of the New World. Based on adaptation and innovation, it has been a cuisine of intuition, with recipes often not written down and no hard-and-fast rules. Sometimes in New Orleans there are as many recipes for a dish as there are cooks.
The Brennan family, whose members— gathered here for Christmas—have founded many of New Orleans' best-loved restaurants.
All this has been true at Commander's Palace since we started here. Truth is, I don't like working with people who aren't growing. I don't want to work with people who are satisfied being where they are. I say if it's not broken, let's break it. There's always a better way.
The good New Orleans restaurateur takes and pulls this creative energy out of people. We Brennans didn't know we had it in us, but people pulled it out of us, and here we are. Now we try to pull it out of others. We try to get people to soar.
This Ethnic Gumbo Pot
New Orleans cooking is the product of more than two centuries of immigration
by Paul A. Greenberg
They came by the thousands from lands of desperation to streets they had heard were paved with gold. With dreams of prosperity and fortune, they came from Africa, Ireland, France, Spain, Italy, Sicily, Croatia, Germany, and everyplace in between.
When the immigrants arrived in New Orleans throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they brought their cooking styles, their seasonings, and their tastes with them. And over time these influences have merged to become contemporary New Orleans cuisine.
It was as if a giant stew cooked over an open, raging fire for a hundred years, with people of varying skin colors, languages, and rituals taking turns stirring the pot. In the end, there was gumbo—the very real Creole-Cajun dish, and the equally real metaphor for everything New Orleanians love to eat.
Native American herbs and spices, combined with cooking artistry of the culinary triumvirate-French, Spanish, and African settlers—begat Creole cooking. But the true beauty of Creole came from the inclusion of all arriving cultures. West Indians added more peppers and allspice and even new vegetables, such as mirlitons, which continue to grace New Orleanian tables. The Haitians knew how to add just enough bitters and brandy to startle the long-established French palate.
Local entertainer Frogman Henry takes a quintessential New Orleans lunch break with a softshell crab po-boy on Bourbon Street.
If the French represented the epitome of refinement in cooking and the lusty West Indians the barefoot contributors of seasoning, someone had to take the middle ground. Fleeing from famine, pestilence, and government upheavals came the Germans, the Italians, and the long-suffering Irish.
The potato famine that began in mid-nineteenth century Ireland sent tens of thousands of Irish to America. Their potato and cabbage heritage traveled with them, as did their love for eggs, baked bread, stews, and big, fresh vegetables. The Irish make their influence felt every day in New Orleans.
The Germans had just as immediate a reason to flee their homeland. The Napoleonic Wars in the Rhine Valley prompted a mass exodus to America, and New Orleans was the destination of choice for many of them. Even when the war subsided, Germans continued to flow into the port city during a two-year famine in the Rhineland. Most could not afford the passage to America, so they struck deals with Dutch shippers. They agreed to work for up to eight years as indentured servants in America in exchange for transportation. By 1910 they constituted the largest single foreign-born group in New Orleans.
Enticing muffuletta sandwiches on the counter of the Central Grocery in the French Quarter Only a tourist would order a whole one, natives know that half is more than enough.
Their poverty dictated that they settle on the outskirts of the city. The Germans took full advantage of their location and produced fresh, plump vegetables in abundance. They sold their crops from trucks and came to be known for their colorful array of produce and their hearty dispositions.
Eventually the Germans opened restaurants. New Orleanians were introduced to many different kinds of sausages (including braunschweiger, blutwurst, leberwurst) and delicacies such as potato dumplings, apple streusel, and always, on every table, big, frothy pitchers of beer. By the mid-nineteenth century, the Germans were laying the groundwork for New Orleans to become a premier brewing center.
As was the case with so many other cultures that came to America, Italians had left their homeland only because they had to. Famines and widespread epidemics forced mid-nineteenth-century Italians to this country—and to New Orleans, a city with a climate they were used to and with a familiar French and Spanish population. The Italian population became known for the fresh fruits they grew and sold. Classic Italian foods are still abundantly served throughout the city. But the single most lasting culinary contribution the Italians made was the muffuletta sandwich.
St Patrick's Day, March 17, is a rowdy festival day for the city's Irish community.
In 1900 Salvatore Lupo, proprietor of the Central Grocery in the French Quarter, developed a custom of giving Italian farmers a small dish of mixed olive salad along with some salami, cheese, and a piece of round bread known in Lupo's native Sicily as muffuletta. The farmers would awkwardly balance all the separate spicy components on their knees, as was their way in Sicily.
The conversations at the Central Grocery were lively debates punctuated with lots of passionate gesturing. It would often happen that a bowl of olive salad would crash to the concrete floor while someone else's salami would fly through the air-all for the sake of getting a point across.
Sometimes a farmer would stand and wildly shake his fist in the air as he spoke, waving his wedge of cheese.
One day, weary of sweeping up salami and olive salad from the floor, Lupo offered the farmers all the ingredients inside the muffuletta, which he had split in half. Little did Lupo know that the sandwich he had invented for his own convenience, this newfangled concoction, would become as much a part of New Orleans culture as gumbo. Now muffulettas are also filled with ingredients like soft-shell crab.
Perhaps the best example of immigrant innovation was the development of the oyster industry by the Croatians, known for most of this century as Yugoslavs. So determined were they to succeed in this country that they gave up almost everything in their lives except work.
Typically, the oyster grower doomed himself to a life of hard labor from dawn until well after dark every day. The Croatians handled the oyster business around New Orleans in a highly organized fashion between the mid-1800s and the 1950s, albeit with the assistance of machines by then. Today, the fisheries around New Orleans gather twenty percent of the nation's oyster crop.
The number of Asian restaurants in New Orleans speaks to the breadth of culinary influence of the Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Thais. When the U.S. government chose New Orleans as a settling point for thousands of Vietnamese expatriates, the city became the willing recipient of yet another culture's knowledge and artistry with food.
The aged streets of New Orleans are home to some of the world's finest restaurants. And the names of some of the most established eateries tell the unique multicultural tale of
