Pure poetry

"Both the cook and the poet are makers. One holds a knife, the other a pen. One grinds fresh pepper over a mound of tender lettuce, while the other adds a period to the end of a sentence or a dash to the end of a line. With available ingredients - vegetables and herbs, rhymes and words - layers of flavor and meaning are infused in the pan and composed on the page."

Nicole Gulotta in "Eat This Poem: A Literary Feast of Recipes Inspired by Poetry"

Po'boys and beignets, okra and file

Although I have eaten in New Orleans just once in my life, I have returned to its food – the variety, the intense and enticing flavors – a million times in my head.

Senior year in college, my roommate and I booked flights from Providence on a whim. She wanted to catch Mardi Gras. I was game for nearly anything. So we left New England on a Friday morning in February. Neglecting to double-check the calendar, however, we didn't realize that we would actually miss the party by a few days.

On the ground, we decided to plan our own festivities. They don't call it the Big Easy for nothing. Over the long weekend, we would eat and drink as best we could on our student budgets.

For lunch, we had muffulettas and oyster po'boys. They are casual, convenient sandwiches, proteins and carbs in the same package. The first is a meatfest topped with an olive spread, the second a showcase for deep-fried oysters.

For dinner, we had red beans and rice, and crawfish etouffee, with bold spices we seldom encountered in the dining halls. They were foods my roommate knew from her Southern childhood, foods with which I had only recently become familiar.

We sipped hurricanes in bars on Bourbon Street and treated ourselves to beignets and chicory-spiked café au lait at Café du Monde.

Piled high with powdered sugar, beignets need to be handled carefully. One shake sends a cloud of sweetness across the table. One laugh out loud and there was snow on our noses, our hair and our shirts. We went through several plates of these signature pastries, laughing into the early morning.

Chicory with coffee, I later learned, is an age-old Louisiana tradition. The French added roasted and ground chicory to coffee to help stretch supplies during Napoleonic blockades in the early 19^th century. When naval blockades cut off shipments to New Orleans during the Civil War, people in Louisiana started to add chicory to their coffee as well, and came to appreciate the nuttiness it lent to the beverage.

***

New Orleans, it seems, has always been about good food. "We not only love to eat and to cook what we eat," Charmaine Neville says in the anthology "My New Orleans: Ballads to the Big Easy By Her Sons, Daughters and Lovers." "We love to talk about what we are going to cook and what we are going to eat. Before we finish what we're eating, we're already talking about the next meal we're going to have together."

"In spite of our differences," editor Rosemary James says in the introduction, "we have sought out each other's company over, always, the very best food, ingenious dishes created from a poor people's basics: beans, rice, okra, fish, crabs, oysters, shrimp, peppers, garlic, onions, file… And elegant desserts created from everyday things like bananas and sugar and rum. Ours is comfort food even for the aliens among us."

Traditional Louisiana cooking blends a number of cuisines and techniques. Creole dishes might have been based originally on French stews and soups, but they were influenced significantly as well by the Spanish affinity for onions, bell peppers, tomatoes and garlic, by the African use of okra, and the Native American introduction of file, finely ground sassafras leaves. Like Cajun foods, considered country cousins, they were spicy and robust.

By the 1980s and '90s, avuncular chefs such as Paul Prudhomme and Emeril Lagasse had mostly blurred the lines between Creole and Cajun cooking, popularizing both in person and in print. Lagasse, for example, incorporated them at Emeril's, his first solo restaurant venture, and in the best-selling book "Emeril's New New Orleans Cooking," developing additional recipes further influenced by his Portuguese roots.

In the months following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, eateries were among the first businesses in the city to re-open. Some places unfortunately did not survive. "Their owners were getting on in years," food writer and radio host Tom Fitzmorris says in "Hungry Town: A Culinary History of New Orleans," "or their buildings had been too badly damaged to rebuild, or they had intractable insurance problems."

But others including Galatoire's, Commander's Palace, Brennan's and K-Paul's Louisiana Kitchen still thrive. Home-grown chefs such as Susan Spicer, Donald Link and John Besh also continue to play with seasonal ingredients and innovative approaches at places like Mondo, Herbsaint and Restaurant August, respectively.

Before Katrina hit, according to Fitzmorris, there were more than 800 restaurants in greater New Orleans. These days, there are more than 1,200 – big and small, casual and formal, Creole, Cajun, Caribbean, French, Italian. It is a testament to the hunger people in the city have for good-tasting food, and the lengths to which cooks will go to feed that hunger. It speaks to their commitment and hospitality.

***

Since college, I have tasted different foods and visited a number of other cities. I have bitten into fresh scones, for example, topped with strawberry jam and lovely clotted cream in London. I have had cheese-smothered deep-dish pizzas in Chicago. I have feasted on Korean favorites like bulgogi and bibimbap in Los Angeles.

Why then, I wonder, do I return often in my head, and in my kitchen, to iconic New Orleans foods?

When catfish fillets are on special at the market, I grill them Louisiana-style, seasoned with paprika, black pepper, white pepper and cayenne pepper. I like the heat. When Christmas comes, I make a festive jambalaya. It seems the right project for a celebration. And when rain threatens to dampen my spirits, I gather ingredients for chicken and sausage gumbo. I have nearly perfected my roux.

Some foods, I suppose, are a part of who I am, who we are. They are the dishes we grow up eating, whether poached whole chicken or macaroni and cheese, barbecued pork buns or fresh baked apple pie. They are the flavors we know well, offered to us by our parents or grandparents.

Other foods, however, are a part of who I become, who we become, the people we essentially grow into. They are the dishes we discover on our own when we choose to travel and broaden our palates. They are the flavors we try to re-create when we can, combinations that started for me with a weekend trip to the South long ago.

Po'boys and beignets, okra and file. They are items my parents and grandparents never ate. After immigrating to the U.S. in the 1960s, my mother spent her time and effort at the stove fine-tuning Chinese dishes that reminded her of home. She knew of nothing else and wanted nothing more at her table in California. I would inevitably learn more and need more.

Maybe that's what New Orleans means to me. It is a terrific city with an extraordinary history. But it is also among the first places I found myself, when I began to look, when I hoped to forge an identity outside of family. There is that thrill. Maybe that's the connection. And the food? Well, maybe the food is just a splendid bonus.

(A version of this essay appeared originally on www.culinate.com.)

Taking tea

"The British really are the only people in the world who become genuinely excited when presented with a hot beverage and a small plain biscuit."

Bill Bryson in "The Road to Little Dribbling"

On barbecue

"So what exactly had happened in the night, to transform these more or less odorless, flaccid hunks of hog flesh into delicious-smelling and -looking meat?

"How was it that some burning coals and a single oak log had turned something you would never think to eat - dead pig - into something you couldn't wait to eat?"

Michael Pollan in "Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation"

Whole hog

"The Skylight Inn does not use a barbecue sauce, that often tomatoey, syrupy, spicy-sweet condiment that most Americans associate with and serve atop and alongside their smoked meats. Here the meat not only speaks for itself but boastfully asserts its historical import and culinary prominence in a stubborn East Carolina drawl...

"Each chopped quarter is sprinkled with a handful of salt, then a fistful of black pepper. There are no written recipes, measuring cups, or calculations; instead the chopper is chef: knowledgeable, trusted, and mostly always right in his apportion of spice.

"Next come splashes of White House brand apple cider vinegar and Texas Pete, a Tabasco-esque cayenne and vinegar hot sauce that, despite its name, hails from North Carolina. Both are poured from plastic gallon jugs, arms held high, the liquids cascading like twin waterfalls into the meat.

"The chopper then (uses) his two blades like paddles to mix the shoulder and ham, spice and sauce... 'The main thing,' (Mike) Parrott believes, 'is to just make the first piece taste like the last piece. You want the whole season to be beautiful.'

"This is the magic hour, when spice meets meat, ambrosia melds with nectar - when smoked and chopped pork becomes barbecue, when barbecue transcends its own simplicity and becomes simply beautiful. When nothing becomes truly something."

Rien Fertel in "The One True Barbecue: Fire, Smoke, and the Pitmasters Who Cook the Whole Hog"

Eating Korean

Because the plating is lovely.

Pie song

Song to Pie

Pie.
Oh my.
Nothing tastes sweet,
Wet, salty, and dry
All at once so well as pie.

Apple and pumpkin and mince and black bottom,
I'll come to your place every day if you've got 'em.
Pie.

Roy Blount Jr. in "Save Room for Pie: Food Songs and Chewy Ruminations"