Before there was Emeril Lagasse or John Besh, PBS had Cajun cook Justin Wilson.
Wilson was not a young man when he began his PBS career on Mississippi Public Television in 1975. Wilson had started his career in public speaking in 1935. A safety engineer and public speaker, he also taught "human relations" to police in six states, including Louisiana.
By the time he decided to become a TV cook, he had released 27 albums of Cajun humor and appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, doing a comedy routine that included his famous catch-phrase “I gar-on-tee!" (I guarantee).”
But despite all of that history, it was the 1982 PBS series Justin Wilson’s Louisiana Cooking that ultimately made him a star. Produced by Louisiana Public Broadcasting (LPB), the series was distributed on PBS throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, and his folksy Cajun banter was a hit. Although even at the time, it was difficult to know how much of his persona was authentically Cajun.
In fact, not every Cajun was a fan of Wilson’s television persona. "He speaks in broken English and with a lot of malaprops," Trent Angers, author of "The Truth About Cajuns," said in 1989. "To hear him you'd think all Cajuns are barely literate and not very bright."
But Wilson insisted he had a deep love for Cajuns and their cuisine, as he explained in these comments from a mid-1980s PBS-issued press kit:
''Cajun cooking is the ability to take what you have and create a good dish and season it right, with salt, pepper and a few good things like mint or garlic, bay leaf, cayenne pepper, bell pepper, onion, celery," Wilson said.
''It isn't all that hard, but so few people know how to take what they have and put it together and season it properly," he said. "It's creative cooking that's all it is."
He followed up that series with the 1997 PBS series Justin Wilson’s Looking Back (which repackaged the earlier episodes produced in Mississippi) as well as 1998’s Justin Wilson’s Easy Cooking.
After that series ended, he focused on his cookbooks and personal events, and was making up to 200 appearances a year until just before his death in 2011.
As he wrote in one of his cookbooks, “"I'm not slowing down. They might catch up with me."
Justin Wilson’s TV shows don’t seem to be available for streaming, but you can find clips from his shows on YouTube.