A rare glimpse of the interior of Madame Begue's famous restaurant, on the second floor of a building opposite the butchers' stalls in the French Market on the downtown corner of Madison and Decatur, where Tujague's now stands, ca. 1894. The caption reads "A Sunday Morning Breakfast," and it was for her breakfasts that Madame Begue first gained fame. [The City of New Orleans: the Book of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Louisiana and Other Public Bodies of the "Crescent City." New Orleans: G.W. Engelhardt, 1894]

Creole cookery was devised by no man in no age, but evolved over the years out of the richness of the natural larder that is southern Louisiana. It has borrowed from other types, but is essentially itself, with perhaps a more marked tendency toward the French cuisine from which it took its early form.