Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2007 - (Page 32)

makinG groceries Butchering and haute cuisine: the market origins of New Orleans’ venerable French restaurants Butchering was a fraternal occupation in New Orleans — skilled, regulated, and eventually unionized in response to the scarcity of outlets and the highly regulated environment proscribed by market ordinances. Highly profitable butcher stalls were jealously guarded, not infrequently handed down from father to uncle to son or brother or nephew. Added to family and professional loyalty was the camaraderie of the immigrant experience. Many if not most of the old French restaurants of New Orleans were intimately connected to the Gascon butchers of the old downtown markets or their extended kin. The so-called “Foreign French” immigrants came in the wake of the French Revolution, Waterloo, the July Monarchy, and the 1848 Revolution. Once arrived, they promoted their culture through the French Benevolent Society, the Société Quatorze Juillet, and the Hôpital Français, led by the influential Gascogne butcher Octave Garsaud. The mainly French Butchers’ Benevolent Association, formed initially in 1867 to counter the power of meat wholesalers, rose to national prominence with 400 members as the leader of the butchers’ struggle against the famous Slaughterhouse Act of 1869. Many of the old French restaurants of New Orleans were intimately connected to the French-born butchers and their families. The limited hours and exclusivity of the meat markets had a social and economic effect as butchers found natural outlets for their procurement contacts and the need to utilize unsold product that had to be removed from the market before morning’s end. These French butchers probably drew on the culinary traditions of their native land in southwestern France, which lent themselves to the business of professional cookery. Jean Tujague was the first of more than 40 French-born Tujagues who moved to New Orleans from southwestern France in the 19th century. By 1886, Tujague family butchers worked markets from the French to the Magazine. Guillaume Tujague, arriving in 1850, married Marie Abadie, a butcher’s daughter from a clan of more than 20 French-born butchers. By 1856 he had opened a saloon on Decatur Street that would later become Tujague’s Restaurant, working at the same time as a butcher at stall 49 of the French Market. His partner Roman Dazet came from a clan of Gascony butchers with stalls at the Poydras, Tremé, Dryades, Magazine, French and St. Mary Markets. Begué’s Restaurant was another prominent French Quarter establishment founded by an immigrant butcher. Both of Madame Begué’s husbands, Louis Dutrey and Hypolyte Begué, got their starts in French Market meat stalls. When Elizabeth Kettering Begué predeceased Hypolyte in 1906, he remarried the widow of another French Market butcher. Begué himself was from a family that sent butchers to the Tremé and Poydras Markets as early as the 1850s. In the same decade, another French Market butcher, Jean Marie Saux, founded the Chêne Vert Restaurant across from the nascent City Park in a building that now serves as Ralph’s on the Park. Irenée Dours, a member of a family of French Market butchers, succeeded Saux there, as did Fernand Alciatore, a private meat dealer. Fernand was from the family of Antoine Alciatore, who, although a French immigrant, was an exception to the pattern of the butchers. He came as a professionally trained chef. Antoine’s Restaurant was not a saloon in its early stages like the others. But William Maylie’s was. Born in 1837 in the Haute Garonne region of southwestern France, Maylie had settled in New Orleans by the 1860s when he was instrumental in organizing the Butcher’s Benevolent Association. By 1870 he had opened a saloon on Poydras Street at Rampart, across from the Poydras Market. His younger brother Jean Bernard, arriving in 1867, landed a butcher’s stall at the St. Mary Market and worked part time as a bartender at the Maylie establishment. After William’s death in 1880, Bernard and partner Hypolyte Esparbe, with their sister-wives Anna and Marie Bussion, expanded the business. Their landmark table d’hote restaurant flourished under Madame Esparbe, under Bernard’s son William, and under the recently departed William III with his wife Anna May. Maylie’s closed in the late 1980s. 32 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Fall 2007

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2007

Contents Friends & Letters Editor’s Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Big Charity: A History of New Orleans’ Public Hospital Historic New Orleans Collection Making Groceries: A History of New Orleans Markets New Orleans’ Faubourg Tremé: Rooted in Tradition Jazz Notes Louisiana Association of Museums Chinatown New Orleans Louisiana Foodways A Question of Secession Louisiana Architecture Louisiana State Museum The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish Terra Incognita Bookstand Sound Advice Forum

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2007

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