Cooking Up a Storm: Recipes Lost and Found from The Times-Picayune of New Orleans Review

Posted by Juanita Avenue on Tuesday, November 30, 2010 · Leave a Comment

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(More customer reviews)Marcel Bienvenu writes the "Cooking Creole" column in the "Times Picayune", and and Judy Walker is the food editor for that publication. They've written other books together, but in a sense this one was written by their readers as they sought to recover from Katrina.

On Oct. 7, 2005, Walker invited her readers to take part in a program they called "Rebuilding New Orleans, Recipe by Recipe." Essentially, the idea was to pair readers who needed a particular recipe with folks who still had theirs. Walker writes that the response was over-whelming. "It became a sort of community project; everybody wanted to help.... It was amazing, so many of the requests were for the same recipe, sometimes the same recipe on the same day."

The book contains 250 of the best recipes, each with a short essay that puts the recipe into a human perspective. Only two of the thousands of requested recipes have not been found; a gumbo recipe from a New Orleans Saints football player and a pasta salad recipe.

Some of the recipes are famous, Jamie Shannon's recipe for Tasso Shrimp with Five-Pepper Jelly; Leslie's mirliton gumbo; and the Roosevelt Hotel's shrimp remoulade, for example.

Others are clearly from home cooks, some handed down from generation to generation; these ten were taken from a file of newspaper clippings: Fair Grounds corned beef; Crabmeat Remick; Johnny Becnel's Daddy's okra gumbo; turkey bone gumbo; Jolene Black's cream biscuits; salt and pepper shrimp; Rosie's sweet potato pies; Brownies to die for; Ursuline Academy anise cookies; and rosemary cookies.

Walker describes the importance of this collection in the following words:

"Here in south Louisiana, we still have an intact food culture, thanks to every one of you who's ever made a roux. Restaurants and home cooks keep the cultural and literal flame burning under the emblematic red beans and rice on Mondays. People make their mama's oyster dressing at Thanksgiving. That's reason No. 1: We have something unique, worth saving.

"And, the region is blessed with many only-in-Louisiana ingredients -- crawfish, hot sausage, cane syrup, andouille, Creole mustard -- this list could go on and on until lunchtime. But there are not a lot of recipes in "Joy of Cooking" for crawfish or cane syrup. So that's another reason: Even when you do find a recipe for stuffed peppers, they're not stuffed with seafood as they are here. So these unique recipes, the lost ones, are specific to south Louisiana."

This is a wonderful book for people like me who have gone to New Orleans just to spend a long week-end enjoying restaurant foods on offer. The recipes and stories capture a wonderful city, its cuisine and its citizens.

Robert C. Ross2008

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Product Description:
After Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleansthousands of people lost their keepsakes and family treasures forever. As residents started to rebuild their livesThe Times-Picayune of New Orleans became a post-hurricane swapping place for old recipes that were washed away in the storm. The newspaper has compiled 250 of these deliciousauthentic recipes along with the stories about how they came to be and who created them. Cooking Up a Storm includes the very best of classic and contemporary New Orleans cuisinefrom seafood and meat to desserts and cocktails. But it also tells the storyrecipe by recipeof one of the great food cities in the worldand the determination of its citizens to preserve and safeguard their culinary legacy.