New Orleans’s iconic foods have been a large part of creating the city’s appeal to visitors. Most folks have the European beignet on their must-eat list and line up for them at Café du Monde. However, the city is home to two fritter traditions: the beignet and the rice fritter known as the cala. The two combine a rich history, enormous culinary appeal, links to the city’s traditions of street vending, and ongoing connections to the city’s contemporary restaurant scene.  

The cala, also known as calas and occasionally as callers, is less well known than the beignet and connects the city with Weste Africa. The use of leftover rice as a fritter is found in the culinary repertoire of many of the rice-growing regions of western Africa, including in Ghana and Sierra Leone. Years back, when noticing a rice fritter on a steam table at a Liberian restaurant in Los Angeles, I was astounded and delighted to learn that not only were these fritters traditional in Bong County, Liberia, but also they have the same name—cala—as the fritter in New Orleans. 

The exact era of the cala’s entrance into the New Orleans culinary repertoire is unknown. Journalist Ora Mae Lewis asserts, in a typewritten manuscript available in the Louisiana Digital Archives, that the cala was established in home kitchens in New Orleans by the mid-nineteenth century, where it likely had been a long-standing household method for transforming leftover rice (a staple in the New Orleans diet). Interestingly, there are no recipes for the cala in the city’s two earliest cookbooks: Creole Cookery Book (1885) and La Cuisine Creole by Lafcadio Hearn (1885), which may indicate that the recipe was so established as a way of using leftover rice as to not merit codification as a recipe in the books. The recipe for calas is deceptively simple. The main ingredients are rice, sugar, a binding agent that may be eggs or flour or both, and a leavening agent of some sort. One of the first codified recipes for the cala appeared in the first edition of The Picayune Cookbook (1900) and calls for rice, eggs, sugar, boiling water, yeast, lard for frying, and nutmeg with powdered sugar for sprinkling after cooking. Later recipes call for baking powder and even self-rising flour.  

The late Leah Chase, the city’s doyenne of Black Creole cooking, recalled that making the fritter was a Sunday occurrence in the household of her youth. Indeed, the fritter became firmly connected to Roman Catholicism; according to Lewis, by the mid-nineteenth century it was a staple after-Mass treat and a confection served at First Communions.  

Almost as important as the fritters themselves is the manner in which they were hawked in the streets of New Orleans, for they became a part of the city’s street-food landscape back at least as far as 1841. Calas, like pralines and other street-sold goods, were often sold by the enslaved at the behest of mistresses and masters; the enslaved were occasionally allowed to keep a portion of the money earned. In this manner, the cala became a source of funds that allowed the more fortunate of the enslaved to purchase freedom for themselves and their families. Equally, they were sold by free people of color as an income source. 

There is ample visual evidence of the cala and its vendors. Léon Joseph Frémeaux’s 1876 book New Orleans Characters includes a lithograph entitled Bels Calas (Merchant of Rice Fritters). Fremeaux’s hand-tinted image portrays a cala vendor with her long calico dress and apron. She has a bowl of batter precariously perched atop her headscarf and carries a small brazier and a cloth-covered basket of the final product.  

Subsequent variants of images of the cala vendor were created by Lafcadio Hearn, artists for Century magazine and Harper’s Weekly, and recently as a collectible ceramic king cake baby issued in 2010 by Haydel’s bakery. While Fremeaux’s image depicts the cala vendor with her brazier and raw dough, more recent reminiscences depict the fritters ready-made, drained on brown paper and sold from a tray or in a basket covered with a towel or napkin.  

By the early twentieth century, the cala vendors were visual testimonials to an age past; their cries were a part of a disappearing city soundscape performed by vendors of various goods, like the one cited in the Works Progress Administration classic Gumbo Ya-Ya (1945), attributed to a vendor named Clementine: 

Beeeeelles calas – Beeeeelles calas – Aaaaaa! 

Madame, mo gaignin calas, 

Madame, mo gaignin calas, 

Tou cho, tou cho, tou cho, 

Beeeeeelles calas – Belles calas 

Beautiful calas  – Beautiful calas  – Ah! 

Madame, I have calas, 

Madame, I have calas, 

Piping hot! Piping hot! 

Beautiful calas – Beautiful calas

As a citywide treat, the cala was well on its way to dying out. Remaining strongholds were the Old Coffeepot, a breakfast spot in the French Quarter, and African-American households, where the fritter had evolved into a festive food prepared for First Communion Sundays and during the Carnival season. Then, in the late twentieth century, Poppy Tooker, New Orleans food expert, mounted a successful one-woman campaign for the acknowledgement of the cala as a unique New Orleans dish. In response, the fritters have reappeared on menus around the city in their classic sweet form, as well as in newer savory variants, allowing the cala to rejoin the beignet in a diptych of fritters that are a tribute to the conjoined culinary cultures of New Orleans.  

Jessica B. Harris is the author, editor, or translator of eighteen books, including twelve cookbooks documenting the foodways of the African Diaspora. In March 2020, she became a James Beard Lifetime Achievement awardee.