Ask ten people in New Orleans how to pronounce Vieux Carré and you will get ten answers, nine of which would not survive a French exam and all of which are perfectly correct down here. It is one of those names the city has worn so long that it stopped being French somewhere along the way and started being ours.
Which is fine, right up until you want to know what the words were ever supposed to mean. We have been baking in New Orleans since 1949, which is long enough to have heard the name said every way there is to say it, and long enough to notice that hardly anybody stops to ask what it is actually describing. It is describing something very specific. It always was.
Say It Like You Live Here
The Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary sets the pronunciation down as /ðə ˌvjɜː kəˈreɪ/, which, once you boil the alphabet soup off it, comes out roughly as voo ka-RAY. Three syllables, and the weight lands hard on the last one.
What it is not is Parisian, and that is where visitors come unstuck. They arrive having rehearsed something delicate in the back of the throat and are met with a flat, unbothered voo ka-RAY from a man selling them a newspaper.
New Orleans has been doing this to French words for three centuries. The city kept the vocabulary and kept the spelling, then handed the pronunciation over to whoever happened to be living here — which at various points meant the French, the Spanish, the Africans and the Creoles born in the colony, and then Germans, Irish, Sicilians and Americans. What came out the other end is not a mistake. It is a record of who was in the room.
So say it the local way. You are not mispronouncing French. You are pronouncing New Orleans.
Old Square, Old Quarter
Now the meaning, which is plainer than the pronunciation and twice as interesting.
Oxford gives it as "the old name for the French Quarter in the US city of New Orleans," and notes that it means "Old Square" in French. That is the whole of it. No poetry, no legend, no saint. The most atmospheric neighborhood in the country is named, with magnificent municipal flatness, after a square — and after the fact that it is the old one.
Both halves of that matter. Carré is the square. Vieux is the argument.
The Square It Is Actually Talking About
New Orleans was founded in the spring of 1718 by the French Mississippi Company under Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, on the high ground of the riverbank. What went up there was not a town that sprawled into being. It was drawn. The early planning fell to military engineers — Pierre Le Blond de la Tour and Adrien de Pauger, who was sent to draw up the plans in 1720 and had them finished the year after — and what they set down was a grid of streets and fortifications laid out along the river.
That grid is the carré. Not a plaza: the whole squared-off block of city, ruled onto the riverbank with a straightedge. Walk the Quarter today and you are walking a floor plan from the 1720s — the same streets, the same blocks, the same rectangle. The name is not describing a mood. It is describing a drawing.
The "French" Quarter Is Largely Spanish
Here is the part that tends to stop people mid-sentence.
On Good Friday in 1788 the city burned. More than 850 buildings went, enough that the original town had to be rebuilt from the ground up — and it was rebuilt under Spanish rule, in Spanish taste. Nearly all of the eighteenth-century architecture still standing in the Vieux Carré dates from that Spanish period.
So the French Quarter is a Spanish rebuild on a French plan, going by a French name that English speakers mostly stopped using. We would apologize for the confusion, but we did not cause it.
How It Became the Old One
Which leaves vieux, and vieux is the half nobody asks about. A square only becomes the old square once a new one turns up.
After the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 the Americans came, and after them Germans and Irish in real numbers, and the city stopped fitting inside the rectangle Pauger had drawn for it. New neighborhoods went up past its edges. The ground upriver filled in so thoroughly, and kept itself so separate, that it was long known by a name of its own — the American Sector. Two cities, in effect, sharing a riverbank and not much else.
Set the new one beside the original and the original picks up an adjective. Not the square. The old square. The name is a comparison, and it only works because the city outgrew itself.
The English version won in the end, the way English versions tend to, and most of the world now says French Quarter. But the older name never actually left. It is the name on the commission that guards the district's buildings, and it is the name an older New Orleanian reaches for when they mean the neighborhood rather than the attraction.
Still the Old Square
There is something fitting about a city whose most famous neighborhood is named for being out of date. New Orleans has never been sentimental about the past so much as stubbornly accompanied by it. We keep the old name, the old grid, the old recipes, and then we go on using them, which is a different thing from preserving them.
We know a little about that. Some things are worth keeping exactly as they were, and the proof is that people still turn up looking for them. If you are in the old square and want something to take home from it, you will find our counters around New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Lafayette — and something behind the glass that has not changed much either.
More from the bakery: browse our New Orleans cakes, baked the way they have been for three-quarters of a century.