By Anthony J. Stanonis

Legend holds that the chef employed by France’s Duke of Plessis-Praslin first mixed sugar with nuts, in this case almonds, during the 1600s. According to some, starting with Recipes and Reminiscences of New Orleans (1971), Ursuline nuns brought the confection to New Orleans in the 1720s, substituting pecans. Others, beginning with Henry Castellanos’s New Orleans As It Was (1895), suggested an aristocrat fleeing the French Revolution carried the candy to New Orleans in 1795.

Despite these tales, evidence points to Louisiana’s sugar plantations as the birthplace of the praline as a patty of brown sugar populated with pecans. Enslaved African Americans were the creators. They did the cooking on plantations, foraged pecans to supplement their rations, and possessed the knowledge to process cane into sugar. In the sugar-producing areas of Louisiana along the Mississippi River, Bayou Teche, and Bayou Lafourche, French speakers named the new confection “plarines,” derived from the French word “plat,” meaning “flat.”

The patty served as the nineteenth century version of an energy bar, combining the calories of sugar with nutrient-rich pecans. The praline powered bodies working the fields and mills of antebellum Louisiana. After the Civil War, emancipated African Americans carried the praline to New Orleans. The bustling port provided more opportunities for seizing new freedoms and improving economic prospects.

Settling in New Orleans, the new arrivals joined a tradition of street selling by African Americans. Black street vendors, free and enslaved, had helped build New Orleans into the fifth largest city in the United States by 1860. Most of these were women, called by the French name “marchandes.” When epidemics of yellow fever struck, as happened every few years until 1905, black vendors braved the plague to sell their wares while panicked New Orleanians fled or sheltered in their homes. These food hawkers became a literal lifeline.

The praline soon joined other items like gingerbread cookies, coconut candies, and calas, a popular rice fritter, in the baskets of the marchandes. The convenient treat now powered bodies working the steamboats along the levee and haulers carrying goods to or from the warehouses. But the praline remained obscure outside the African American community. The two earliest cookbooks on New Orleans cuisine – Lafcadio Hearn’s La Cuisine Creole (1885) and the Christian Woman’s Exchange’s The Creole Cook Book (1885) – didn’t contain a single recipe for pralines.

The arrival of thousands of northern tourists for the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition in 1885 proved a tempting market for the marchandes. Visitors were fascinated by stories about Creole culture, largely inspired by the best-selling novel The Grandissimes (1880) by lifelong New Orleanian George Washington Cable. The tourists pursued Louisiana flavors. Praline sellers eagerly abided, bringing attention to the candy. Slowly, the better understood French word “praline,” meaning sugar-coated nut, replaced the local word “plarine” as tourism became a cornerstone of the New Orleans economy.

By the late 1880s, tales about African American street-sellers and the praline proliferated in local and national publications. The first postcard featuring New Orleans, produced in the late 1890s, displayed a sketch of a praline hawker drawn by a student at Newcomb College, now part of Tulane University. The praline became so synonymous with New Orleans that the port received the nickname “The Praline City” by the 1920s.

The abundance of cheap sugar, spurred by domestic beet sugar production and imports of cane sugar from Cuba, Hawaii, and the Philippines, led to the growth of the candy business across the United States during the early twentieth century. Pecans too became more plentiful and affordable. Cotton, sugar, and rice dominated the economy of the American South before the Civil War. Boosters of a postwar “New South” urged agricultural diversification, including planting pecan orchards.

Pecan trees are native to the Mississippi River Valley. In the 1840s, an enslaved gardener named Antoine on Oak Alley Plantation, near Vacherie, Louisiana, was the first person to graft the trees successfully. These trees fully matured by the 1870s, when the plantation’s new owner heralded their pecans at the Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia. The popularity of the pecans from Oak Alley spread word of the now-branded Centennial variety of pecan and the potential for pecan horticulture. Soon, nurseries grafted a range of different varieties of pecan trees suitable for planting far beyond the Mississippi River Valley. Trees planted in the late 1800s matured by the First World War, giving rise to pecan shelling companies.

The widespread availability of affordable sugar and shelled pecans encouraged a range of candy makers in New Orleans and beyond to further popularize the praline. The spread of improved pecan trees to Georgia, Texas, and other Sunbelt states in the early twentieth century and the success of pralines-and-cream ice cream, introduced to the American market by Bordon’s in the 1950s, turned the New Orleans praline into a nationally popular treat. But it is in Louisiana where the praline remains closest to its origins.

Both images above are from the Louisiana Digital Database
Sugar Cane Harvest - ca 1900 - LSU Libraries
New Orleans Praline Woman - ca 1900 -New Orleans Historic Collection