Marcelle Bienvenu

We can all recall the devastation we saw on the news, of course. Entire neighborhoods flattened, hundreds of people killed, hundreds of thousands left to a refugee existence in inadequate trailers and uncertain housing far from their wrecked and sodden homes. And yet, long before people were able to return to the city to take stock of what they had lost, they were trying to recover and rebuild. And among the first things they sought to reclaim were their family cookbooks and recipes. New Orleans bookstores will tell you that when they were finally able to re-open, their most popular books were the old community cookbooks that were standard for every New Orleans kitchen: River Road Recipes from the Junior League of Baton Rouge, Big Mama’s Old Black Pot by Ethel Dixon, the cookbooks of Emeril Lagasse, Paul Prudhomme and Justin Wilson, and The Picayune’s Creole Cookbook from the New Orleans Times-Picayune.



The Times-Picayune was able to return to the city after six weeks in exile. Two weeks after that, they resumed publication of their popular Food section. And within days, the paper was inundated with letters and emails from their readers pleading for reprints of recipes they had lost in the storm. “Funny how when life is in a turmoil, the debris pile in front of your house has been 15 feet high, and you haven’t slept in your own bed for three months, you can’t stop thinking about a soup recipe that got flooded!” wrote one person in search of a recipe for sweet potato, corn and jalapeno bisque. “If ever I need some comfort food, it’s now,” wrote another, in search of the same recipe.



In response to the hundreds of queries from readers, The Times-Picayune created a regular recipe exchange column, “Exchange Alley” that acted as a kind of message-board. The paper would reprint any recipe it could find in its own archives, issue calls for recipes from its readers, and even have the chefs at favorite restaurants supply recipes for the dishes they were unable to serve, or that people still in exile were unable to order. Exchange Alley is possibly the biggest and most important “foodways” cultural project ever undertaken. There’s a book, of course. Eventually, after a year of collecting or recreating the lost recipes of one of the most food-oriented cities in the country, someone said “we should put these all in a book.” It includes not only the requested bisque recipe above and about 200 others, but also a biscuit recipe (Jolene Black’s Cream Biscuits) that has the distinction of being the only one I ever tried that actually worked for me the first time.



Cooking Up a Storm: Recipes Lost and Found from The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, by Marcelle Bienvenu and Judy Walker is the newspaper’s attempt to bring the best of the recipes and the best of the stories into one place—not, perhaps, for the people of New Orleans; they have already been on this journey of rediscovery. I think, instead, the book is for everybody else...read full review… (meer)