On Location 139
Restaurant Guide 140
Contributors 141
No Mardi Gras celebration would be complete without the traditional Red Beans and Rice with Com Bread See page 133 for recipes.
Part One: Food in New Orleans
On the foundations of Creole and Cajun cooking, a city builds a temple to terrific food
by John DeMers
Lavishly festooned with magnolia and bougainvillea, New Orleans is an American city unlike any other. This steamy Southern metropolis is well loved for its charming architecture, its music—especially jazz—and its riotous Mardi Gras celebration. Yet most of all, it is revered for its food.
The city's unique history—it was founded by French colonists in the eighteenth century—and location at the mouth of the Mississippi River have given it a personality all its own. Its French roots may be why New Orleanians are known for their love of good food—nowhere else will you find so many famous dishes: gumbo, crawfish étouffée, jambalaya, muffuletta sandwiches—the list goes on.
Situated at the mouth of the largest and most important waterway in America, New Orleans has welcomed immigrants from around the world. And its food reveals the contributions of the city's many peoples—not only the first French and Spanish colonists, the Creoles (descendants of French, Spanish, African, and Caribbean colonists), and the Cajuns (French-Canadian immigrants who arrived in the eighteenth century), but also West Indians, Germans, Italians, Chinese, and Thais, to name a few.
No other American city can boast an unbroken tradition of fine dining as long as that of New Orleans; its classic French cuisine can be sampled in dining rooms that are over 150 years old. At the same time, it's hard to think of any other American city that has undergone such dramatic culinary change in one generation, evolving from a place that once scorned any food not its own into a city that now embraces dishes and cooking techniques from around the world.
This new spirit has reinvigorated New Orleans cuisine, which had become somewhat frozen in time. In recent years the old dynastic restaurant system, in which chefs handed down their recipes from generation to generation, has been challenged by a new breed of eateries built around a single innovative chef-owner's vision. The result has been change, growth, diversity, and excitement.
What New Orleans cuisine is about today is surprise. Just when you expect a classic dish unchanged from its roots, the one put before you could be straight out of the trendiest food magazine—next month's edition, no less. And just when you think these young chefs have gone crazy, out comes the most glorious traditional Creole courtbouillon or Cajun cochon de lait. There is no way to predict; there are only ways to enjoy.
This book is about the mystery and magic of New Orleans cooking. It explores the flavors of the city's intermingled cultures, the shifts and slants of its rich history, and its deep spirit of celebration.
Crescent City Culinary Origins
A brief history of settlers who taught a kitchen to sing
by Honey Naylor
Imagine, if you will, the French or Spanish master of a New Orleans household struggling to teach the kitchen help to prepare his favorite dish. The cook may have been a slave from Africa, or a free person of mixed race, whose cooking experience was based entirely on the preparation of his or her native foods. It was left to the cook to interpret a complicated recipe, in a different language, using new ingredients. Authenticity was irrelevant; getting dinner on the table was all that mattered.
The Creoles of the French Quarter in the 1800s lived comfortably This watercolor shows Dumaine Street between Dauphine and Bourbon Streets at that time.
Now imagine these same "European" recipes being taught by slave to freed slave to immigrant, perhaps even someday being taught to a classically trained chef, who probably wouldn't even recognize its buried origins. All that remained of the original was a misspelled word or a questionable reference to a particular technique. What now existed on the plate, what took this chef's breath away, was something entirely new. It was a cuisine born in and for a new world. And it was terrific.
There is no moment at which we can say, Look, there it is, the birth of New Orleans cuisine. Every moment in the city's history has been part of this birth, and, truly, the cuisine is constantly being reborn. Every French or Spanish colonist added something to the pot. Every cook added the flavors of his or her own experience. And in their search for the taste of home, each immigrant group—Sicilian, Greek, German, Irish, Croatian, Vietnamese, Thai—added something.
The outside world would give this cooking a name—usually Creole, or out in the countryside, Cajun. But this food is the child of everyone who has ever cooked a meal in New Orleans.
Historians, perhaps grabbing at straws, have come up with one incident that at least symbolically evokes the beginning of New Orleans Creole cuisine. In 1722, in what became known as the Petticoat Rebellion, about fifty young wives marched on Governor Bienville's mansion in New Orleans, pounding their frying pans with metal spoons and protesting their dreary diet of cornmeal mush.
With a dash of admirable dexterity, Bienville put the women in touch with a certain Madame Langlois, who had learned more than a few secrets from the local Choctaw Indians.
It was she who calmed the angry wives by teaching them how to use powdered sassafras for flavor in the gumbo they'd already tasted from the hands of African slaves (gumbo being the West African word for okra), how to prepare hominy grits, how to squeeze the most flavor (and indeed the greatest variety of meals) from the region's abundant fish (such as trout, red snapper, and the highly prized pompano), shellfish (shrimp, crabs, and crawfish—also called "mudbugs" by locals), and game.
It is not an error to say Creole cooking is French, even though that is a gross oversimplification. The French founded the colony they called La Nouvelle Orleans in 1718, near the mouth of the Mississippi. At that time child-king Louis XV sat on the throne, but France was actually ruled by its regent, Philippe II, Due d'Orleans. It was for the duke that the new settlement was named. Its first streets were named after French royals of the day.
The famous French Market of New Orleans was so central to the city's culinary life that it even turned up on coffee labels.
From the beginning, New Orleans cuisine incorporated a flurry of French words and, at least in certain ways, the flavors of France. There were ravigotes and rémoulades, étouffées and beignets. There was reverence for lush sauces, from béarnaise to hollandaise; butter and cream were used generously. But later generations would scratch their heads at New Orleans recipes, wondering how a dish with a name found back in France looked and tasted so little like its namesake.
Perhaps the richness of the food consoled the colonists through those hard first years—and they needed consolation indeed. Set on the bank of a great crescent in the wide brown river, much of the city lies five feet below sea level, with surrounding
