Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Spring 2009 - (Page 64) By the Book Louisiana’s stockpile of cookbooks capture the taste of their times I am a rabid bibliophile. I’ve stated for years that when they come up with a Book-Buyers Anonymous (B.B.A.), I am a prime candidate. In my mind’s eye I can see myself standing up at the first meeting and proclaiming loudly. “My name is Jessica and I’m a book addict!” As a teacher and a scholar, I can keep some of the stock in my office, but it’s getting out of hand. I have bookshelves in every room of my house including the bathrooms! And still they keep coming. And still I keep buying: novels, photography books, histories, autobiographies, graphic novels, and more, but my true missionary’s downfall is always cookbooks. Somehow, I cannot resist them. Perhaps it is because a good one can combine the best qualities of almost all of the other categories. Right now, there are good ones a-plenty — books that understand our regional hunger for the comfort foods of times past and that bring together recipes lost as a result of Hurricane Katrina. There’s You Are Where You Eat, from the University Press of Mississippi, and The Times Picayune’s compendium of recipes that were most requested by readers who lost their collections in the storm. Local chefs Susan Spicer, John Besh, and others have new tomes out, and restaurants are publishing theirs as well. I’ve often questioned my love of cookbooks. It’s not simply that I write them myself or even that I cook from them that much. I love cookbooks because they encapsulate moments in time like few other documents; they literally catalogue the tastes of their times. For this, there is no more fascinating reading. A peruse can tell, in brief compass and a few shelves, the history and development of Creole cooking as it is known to the public. (Nothing really comes close to capturing the full glory of what it is in people’s homes!) Begin with the two earliest known Creole cookbooks, both published in 1885 by people who were not in majority Creoles: Creole Cookery published by the Christian Woman’s Exchange and The Creole Cook Book by Lafcadio Hearn. Creole Cookery, the frontispiece of which is a large image of a spoon-wielding tignon-wearing black mammy figure, proclaims on its title page that, “the recipes which make up the collection are the contributions of housekeepers experienced in the science of cookery as practiced throughout the South, and more particularly as it is understood and applied by the Creoles of New Orleans.” The names of the organization’s board of managers, however, do not ring with the Gallic sonorities of those aforementioned Creoles. Instead we find Mrs. R.M. Walmsley, Mrs. T.G. Richardson, and Mrs. S.H. Kennedy among the 32 women listed on the board of managers. Since they all went by their husbands’ names, there may have been more than one Creole face hidden behind an Anglo name. The recipes certainly include an array of Creole specialties: three gumbos, three okra soups, fried oysters and at least 16 additional oyster preparations, not counting the five oyster soups. There’s riz au lait, and one for the rice fritter known as calas anglicized into callers, as well as bread and butter pudding. Clearly someone had been peeking into Creole cooking pots. But the collection doesn’t end with the traditional favorites. There are also such unusual items as Zouave rusks and two types of dyspepsia breads (no doubt to assuage the torments of gastronomical excesses) and even a version of soy sauce. Hearn’s collection seems more Creole, or at least more Gallic in origin with nine gumbos, 13 oyster recipes, not including sauces, a jambolaya [sic] of fowl and rice, bread pudding, and rice milk — in English — with “for children” added as a note for serving. Most tellingly, Hearn includes a section on “The Service of Wines” and drinks including an absinthe suississe, two types of café brulot and instructions for absinthe imbibing. The Creoles were certainly not abstemious and there are no drink recipes in Creole Cookery, so for me Hearn wins my prize for créolité here although I use both books often to cook from and for research. The Picayune’s Creole Cook Book, first published in 1900, gives me more food for thought and study. I have only three different editions of its more than 16 different ones and love that the text changes with the times, making it a morphing bible of the food and mores of southern Louisiana. It is so much a culinary witness to changing times that my friend, Rien Fertel, has written a wonderful, soon-to-be-published analysis of its multiple incarnations. The mammy on the original frontispiece gives way in subsequent years to be-toqued chefs and brightly smiling debutantes. Notably, the sesquicentennial edition contains few, if any, images of African Americans amid the nostalgic portrayal of Creole life past. A 17th edition is in the offing and I wonder what it will reveal about our current social and culinary climate. Following the Big Three of Creole cookbooks, my collection of cookbooks from the Creole world rambles. Because of the 64 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Spring 2009
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