Liz Darby Buteau did not learn her cooking skills, famed throughout her large family, at her mother’s knee. In fact, her mother would not let her within sniffing distance of the stove.

Instead, Buteau picked up the stir and simmer trade at the shoulder of her mother-in-law, Marian Legon Buteau.

Liz Buteau took four years of cooking classes in high school, but learned the true craft of cooking, and that means Cajun cooking, through her visits every Sunday to her mother-in-law’s kitchen.

“I would stand by that stove and watch everything she’d do,” Buteau said.

She took the recipes and techniques learned from her mother-in-law and, in the best tradition of jazz musicians and artists everywhere, adapted many of them by infusing them with her own saucepan elan, with a dash more of this or a cup less of that.

Buteau’s kitchen work kept family gatherings large, and possibly helped make individual gatherers larger, and she saw similar success when she took her show on the road for Beagle Club events.

At the road trips to the hunting dog field trials, one could make a sure bet that no matter what was cooking at the clubhouse, the lion’s share of the lunch line would be crowding Buteau’s camper.

So popular were Buteau’s recipes that her sister, Beverly Darby Bernard, asked her to get them down on paper so they would not be lost. Buteau said her sister’s request was an inspiration, but she had a problem- How does a cook who flew by her apron strings pass through the printed page the things she just knows from years of practice?

For Buteau, that meant three years of having to measure out the ingredients of her best recipes, which, for years, she had simply mixed at amounts that looked and felt right. This she did, all the while working full-time.

Part of the reason the cookbook project was so important to Buteau was that she saw it as a chance to help preserve a piece of the culture she grew up in, a culture that she has seen begun to fade or be misremembered, especially the cooking. Cajun food is spicy, but it does not need to be blanketed with pepper, as many Creole dishes are.

Buteau draws a sharp line between Cajun and Creole cooking.

“It’s a simple, but very tasty, Cajun food, because you don’t need exotic stuff, “ she said. You can do it with stuff you already have around.

Buteau’s project lay marinating in dust for about six years after she had prepared her collection and laid it out on paper, before the printing of a cookbook as authentically Cajun as the woman who showed Buteau the way of the whisk.