Recipes of Recovery and Rebuilding: The Role of Cookbooks in Post-Katrina

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By

Nicole K. Nieto

Graduate Program in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies

The Ohio State University

2015

Dissertation Committee:

Linda Mizejewski, Co-Advisor

Amy Shuman, Co-Advisor

Guisela LaTorre

Copyright by

Nicole K. Nieto

2015

Abstract

In August 2005, New Orleans and surrounding communities suffered catastrophic damage and loss of life when reached landfall. When the levees surrounding the city of New Orleans broke, homes were flooded and lives were lost.

Community members began to rebuild their homes as well as their culture including food, music and art. This project examines the role that the New Orleans culinary heritage played in rebuilding and recovering the city. I am primarily concerned with cookbooks published after Hurricane Katrina as well as The Times-Picayune newspaper recipe column, “Rebuilding New Orleans Recipe by Recipe”. I examine the cookbooks and recipe column using discourses of feminist analysis, material culture, continuity and tradition. I am most interested in the ways that cookbooks and recipes helped to rebuild the community and city of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. I suggest a fifth cookbook plot, the recovery plot, to Anne Bower’s narrative framework of community cookbooks. In the recovery plot, I suggest cookbooks do the important work of creating continuity and opportunities for recovery after loss. This project suggests cookbooks and recipes were an integral component of cultural recovery after Hurricane Katrina and were in fact a way to share narratives of loss and recovery about the storm and flooding.

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Dedication

Dedicated to the city and people of New Orleans

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Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to my dissertation committee, The Department of

Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, The Center for Folklore Studies and The Ohio

State University. I would like to thank my co-advisors, Linda Mizejewski and Amy

Shuman. I met Linda Mizejewski when I first arrived on the OSU campus. Throughout the years she has provided support and encouragement always with a smile and a hug. I took my first Folklore Studies class with Amy Shuman. I went on to take two more classes with Amy and complete a Graduate Interdisciplinary Specialization in Folklore

Studies. Throughout this time, Amy provided meaningful insight and time furthering my love for foodways and the study of folklore. I would also like to thank Guisela LaTorre for serving on my committee. Guisela introduced me to many great Chicana scholars and artists throughout my time at OSU. Guisela provided great encouragement to me throughout my time in the WGSS program. I have great respect for all three of these women. They are smart, kind and have each made a lasting impact on me. With great gratitude I thank you all.

I would like to thank my parents, Rudolph and Rebecca Nieto, for instilling the value of education in me. I would like to thank my family and friends for their support and encouragement. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Polett Cahue, who has believed in me when I needed it most. I am so grateful to have her stand beside me in this life.

She brings me great joy. I am eternally grateful for this journey. iv

Vita

May 1995………………………………..Slidell High School, Slidell,

August 1999……………………………..B.A. International Studies, University of

Southern Mississippi

August 2002……………………………..M.A. Women’s Studies, University of Alabama

Fields of Study

Major Field: Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies

Graduate Interdisciplinary Specialization: Folklore Studies

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Table of Contents

Abstract………………………………………………………………………………..ii

Dedication……………………………………………………………………………..iii

Acknowledgments…………………………………………....………………………..iv

Vita………………………………………………………………………………….....v

Table of Contents…………………………………………………...... vi

Chapter 1: An Introduction……...……………………………………………….……1

Chapter 2: Review of the Literature…..……………………………………………....37

Chapter 3: Recipes Lost and Found...…………………………………………………76

Chapter 4: Continuity through Cookbooks and Tradition…………………………….129

A Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………..161

Works Cited………………………………………………………...... 165

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Chapter 1: An Introduction

New Orleans is a small city, but it seems spacious because it is always full of people… like a crowded barroom at night. At dawn, a deserted barroom seems small beyond belief: How did all those people fit? The answer is that space and time are subjective, no matter what the merciless clock of late twentieth-century America tells us. And there is more subjective time and space here in New Orleans than almost anywhere in the United States. Which is not to say that the sad ironies of dehumanized commerce and violence do not touch us here: They do, as Walker Percy’s “Moviegoer” and John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces” amply prove. But the city puts up a fight, a funny, sad fight composed sometimes of sly stupidities and Third World inefficiency. The city can drive a sober-minded person insane, but it feeds the dreamer. It feeds the dreamer stories, music, and food. Really great food. (Codrescu 61)

I walked the streets of New Orleans, seeing familiar sites, but feeling lost, as if I was in an unknown city. I recognized the places of my youth, but the familiar landscape of music, laughter and people was gone, replaced with an emptiness of silence and darkness.

It was November 2005; I had traveled to my home state of Louisiana with over 70 students from The Ohio State University (OSU). We were there on a service trip over the

Veteran’s Day weekend to rebuild homes with Habitat for Humanity. We were rebuilding homes in my hometown of Slidell, Louisiana across Lake Ponchartrain on the

Northshore. I had recently moved to Columbus, Ohio three months earlier, in August, to begin working at the OSU Multicultural Center. Shortly after I arrived in Columbus, I witnessed from afar the tragedy that swept across my beloved city and the Gulf Coast.

Images of despair, hopelessness and violence flooded my television screen in my newly rented apartment with fresh paint still on the walls. My family, living in Slidell and

1 Covington, decided to stay home and await Hurricane Katrina. We had been through many hurricanes before and what meteorologists often referred to as the “storm of the century” often turned out to be little more than a day or two of heavy rain with a few branches blown off of trees. These storms often began with the obligatory visit to the local grocery store, along with the rest of the city’s inhabitants, to buy bread, milk, peanut butter and canned goods. This storm was different, however, and no one would know this until it was much too late.

When I finally heard from my parents, five days after the storm hit the Gulf Coast, it was via a man who lived in Baton Rouge and traveled to Slidell to bring sundries, water and food to the small street my parents lived on. My mother asked him to please call her daughter, who was living in Ohio, and let her know that they were okay. I still remember answering the much anticipated phone call, with the Baton Rouge area code flashing on my cellular phone screen, knowing that I was finally going to be reconnected with my family in some way. One day later, my parents made the treacherous 25-mile trip to

Covington to make sure my younger sister was okay. Of course, they had not been in contact with her as there was no cellular phone service, landline phone service or power.

Luckily for her, a neighbor’s family owned a sno-ball stand, the ubiquitous New Orleans summer treat. He had supplied her with blocks of ice used for making sno-balls. They were able to use the ice to keep drinks and food cold.

Our family was spared. We didn’t experience the tragedies that so many did. This does not mean that we did not experience the emotional setbacks and heartache, because we did. As I traveled down to Louisiana with those 70 Ohio State students, I did not know what to expect, but I did know that I was on my way home. On my way to a home

2 that gives me great pride, despite the many inequities that are present., a home that has produced great music and great food, while also producing very high rates of violence and poverty and a home that was slowly rebuilding after enduring tragic loss and despair.

Four years later, I was visiting New Orleans again, presenting my research at the annual American Folklore Society meeting. As our plane was landing, I listened to the conversations going on around me. Some were locals, and some were tourists on their way for some fun only New Orleans can offer. All of the conversations I listened to, centered on food. Out-of-towners were asking locals where they recommended they dine. Locals were enthusiastically playing tour guide and suggesting popular and off-the- beaten path restaurants. I smiled, as I do the same thing when I hear a colleague or a friend from Ohio is visiting New Orleans. I give them a rather detailed list of restaurants with descriptions of my favorite dishes as well as memories I have of the restaurant. The list is long and represents my love for the unique New Orleans cuisine as well as the cherished memories I have of the city, a form of my own nostalgia for New Orleans.

These food conversations are important and highlight the ways in which New Orleans cuisine is recognizable both to insiders and outsiders. While they may think of New

Orleans cuisine differently in that outsiders may have less of an understanding of the nuances of the distinct cuisine, there is still a general shared knowledge between the two groups of New Orleans as a food city.

I suggest food is central to the cultural identity of New Orleans. Everyone from the

New Orleans area can tell you the first time they tasted a beignet, a po-boy or crawfish.

They can share their favorite memories of grocery stores that long ago closed their doors.

Everyone has a favorite bakery, a favorite type of king cake and a favorite spot to get a

3 muffaletta sandwich. So much of the New Orleans experience centers on food. This identity extends beyond those that are from this area. It seems the entire nation knows that New Orleans is a “food city”. This may be one of the very reasons that people across the country cared so deeply when New Orleans was hit by Hurricane Katrina and then flooded by the rupture of the levees. There is a shared imagination of New Orleans and I suggest this shared imagination was central to the rebuilding of our community, that cultural identity is important.

New Orleans, Katrina and Food

I would like to begin this chapter with a brief history of Hurricane Katrina as well as some background on New Orleans as a city deeply connected to food. New Orleans, a city long in the path of hurricanes, has endured many storms. Katrina was different and will forever be remembered in the history of New Orleans. It started like any other hurricane making its way slowly through the Gulf of Mexico in the hot summer of

August 2005. The city’s inhabitants as well as those all over the region, including

Mississippi and parts of Alabama, monitored the storm closely making the achingly difficult decision of whether or not to pack their most treasured belongings and leave their homes to get out of the path of Katrina. It is never an easy decision. In the end, so many usually stay, as the hurricanes never quite come through with the gusto predicted by the meteorologists. In a counterintuitive way people are often disappointed and let down by the weakening of these storms, after so much anticipation and preparation.

Hurricanes often generate excitement in the region. In an area that already lets “the good times roll” much more than other regions of the United States, hurricane season is no different. In fact, hurricanes are often seen as an occasion for revelry and parties.

4 There is a different feeling in the air. Perhaps it is the nervous energy that causes this revelry or perhaps it is that school and work have been called off for many allowing for an extended bedtime or an extra nightcap. Whatever the reasons may be hurricanes seemed to have lost their reputation for generating catastrophic damage in the region and therefore often do not illicit the seriousness the situation calls for. It had been so long since the city had seen such devastation. In fact, many New Orleanians had not seen as catastrophic a storm as Katrina since Hurricane Betsy in 1965. For some that was a distant memory and for other younger New Orleanians it was a story they only heard.

Katrina would surpass Betsy in devastation and in loss.

Hurricane Katrina formed in the Bahamas on August 23, 2005 and crossed over

Florida as a category 1 storm. Katrina made its way through the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico intensifying to a category 5 hurricane. As it approached landfall on the morning of August 29 in southeast Louisiana, it weakened to a category 3 hurricane.

Despite this weakening, Katrina caused devastating destruction throughout the Gulf

Coast region. Katrina made landfall near the mouth of the Pearl River between Louisiana and Mississippi. The eye of the storm passed over St. Tammany Parish in Louisiana and

Hancock County in Mississippi. New Orleans and its surrounding communities as well as, St. Bernard Parish, St. Tammany Parish and all parishes surrounding Lake

Pontchartrain and coastal Mississippi were hit particularly hard. New Orleans suffered catastrophic loss as the levee system failed, flooding the city.

Unlike other storms, Katrina resulted in a mandatory evacuation, the first ever for residents in New Orleans. As a result, many of the city’s inhabitants heeded Mayor Ray

Nagin’s warnings and left the city. Others were not so lucky. Some chose to stay behind,

5 thinking the storm would pass through with little damage. Others did not have the means to evacuate the city, including money for gasoline and other expenses. While countless others did not have transportation to evacuate. Nagin opened the Superdome as a “refuge of last resort” for those that could not get out of the city in anticipation of the storm.

53 levee breaches occurred on August 29 as a result of Hurricane Katrina and the powerful storm surge, while the city also suffered considerable wind damage from the hurricane. Part of the Superdome’s roof blew off exposing some of the 26,000 evacuees to the treacherous conditions outside the Dome. There were 1,577 deaths in Louisiana and 135 people remain “missing” to this day. Countless others died indirectly as a result of Katrina. My family knew of two such people, one who suffered deadly injuries while removing fallen trees from his property after the storm and another who committed suicide as the storm and its aftermath was just too much for her to endure. I remember visiting my family for Thanksgiving in 2005 and seeing an increase in people smoking. I just knew it was a result of Katrina.

Much has been written about the deadly aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New

Orleans. The flooding of the city led to complete destruction and also to mayhem.

Images of families on their rooftops being rescued by helicopters, men and women floating to safety on mattresses from their beds and utter chaos at the city’s Convention

Center flooded television screens. National reporters broadcast live from the city sharing the unsettling images with evacuees, the country and even the world. It was as heartbreaking as it was frustrating for many viewing their televisions and reading the accounts. Many wondered how this could happen to an American city, while others wondered why anyone would want to live in a city like New Orleans that could suffer

6 such catastrophic flooding and also spiral into such chaos as a result. Many New

Orleanians and those from the surrounding areas would answer this question, which loomed in the thoughts of many, as the weeks and months progressed. I suggest that the intangible , including culinary heritage, was a big part of the answer to that question.

New Orleans’ culinary culture was not spared by the storm. As a result of the mandatory evacuation, all of the city’s restaurants were closed after Hurricane Katrina.

New Orleans’ revered restaurant scene had grown throughout the decades thanks to the likes of legendary restaurants like Antoine’s and Galatoire’s as well as individuals such as the Brennan family, , and Emeril Lagasse. Newcomers, relatively speaking, like John Besh, Susan Spicer and Scott Boswell furthered the identity of New Orleans as a food destination for so many, at this time. New Orleans’ culinary identity has always been unique as it brings together the culinary traditions of so many cultures including Spaniards, Native , French, Africans and Latin Americans.

The Cajun traditions meld with the Southern traditions to create a distinctive cuisine that is uniquely New Orleans’ own. I suggest it was this culinary tradition that helped to sustain New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

Chefs could easily be considered first responders as a result of the role they played in post-Katrina New Orleans. After the storm, many of the restaurants had large amounts of food that were in coolers that no longer worked due to power outages.

The food was cooked and given to those that remained behind. Fitzmorris writes,

“Galatoire’s and Antoine’s had two of the best such banquets, hauling out whole beef tenderloins and beautiful fish, grilling it (no sauces under this duress), and passing it out

7 to a grubbier bunch of people than they’d served in a long time” (Fitzmorris 142). Horst

Pfeifer, the owner of Bella Luna, a restaurant that never reopened after Hurricane

Katrina, also owned a catering facility. He supplied the troops that had entered the city with food if they made sure he had water and electricity to continue cooking (Fitzmorris

142). Restaurants began to reopen on the Northshore in St. Tammany Parish as well as in

Metairie, the biggest New Orleans suburb. Drago’s was one of those restaurants in

Metairie, famous for their char-grilled oysters. The owners, Croatian immigrants, opened

Drago’s before they even saw to taking care of the flooding in their own home. They served free meals to anyone who came by their restaurant. They did this for two months and served an estimated 77,000 free meals to the community. For the owners, who had before organized a relief effort for the war in Bosnia, they saw this as their duty

(Fitzmorris 144). Down the road, at a Metairie spice plant, Chef Paul Prudhomme set up a kitchen and cooked for anyone that needed food. This continued until he reopened his

French Quarter restaurant, K-Paul’s, a month later (Fitzmorris 144).

As Fitzmorris writes, and as I witnessed firsthand on a shopping trip to Metairie over the Thanksgiving holiday in 2005, restaurants were reopening, but they lacked the service staff to fully operate (154). People didn’t mind; they waited in long lines just for the chance to eat at one of their favorite pre-Katrina restaurants. This served as a time for people to share their Katrina stories as well as reminisce about favorite meals from the restaurant they were patiently waiting in line for. Regardless of the fact that menus were limited, service was slow, lines were long and often the restaurants themselves were in disarray, people were happy to be dining out. It must be stated, that not everyone was dining out. Many who returned to New Orleans were those that had the means and also

8 the insurance policies to do so. They were able to afford to rebuild their badly damaged homes, while others remained in the cities they were evacuated to, sharing their food with those lucky enough to get a taste.

I suggest cookbooks are an integral part of New Orleans culinary heritage. While much has been written on the recovery of restaurants in New Orleans, I am most interested with the recovery of recipes and food traditions through cookbooks and recipes. I seek to explain how cookbooks and recipes played an expanded role in the culinary heritage of New Orleans after Katrina. That role is one of recovery. Cookbooks recovered memories for those that read the stories and recipes on the pages of the cookbook. Cookbooks recovered recipes that were quite literally lost after the storm and collected them in one place. My research suggests cookbooks and recipes contributed to the recovery of New Orleans. After the storm, there were many conversations across dinner tables and boardroom tables on the merits of rebuilding New Orleans. These conversations occurred in the bars and restaurants of New Orleans as well as the halls of

Washington, DC. In the end, there were many reasons New Orleans needed to be rebuilt, and culinary heritage, I suggest, was one of those reasons.

New Orleans, Food and Cultural Identity

My project suggests that food is central to the cultural identity of New Orleans and is particularly useful for understanding post-Katrina New Orleans. I examine the ways cultural identity, recovery and community, in post-Katrina New Orleans, are manifested through recipes, cooking and food. This is explored specifically through cookbooks and recipe collections published after Hurricane Katrina. The lens through which these sites are examined is through the discourses of gender, folklore, foodways and narrative

9 theory. This project suggests that these cookbooks are much more than a collection of recipes, but rather a narrative shared and produced by women. These cookbooks tell stories of cultural tradition as well as of loss and recovery. They do the important work of telling stories that are often left off the pages of newspapers and magazines.

Drawing on the work of Tad Tuleja in his edited volume, Usable Pasts, I propose that cookbooks serve as a mechanism for creating a unified narrative around cultural identity, community and recovery, and that these cookbooks took on a different role after Katrina.

They recovered recipes and memories and also helped in the recovery of the city by reinforcing shared cultural traditions. Tuleja writes, “Ethnic groups, regional groups, organizational and occupational groups, families: all such groups may find themselves creatively utilizing “past practices”—both inherently aged ones and deliberately aged ones—as manipulable markers of a common identity” (3). It is through shared cultural identities and traditions that community is formed and also recovered. This is type of shared cultural identity is present in many forms in New Orleans. The rich music scene serves as another example of a New Orleans shared cultural identity. As Tom Piazza writes in his book, Why New Orleans Matters:

Music was my entry point into the world of the spirit that New Orleans embodies. But there are so many other possible entry points, too—culinary, social, historical, literary, and architectural—all of them connected. For years, because of what I heard in the music, I wanted to visit that place. Eventually after many visits, I ended up moving there. (5)

Felipe Fernández-Armesto writes, “Cultural historians are increasingly interested in how food nourishes societies as well as individual bodies—how it feeds identities, defines groups” (ix). After Hurricane Katrina, much of New Orleans was in turmoil. Race and class stratification was exposed on a world stage in ways that it had previously not been.

10 While residents and observers needed to have often-difficult conversations about these inequities, it was also important to find commonalities among the communities. This could be found through the shared cultural traditions of New Orleans. Cookbooks and food traditions served as a shared cultural identity in which communities could grasp onto. My research suggests that communities in New Orleans and surrounding areas often came together through food and culinary traditions. Despite different food traditions, food and the importance of it, was a commonality. For example, the recipe archive examined in this project provided a common goal for residents to focus on, something they could recover together. It is through the memories of what Tuleja calls a

“usable past” that connections are realized, memorialized and celebrated. He writes,

“Among the cultural resources available for creating a usable past is the very idea of the past itself, the idea of common heritage and shared memories” (12). It can be particularly useful to recall a “usable past” during times of urgency whether it is a political crisis, widespread discontent or a catastrophic disaster such as Hurricane

Katrina. Tuleja writes, “the past becomes usable not for itself, or even for the present, but for the future” (14). I suggest that cookbooks and food traditions were one of the

“usable pasts” found to be most effective in the recovery of New Orleans and surrounding communities. This “usable past” creates a shared cultural identity focused on food practices and food memories. Cookbooks published after Hurricane Katrina serve as a bridge to pre-Katrina. They create a narrative of recovery, providing a space for recipes and memories to be recovered and shared. I suggest that the recipe archive and cookbooks examined in this project served as a gendered female space marked by recovery, creativity, invention, community, networking and nostalgia.

11 It must be noted that the dialogue, inspired by Katrina, on race and class in New

Orleans must continue. This is unfinished work. There is important scholarly research as well as in-the-field work being done on these inequities. The stratification that was so ingrained in New Orleans certainly made the devastation of the city that much worse. As

Jed Horne writes in his book, Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City:

Katrina tore up lives as well as landscapes. A city below sea level was churned suddenly and convulsively by the hurricane that struck New Orleans in late August 2005. Rich people died along with the indigent. The pricey homes of the professional classes, both black and white, were destroyed, as were rickety cottages owned or rented by the poor. Millionaires and high-flying politicians were undone by Katrina, while other survivors found opportunity in the ruins of the city. That did not make Katrina an ‘equal opportunity destroyer,’ as some hastened to call it. Poor blacks did disproportionately more of the dying. And as the engines of recovery creaked into gear, people of means enjoyed advantages that had been theirs all along. (xv)

New Orleans is no different than many other American cities, in this regard, as we continue to see a deepening divide between the rich and the poor across the United States.

These systems of inequity are made more visible when disastrous circumstances occur.

Many factors contributed to this aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Although people of all racial and economic backgrounds were impacted by the storm, media reports documented disproportionate loss of life and devastation among Blacks and the poor. These population segments were both hardest hit and least likely to have adequate evacuation resources. Also, news reports of the devastation identified slow emergency responsiveness, communication failures, and poor emergency preparedness as the underlying causes of the disproportionate impacts. (Cole, et al 3)

This important work must continue, and must be given a forum in which to be heard.

Food is one way in which conversations around race and class can continue. Food is a venue in which to view inequities, that is who has access to food and to what types of

12 food. According to a study by the National Institutes of Health, New Orleans experienced racial disparity before Hurricane Katrina when it came to food accessibility.

After Katrina, this dramatically worsened. The New Orleans Food Policy Advisory

Committee, formed by the city council, put forward a set of recommendations to improve food access problems after Hurricane Katrina.

On August 26, 2005, 809 restaurants were open in New Orleans. (Fitzmorris 137)

Twenty-four hours later, all of these restaurants were closed, at least temporarily, with some of them having closed their doors forever without even realizing it. New Orleans would later come to depend on its culinary culture in ways that it never had before

Hurricane Katrina, through restaurant re-openings as well as openings and through, as I suggest, recipes and cookbooks. Certainly New Orleanians and those familiar with the

New Orleans culture recognized the importance of New Orleans’ cuisine prior to

Hurricane Katrina. It provided a unique cultural identity to New Orleans, while also contributing to the often-struggling economy. After Hurricane Katrina, however, New

Orleans’ culinary culture nourished the community not only physically, but also emotionally and spiritually as well. Radio talk show host, Tom Fitzmorris, writes about the importance of this culinary tradition in the recovery of New Orleans stating:

So, we went on. And we ate. We ate in grand restaurants like August if that’s what we need to do to be convinced that the food infrastructure was still sound. Or we ate in raffish old poor boy shops like Mother’s, a block away. Or in our own kitchens (or those of the people who were letting us stay with them), cooking our own red beans and rice, and gumbo. We cooked and ate not just to fill our stomachs, but to live the New Orleans life, eating and drinking with relieved abandon. (15)

The act of eating in familiar spaces allowed for continuity of tradition and of the everyday after Hurricane Katrina. Fitzmorris acknowledges that this act of eating was

13 much more than physical nourishment, but was in fact a way of connecting to pre-Katrina

“New Orleans life”.

Intangible Culture, Recovery and Narrative

Folklorist Nick Spitzer recognizes the integral role culture can play in recovery in his article in Southern Spaces appearing online. He writes, that after Hurricane Katrina,

“carriers of intangible culture in family and neighborhood networks made such an impact on the shared citywide vernacular culture.” In a city such as New Orleans, already rich with well-known cultural markers, cultural recovery was just as much a part of the physical recovery. Spitzer writes of the role of intangible culture such as music, festival and food as key to the survival of post-Katrina New Orleans. He states that the roles of vernacular culture after Hurricane Katrina “testify to the primacy of non-institutional forces at work in the recovery.” These cultural markers provided countless reasons to rebuild New Orleans for a city so steeped in the tradition of the intangible. They brought hope to an often-hopeless situation. For this project, I am using UNESCO’s (United

Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) definition of intangible culture. Intangible culture includes music and song, drama, crafts, festivals and foodways. According to UNESCO, intangible cultural heritage is defined in the following way:

The intangible cultural heritage is transmitted from generation to generation, and is constantly recreated by communities and groups, in response to their environment, their interaction with nature, and their history. It provides people with a sense of identity and continuity, and promotes respect for cultural diversity and human creativity.

The Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage defines the intangible cultural heritage as the practices, representations, expressions, as well as the knowledge and skills (including instruments, objects, artifacts,

14 cultural spaces), that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognise as part of their cultural heritage.1

My work suggests that culinary narratives, which I propose include recipe collections, cookbooks, restaurants, celebrations, rituals and traditions, are central to the shared cultural identity of New Orleans and useful for understanding post-Katrina New Orleans.

These narratives mark the role of community in post-Katrina New Orleans, simultaneously marking the rupture, and creating continuity. Narratives are constructed every day as a way to recount events and experiences. Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps write,

"Personal narrative is a way of using language or another symbolic system to imbue life events with a temporal and logical order, to demystify them and establish coherence across past, present, and as yet unrealized experiences" (2). In times of catastrophic loss such as post-Katrina, narratives do the important work of memorializing, sustaining and rebuilding.

Culinary narratives, in a city such as New Orleans, are particularly worth examining as the cultural identity of New Orleans is engulfed in food. These narratives, oral, written and performed, play an integral role in post-Katrina New Orleans. Culinary narratives do the work of recovering community and of observing and documenting the recovering that is not possible, the loss that is still present. While considerable attention, by scholars such as Long and Counihan, has been accorded to the ways food constructs identity, less is understood regarding the role of food in loss and recovery particularly with regards to community. The culinary narratives I am most interested in for this project are

11 In 2013, I attended the UNESCO Foodways and Heritage Conference: A Perspective in Safeguarding the Intangible Cultural Heritage in Hong Kong to present my research on foodways. Central to the conference was the idea that foodways is an important cultural marker of identity and community. 15 cookbooks published after Hurricane Katrina as well as the online newspaper recipe archive. I am interested in the role these cookbooks and the archive played in the sharing of traditions, recovering a collective New Orleans cultural identity, as a way to rebuild the city and surrounding communities.

In her essay, “Cooking Up Stories: Narrative Elements in Community Cookbooks”,

Anne Bower argues that feminist studies has expanded the definition of narrative to include literary and non-literary texts as well as those texts that have historically been ignored and undervalued as women’s domain. These include diaries, journals, quilts, crafts and cookbooks. Bower uses traditional components of narrative structure to examine community cookbooks. These include: setting, characters, plot and theme. She identifies four types of plots: the integration plot, the differentiation plot, the plot of moral or religious triumph and the historical plot. These plots will be further examined in

Chapter 2. Bower’s work brought attention to the community cookbook as a viable expression of women’s lives and stories. I would like to suggest the addition of a fifth plot to Bower’s framework, the recovery plot, which I utilize as an analytical framework throughout my project.

Framework and Methods

This project draws on the discourses of gender, foodways and tradition as well as material culture, literacy studies and cultural circulation to examine cookbooks published after Hurricane Katrina. I suggest that women’s networks, through recipe collections and cookbooks, created ways of recovering and preserving tradition and circulating culture, thus rebuilding cultural heritage and community after Hurricane Katrina. I examine three cookbooks: Cooking Up a Storm, edited by Marcelle Bienvenu and Judy Walker; Ruby

16 Slippers Cookbook: Life, Culture, Family and Food After Katrina by Amy Cyrex Sins; and You Are Where You Eat: Stories and Recipes from the Neighborhoods of New

Orleans by Elsa Hahne. Each cookbook presents a collection of stories and recipes while also doing much more than simply providing a set of cooking directions. I suggest the cookbooks are creating a “usable past” in which to rebuild community after Hurricane

Katrina through a narrative of shared experience particularly among gendered networks.

I also include an analysis of the food-centered ritual practice of St. Joseph’s Day Altars in

New Orleans and surrounding communities as an example of shared cultural identity and of continuity after Hurricane Katrina.

Material Culture

I utilize the theoretical framework of material culture to ground my research in cookbooks published after Hurricane Katrina. Material culture is the theoretical framework of examining objects and the creation of these objects to learn more about a group of people. I find this framework particularly useful for my examination of cookbooks and foodways in post-Katrina New Orleans including the analysis in Chapter

4 of St. Joseph’s Day Altars. Drawing on the contributions of Henry Glassie, Pravina

Shukla and Kathy Neustadt I outline a framework in this section useful to my research topic. Glassie provides a theoretical framework and methodology in which to examine material culture, while Shukla and Neustadt offer examples of this methodology in practice. Shukla examines dress and adornment of the body in modern India and Neustadt examines a clambake in Allen’s Neck, Massachusetts. This section offers what I consider to be several of the most useful theoretical concepts (for my project) of material culture offered by Glassie as well as a methodology in which to situate my work.

17 Throughout the section, I have noted the ways in which my project would enter this conversation.

According to Henry Glassie, “Material culture is culture made material; it is the inner wit at work in the world. Beginning necessarily with things, but not ending with them, the study of material culture uses objects to approach human thought and action” (41).

Henry Glassie’s theoretical framework is particularly relevant to my exploration of foodways in post-Katrina New Orleans. He offers an extensive framework in which to examine material culture. Things and objects are the starting point for examining a culture, but not the ending point. Through objects, so much is revealed about cultures including thoughts, actions, hopes, feelings, family structure, community, hierarchy, etc.

Glassie notes the relevance of artifacts when examining cultures. He writes, “Seeking the human, the artful in the cultural, the cultural in the material, we go into the world and find things. They will not let us mistake people for vapors of consciousness. Artifacts set the mind in the body, the body in the world” (42). For Glassie, and other scholars of material culture, objects are much more than merely things, objects possess a quality that makes them subjects, not just objects. As Glassie poetically states they are objects “filled with the human” (41). Examining how these objects come to be subjects offers lived stories and experiences. In Chapter 3 of my project, one can hear the voices and begin to understand the experiences associated with cooking and with Hurricane Katrina just by reading the recipe requests I examine. Material culture offers a record of groups of people, a way for one to begin to understand the daily lives of communities as well as what is important to them. Glassie writes, “Material, a part of the world, the record of bodily action in nature, the artifact perpetually displays the process of its design, the

18 pattern in the mind of its creator. It incorporates intention” (44). For Glassie, intention through objects does not depend on words. Objects are viewed as a form of narrative.

This narrative is read through material culture, through objects that have become subjects. They tell the story of individuals, groups of people and cultures. This narrative does not need language in the form of words, as the language is present in the object.

Glassie writes, “Material culture is as true to the mind, as dear to the heart, as language, and what is more, it reports thoughts and actions that resist verbal formulation. Like a story, an artifact is a text, a display of form and a vehicle for meaning” (46). For my research, the cookbooks and recipe collections published after Katrina, tell the story of life lived after Hurricane Katrina, as well as a life lived before Katrina. The cookbooks and recipe collections tell the stories of survival, hardship, celebration, family, resilience and recovery. The cookbooks and recipe archive I examine provide more than just instructions on cooking, they are life stories, reflecting on memories as well as future directions.

Glassie provides a useful methodology when examining material culture. Though he states that the work of material culture scholars is not easy, the basic strategy is finding pattern. He writes, “Patterns imply intentions and carry toward meaning” (47). A lone object means nothing thus the practice of examining text along with context is an integral part of material culture studies. Glassie writes, “All objects are simultaneously sets of parts and parts of sets. They are texts, sets of parts, to which meaning is brought by locating them in contexts, by analyzing them as parts of sets” (47). Glassie notes that folklore has sought the meaning of texts. Even if one does not know the meaning, the object can be described. Glassie notes that examining context is more difficult than

19 examining text, as descriptions for meanings of text eventually run out while contexts continue to unfold. Context, though, is key to material culture scholars. Through context, objects (texts) are situated and patterns are revealed. Glassie writes, “Texts have limits, meanings do not, and the analyst on the hunt for meaning will gather as much information as possible to construct as many contexts as possible. Then as the text is located in context after context, associations will assemble and multiply. The reading becomes rich. The artifact swells with meaning and accomplishes its mission” (48).

Thus the process of contextual analysis can be broad and extensive. Glassie offers what he calls “three master classes” for examining context. These include creation, communication and consumption, which he states, “cumulatively recapitulate the life history of the artifact” (48).

In offering this methodology, Glassie examines the work of weaver Aysel Ozturk in the village of Karagomlek in northwestern . He defines the first master class of creation stating, “That instant which she translates herself into wool, when thought becomes material, is central, fundamental, and it gathers a host of associations that fuse in the act of creation” (51). These associations, according to Glassie, are social. Aysel learned the art of weaving rugs from her mother and she continues this tradition and honors her mother through her creation of rugs. The rugs tell a story and communicate a life lived. The second and third master classes, communication and consumption often go hand in hand. The stories are communicated and consumed by those who read the text and also by those who take possession of the text through purchasing an object, receiving an object as a gift or quite literally consuming an object through eating. This methodology provides a thorough framework for examining material culture both

20 textually and contextually. Cookbooks and recipes are a type of material culture that engages the intangible culture of culinary tradition. Cookbooks are created and often published. The cookbooks I am most interested in are those focusing on community recipes. These cookbooks are published, bought, shared and used. Recipes that were passed down from one generation to the next appear in these collections. Some of these recipes are family recipes while others are from restaurants. Once transmitted, these recipes are prepared by a larger community. These recipes are then eaten and shared with others creating a sense of shared community via food.

In her extensive study of Indian dress and adornment of the body, Pravina Shukla, offers an example of material culture study. She writes, “Dress, along with architecture and food, fulfills basic human needs for protection and creativity, while responding to environmental and social conditions” (3). Shukla suggests that dress, architecture and food not only fulfill a need for protection, but also for creativity. Thus, for my project food is a basic need for survival, but recipes, cookbooks, restaurants and the like provide outlets for creativity which she argues is also a basic need. This creativity is a form of cultural expression, which was apparent throughout my examination of the recipe archive in Chapter 3. She notes that since dress, architecture and food are shared experiences, examining these forms of expression reveal much about cultures. She writes, “One way to understand and compare cultures—and to see regional, local, and personal differences within cultures—is to examine the specific modes of clothing, housing, and feeding the body” (3). Shukla notes that scholars of material culture “enable considerations of form and function, creation and consumption, and the historical and social forces that bring beauty, meaning, and the power of communication to the things people make” (386).

21 Central to Shukla’s work is the issue of formal analysis. She writes “In harmony with their colleagues in art history, students of material culture analyze and assess the formal qualities of things whether they are paintings, pots, or plain old barns” (387). This close analysis offers patterns, which are key to material culture studies. Shukla also notes the important role of studying the individual creator. Extensive interviews and interactions are essential “if we are to understand how the productive tensions of traditions and innovation are mediated by the creative act embodied in the object that stands before us and beckons to us through its presence” (388). Through this close interaction with the creator, one is able to begin to understand the ways in which life experiences shape the object. These experiences are often based on gender, age, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status and regionality. Thus, material objects inherently display social identity. My research on cookbooks and recipe collections in post-Katrina New Orleans beckons me into the individual lives of creators. Specifically, through the cookbooks I examine, the reader is introduced to the recipe creator or person who has recorded the recipe and passed it down to others through the recipe narrative. Through this narrative, we, the readers, gain access to the lives of the recipe creators. It is through utilizing methods for

“reading” recipes and cookbooks that I begin to understand the wants, needs and desires of the community after Hurricane Katrina.

Kathy Neustadt’s analysis of a clambake in New England offers a model for examining food in a community context. Her ideas of material culture are set in the context of use, which is important for my project. Additionally, she considers the role of ritual. I am interested in both everyday food and also ritual food events that are very much a part of the New Orleans culinary landscape. The cookbooks I examine offer

22 examples of everyday food use, as well as ritual food events such as Mardi Gras, St.

Joseph’s Day Altars and New Year’s Eve celebrations. Neustadt’s close study of the

Allen’s Neck Clambake reveals the ways in which what may be perceived as simple gathering of people for a meal is in fact much more complex, offering the story of a community and their lived experiences. Neustadt divides her text into three sections.

The first examines the history of the clambake as well as the social, cultural, regional, economic and political forces that shaped the clambake. The second section focuses specifically on the Allen’s Neck clambake and the final section theorizes the clambake.

Neustadt notes that with the development of functionalism in anthropology a shift from the study of food for sacred significance to social value occurred (137). Through formal analysis of foodways, one can begin to read a culture’s story. Much like the clambake, my examination of the St. Joseph’s Day Altar in Chapter 4, can be read as a ritual ceremony. “Rituals accrue to occasions of status change, in natural as well as social relations” (Neustadt 145). The clambake marks the end of summer while the St. Joseph’s

Day Altar marks the famine in while also honoring the ways in which St. Joseph has blessed the family and community through births, healings and survival. Neustadt describes the role of the preparation of the clambake in creating and renewing community. She writes, “By pulling people together to get these chores done, by drawing in the larger community of their neighbors, relatives, and the summer residents, the clambakers are able to take stock of the current human population and make and renew social bonds” (146). This also happens at St. Joseph’s Day Altar traditions in New

Orleans and surrounding communities. Neighbors stop by and offer religious statues for the altar; family members help construct the altar and friends stop by to help with the

23 cooking. Relationships are renewed and community and familial bonds are reinforced through the preparation of the altar. According to Neustadt, “Rituals also interact with ideology, the officially professed values and aspirations of a group” (149). Ritual is present in the St. Joseph’s Day Altar. The preparation, construction and presentation all exhibit the values of those that create, communicate and consume the altar. The role of rituals in creating and sustaining communities cannot be underestimated. Rituals are sites of collectivity. Neustadt writes, “In addition to their ability to reflect and shape culture, rituals also serve as a kind of ‘traditionalizing instrument,’ capable simultaneously of creating a sense of natural process, legitimating the social group and its values, commanding attention, and asserting a cultural reality” (149). Material culture exhibits the values, traditions and stories of those who create it. Neustadt’s example of the clambake provides a model for examining everyday foodways and celebration, which is useful to my work. While much of my work focuses on cookbooks and recipes, inherent in these collections are the ritual celebrations, which are part of the New Orleans identity.

I suggest many everyday events in New Orleans are also ritual celebrations. For example, the clambakes that Neustadt studies, are akin to the crawfish boils that occur on a weekly basis for many Louisiana families and communities. I also cite a recipe for hand pies later in the project that includes ritual, tradition and celebration. Perhaps nowhere is everyday cooking and eating so closely linked to celebration and ritual than in New

Orleans.

Literacy Studies

As indicated earlier, foodways, including ritual celebrations and cookbooks, are part of community networks. As a text, cookbooks raise different questions than ritual

24 celebration. Literacy studies is a useful way to examine cookbooks. Literacy studies is concerned with the context in which literacies occur. Lankshear writes, “From a sociocultural perspective, literacy is a matter of social practices. Literacies are bound up with social, institutional and cultural relationships, and can be understood only when they are situated within their social, cultural and historical contexts” (13). Lankshear points out the way literacies are situated contextually.

Reading and writing are not the same things in a youth zine culture, an online chat space, a school classroom, a feminist reading group, or in different kinds of religious ceremonies. People read and write differently out of different social practices, and these different ways with words are part of different ways of being persons and different way and facets of doing life. (Lankshear 13)

My exploration into the online recipe archive and the cookbooks published in post-

Katrina New Orleans, are centered around types of literacy practices. These practices are worth exploring as they provided outlets for New Orleans residents to write about their experiences with Hurricane Katrina as well as request and/or share recipes. It is important to note that some recipes were transmitted orally while others were written down and/or printed in The Times-Picayune newspaper. Shuman and Blue examine the ethnography of writing. They suggest that the varieties of writing in various domains are worthy of this examination. They state, “The ethnography of writing begins with the premise that writing is a cultural practice that needs to be understood within particular contexts” (107). They continue stating:

The central conceptual shift that was required to view writing as a cultural practice rather than as a modern technology that disrupted cultural practices was to see writing as part of everyday life rather than only as part of official public life. Ethnographic studies of writing examine all genres of written communication, not just print culture and not only genres using standard language varieties. In ethnographic studies of writing, public, mainstream, academic, and

25 official governmental writing are viewed as varieties of writing along with writing in everyday life. (109)

For this project, I am most concerned with writing the everyday life through cookbooks and recipes. I suggest that cookbooks and recipes are components of women’s literacies and important to understanding women’s lives. I am interested in the ways these writings are circulated and/or not circulated after Hurricane Katrina. The newspaper archive as well as the cookbooks, made private writings public as literacies transitioned from the home kitchen to the newspapers and cookbooks. This transition can be viewed as a form of empowerment as well as agency. Shuman and Blue write:

One advantage of the domain approach to studying writing is that it avoids assuming that literacy learning takes place only in the domain of explicitly designated institutions for instruction in reading and writing and also includes informal means for acquiring literacy skills as part of family life or social activities. As Whiteman argues, “learning literacy is . . . an intensely social pastime”. (110-111)

Engaging with different domains of literacies allows an opportunity for exploring communities historically overlooked. Domestic life provides a rich domain for the examination of women’s literacies. Hamilton, Barton and Ivancic comment on the role of gender in literacies stating:

Much has been written on the silencing of women’s voice in literature, and in the processes of creating knowledge, whereby certain types of knowing are privileged or excluded. Within the feminist movement there has been an emphasis on women’s writing as an enabling tool for creating our own stories and as a key to personal and social transformation. (8)

They are also particularly interested in the domestic domain as a site of literacy studies.

They state, “Uses of reading and writing in our everyday domestic life are often not counted, but they are a distinct world of literacy, the one in which most of us feel at home” (9). Literacies are a valuable mode of understanding the transmission of

26 knowledge, culture and memory after Hurricane Katrina. Cookbooks provided a gendered female space in which to begin to make meaning of recovery and community in a post-Katrina New Orleans.

Gender Studies

I utilize the discourses of feminist foodways scholars to examine the importance of cookbooks as a way of understanding women’s lives. Drawing on the work of feminist foodways scholars such as Anne Bower, Janet Theophano, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and others, I suggest, as do they, that cookbooks are often important narratives of women’s lives that should not be left unexamined. It is the work of these feminist scholars that led others to see, what was traditionally viewed only as women’s domestic work, as much more. Cookbooks, recipes, crafts, quilts and other forms of domestic work were taken up as integral components of women’s existence and thus worthy of critical academic study. In her essay, “Empathy, Energy, and Eating: Politics and Power in The Black Family Dinner Quilt Cookbook”, Sally Bishop Shigley writes,

“Examination of cookbooks or quilts or other ‘female’ domains illustrates how women have used the discourses available to them to make profound and effective statements”

(125). The work of these feminist scholars is invaluable to my research. It was these scholars that first began using narrative theory to analyze non-traditional texts such as letters, journals, diaries, quilts, recipes and cookbooks.

I ground much of my research on the readability of cookbooks, on the work of Anne

Romines, Janet Theophano, Anne Bower and others whose work focuses on narrative theory particularly with regards to non-traditional texts. Cognard-Black and Goldthwaite refer to this readability in their book, Books That Cook: The Making of a Literary Meal,

27 as “pieces of literature: as forms of storytelling and memory making all their own” (1).

In her essay, “Claiming a Piece of the Pie: How the Language of Recipes Define

Community”, Colleen Cotter writes, “By looking at the language and structure of a recipe, we begin to see how a recipe can be viewed as a story, a cultural narrative that can be shared and has been constructed by members of a community” (52-53). Cookbooks are what Bower refers to as communal partial autobiography. Cookbooks, she suggests, are telling the stories of communities and creating shared identities. As narrative theorists maintain, the notion of a shared or communal autobiography is gendered and typically a style of female writers. As opposed to male writers, who often focus on themselves and their role in the community rather than the communities’ role in their own lives. Bower writes about her own rediscovery of an old family cookbook and how this text changed the way she “read” cookbooks. She writes:

Could I value this book not just as a fun source of recipes but as a literary text whose authors constructed meaningful representations of themselves and their world? Probably as a result of working on other projects concerning women’s writing—analyses of letter novels, of quilting metaphors in poetry, of feminist critical styles, I began to wonder about the potential interpretability of cookbooks like Our Sisters’ Recipes. (2)

For Bower, the practice of “reading” this old family cookbook allowed her a glimpse into the lives of women from this particular region and time. The cookbook was more than a collection of recipes, but also a collection of stories about women’s lives. She further elaborates on this, stating, “Part of what we are coming to see about these varying texts, once considered decorative and/or private and/or trivial, is how they have served the communication needs of women” (5). This communication need is evident after

Hurricane Katrina, when women were seeking recipes to rebuild their recipe collections

28 and their lives. It was through this communication that women contributed to the cultural rebuilding of New Orleans.

Folklore Theory

This project uses the discipline of folklore to explore the meanings of food and tradition in post-Katrina New Orleans. Folklore takes food studies, having its academic roots in anthropology, one step further. Folklore not only examines what we are eating, but why, where, how, when and with whom. Foodways folklorist Lucy Long writes,

“Folklore offers to food studies a conception of food as more than just ‘what we eat’. It is rather, the aesthetic domain of activities and practices surrounding that stuff” (7).

Long highlights the importance of everyday events in this examination stating, “activities such as washing dishes, shopping for groceries, or growing herbs on the kitchen windowsill can be recognized as contributing to the ways in which we use food and find meaning in it” (7).

Long’s work captures the deep connections between food and identity. She writes:

Identity in the present emerges out of identities in the past. Food is a common medium through which these processes occur and can be examined. Food advertising, films, cookbook publishing, restaurant trends, and even the fascination with television cooking shows and food tours are not simply celebrations of what we eat; they are vehicles for the public and private construction, negotiation and manipulation of identity. (3)

The identity of New Orleanians is undeniably linked to food. Ask anyone from this area about the identity of New Orleans and food will always come up. Likewise, ask anyone not from the area what distinguishes New Orleans from other cities and again food will most likely be the answer. Not only do New Orleanians identify with food, those not from New Orleans identify the city with food. It is this shared imagination of New

29 Orleans culinary culture that I suggest played an integral role in the recovery of New

Orleans. If not for this shared imagination, New Orleans might not be thriving in the way it is today. This shared imagination has contributed to the recovery process of New

Orleans.

Tradition, Circulation and Transmission

At the core of this project are questions of tradition, circulation, transmission and how cookbooks and recipes do this work. Folklorists have long been attentive to the role of tradition in the work of folklore. This has led to an interest in cultural circulation, that is how culture circulates over time and what networks are part of this circulation. This is the model I am using to explore cookbooks and recipe collections in post-Katrina New

Orleans. Cultural circulation has the advantages of not constructing simple binaries of active and passive tradition bearers and of not being linear, one generation to the next.

Rather, understanding how discourses circulate as part of social networks. The recipes and cookbooks I examine have components of tradition and cultural circulation, alike.

Active and passive tradition bearers and generational transmission are pieces of this as well as new social networks such as the online recipe archive I examine. Cultural circulation is made most apparent through the online recipe archive. Through this archive, recipes are transmitted in non-linear forms. Recipes that existed before

Hurricane Katrina are requested by community members, then reprinted or requested by the Food Editor, Judy Walker. When the recipe request is sent out, community members look through their own recipe archives to locate the recipe. This creates a network of circulation.

30 Tradition has been a theoretical interest of folklore. Folklorists have been concerned with the role tradition plays in communities and identities. Ben-Amos writes:

In folklore studies, tradition has served as a motive for and a subject of research. It has been a fundamental theoretical concept indispensible in the analysis of texts, cultures, and societies. The impulse to salvage the diversified forms of tradition has motivated folklore research from its inception. Whether the sentiment be nationalistic, romantic, literary, or historical, the imprint of antiquity on customs, songs, and tales has been a sufficient reason for their scrutiny by folklorists. Often these vestiges have been major analytical concerns: the recovery of past meanings, uses, and references has been a primary research goal. Consequently, any explanation of their survival has placed tradition at the center of many a theory in folklore. (98)

Ben-Amos and others have offered critique of tradition and have instead encouraged analysis of circulation, networks, processes and dynamics.. Cooking and other ritual practices around food and eating in New Orleans is part of this discussion of tradition and circulation particularly after Hurricane Katrina. Ben-Amos offers seven strands of tradition: tradition as lore; tradition as canon; tradition as process; tradition as mass; tradition as culture; tradition as langue; and tradition as performance. I am most interested in tradition as process as it relates to cookbooks and recipes as well as the St.

Joseph Day Altar. Ben-Amos writes, “In folklore, as well as in other disciplines, the process of tradition implies the dynamics of transmission and cultural heritage from generation to generation” (116-117). Tradition can be handed down orally or ritually through customs and practices such as cooking or sharing recipes and through this handing down it can be recovered, reinvented, reformulated; this is circulation. “As a transmission process, tradition has clearly been associated with the past. Folklorists, however, have extended the tradition process from temporal to social and spatial

31 dimensions” (117). After Hurricane Katrina, tradition was recovered, but much tradition and ritual practice had changed over time. This was happening prior to Katrina as well.

Circulation takes into account the ways that tradition changes as well as the networks that are a part of this process. As Ben-Amos writes in “Toward a Definition of Folklore in Context”, “ . . . the materials of folklore are mobile, manipulative, and transcultural”

(4). Ben-Amos states that folklore is one of these three: “a body of knowledge, a mode of thought, or a kind of art” (5). Each of these is transmitted verbally or imitatively and is often recreated. For my project, it is interesting to think about what recipes are passed down from one generation to the next, what is left out and what changes over time. It is also important to consider who controls what circulates and what counts as something worth circulating. Lee and LiPuma state that, “Cultures of circulation are created and animated by the cultural forms that circulate through them” (192). The roles of the home cooks in New Orleans and those requesting and finding recipes are important in the circulation of tradition and material culture after Hurricane Katrina. These networks were sharing their voices and their own recipe and cooking traditions through circulating their narratives and recipes. They were forming the narrative that was recorded through the archive as well as the cookbooks.

Chapter Organization

I begin each chapter with an epigraph and end each chapter with a recipe. Each epigraph is an excerpt from popular New Orleans writings that display the importance of food to New Orleans identity. The recipes are from the recipe collections and cookbooks examined in this project. I include these, as they were both catalysts for my research project. The first epigraph in this chapter is from Andrei Codrescu’s collection of essays

32 on New Orleans, New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings From the City.

Codrescu’s style of writing about New Orleans incorporates elements of magical realism, as he suggests that the official language of New Orleans is “dreams”. This excerpt from his collection of essays touches on the dream-like trance that many visitors feel the first time they visit New Orleans. He suggests that while the city can drive a sober person insane, it feeds the dreamer many things including really good food. Food is highlighted as something that makes up for all of the other problems the city presents. Fitzmorris also writes about these ongoing problems and the role of food in compensating for them.

The people who never had much of a romance with the city in the first place saw nothing but a shocking mess. To them, the idea that food could possibly compensate for the disadvantages of living in that morass was ridiculous. And maybe they’re right. In addition to dangerous hurricanes and precarious levees, New Orleanians must battle with a chronically sluggish economy, a high crime rate, and embarrassingly poor public education. The disenchanted citizens made a good case for leaving forever, and many of them did. (17)

I had the opportunity to meet Codrescu after Hurricane Katrina at a New Orleans food symposium where I presented my research in 2008. It was a perfect November night in

New Orleans, the humidity of the summer and early fall had dissipated and the crispness of fall was in the air. I had earlier had an exquisite dinner at a corner table for one at the legendary Creole Italian restaurant, Irene’s Cuisine. By a stroke of New Orleans luck,

Olivia Manning, wife of Archie Manning and mother to NFL football quarterbacks, Eli and Peyton Manning, sat at the table next to me celebrating her birthday with a group of friends in true New Orleans style. Codrescu was the invited speaker at the evening gathering of symposium attendees. He had just published a book of poetry about the city and Katrina, Jealous Witness. After his talk, I brought my marked up copy of his book,

33 New Orleans, Mon Amour to him and asked him if he would be so kind as to sign by the passage I include at the beginning of this chapter. He very kindly obliged my request and wrote a kind note as well. I still have my receipt from Irene’s tucked into my copy of

New Orleans, Mon Amour --a glass of chardonnay, a bowl of turtle soup and the soft shell crab.

The recipe at the end of this chapter is a classic New Orleans drink. The recipes create a New Orleans meal that begins with a cocktail and ends with dessert. I include these recipes to illustrate the ways in which recipes are useful to understanding tradition, cultural circulation and community. They are important elements in the narrative of recovery and continuity.

In Chapter 2, I provide an overview of existing literature on foodways and gender. I review some of the existing literature that I find particularly useful for my project. This includes the work of Janet Theophano and Anne Bower. I am particularly interested in the influence of folklore on the study of foodways as well as how narrative theory is applied to cookbooks and recipes. This chapter is the foundation for much of my own research on post-Katrina New Orleans’ cookbooks.

In Chapters 3 and 4, I examine the recipes collected and cookbooks published after

Hurricane Katrina. These chapters include passages of requests for recipes and personal narratives. I include these, as they are important examples and illustrations. In Chapter

3, I examine the popular cookbook, Cooking Up a Storm: Recipes Lost and Found from

The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, edited by The Times-Picayune food columnist and food editor, respectively, Marcelle Bienvenu and Judy Walker. This cookbook has its beginnings in the online recipe archives compiled after Hurricane Katrina by Walker.

34 The archives served as a space for community members to request recipes they lost during the storm. Parts of the recipe archive were then published into a cookbook. This chapter will explore the recipe archive as well as the cookbook. This archive was my inspiration in undertaking this project. It was through this space that I began to understand recipes as intangible culture that was lost and then recovered after Hurricane

Katrina.

In Chapter 4, I examine two cookbooks. The first, Ruby Slippers Cookbook: Life,

Culture, Family and Food After Katrina by Amy Cyrex Sins, is part cookbook and part recollection of memories of food and celebration. The second, You Are Where You Eat:

Stories and Recipes from the Neighborhoods of New Orleans by Elsa Hahne, offers a glimpse into the lives of New Orleanians through the foods they prepare and eat. The inside cover of the cookbook states that “You Are Where You Eat proves that the local population remains as passionate about cooking after the hurricanes of 2005 as at any time before.” I would agree. I end this chapter with an exploration of an important New

Orleans food-centered ritual practice, the St. Joseph’s Day Altar.

I conclude this project by suggesting broader and future implications for foodways research in New Orleans. I briefly comment on the new cultural food traditions brought to New Orleans by immigrants. As new communities were coming to New Orleans, there were those that evacuated New Orleans never to return creating a of New

Orleans food traditions across the United States, most notably in Texas. Finally, I end with a brief exploration into what Nick Spitzer calls “public folklore” and the opportunities for projects such as these to make a positive impact on the future of New

Orleans.

35 Creamy Brandy Alexander

If you want to indulge just a bit, this is a delightful after-dinner drink to offer to guests. It can be whipped up ahead of time and stored in the freezer until ready to serve. {Makes 6 to 8 Servings}

½ gallon vanilla ice cream, slightly thawed 15 ounces brandy 10 ½ ounces dark crème de cacao ½ cup heavy cream Fresh mint to garnish Toasted Coconut Cookies (page 311) or another crispy cookie for serving

Combine all the ingredients except the mint and cookies in a blender, and process until smooth. Serve immediately or store in the freezer. Garnish with fresh mint and serve with cookies. (Bienvenu and Walker 20)

36

Chapter 2: Review of the Literature

New Orleans is like your first raw oyster. You must suspend your squeamishness and take it on its own terms to enjoy it. If you keep your distance, you’ll never get it. If you go for it, though, you will be rewarded with the fulfillment of lust. Lust is an urge you need to have to live in this this city successfully. Without lust, you’re probably better off living somewhere else.

No matter what else you think or hear, the central lust in New Orleans is for eating. Passionate eaters recognize that about the city almost as soon as they arrive. The same way they do in Italy, France, and Spain, and for the same reasons.

Some people who love New Orleans might hesitate to credit something as quotidian as food with having so much magnetism. But not long ago some very convincing proof that food is almost everything was put before us. For New Orleanians, it was an extreme example of what we feel when we travel to another place and realize that the people there don’t cook the way we do. We begin to itch to get back.

People who were living in New Orleans in the summer of 2005 will talk about what happened then for the rest of their lives. I was, and I will. Those of us who survived Hurricane Katrina (and many didn’t; it was as bad as the television coverage made it look), those of us who love living in New Orleans, wondered what force possibly could pull our city and our lives back together.

To our surprise and delight, that force was provided in almost unbelievable measure by cooks, restaurants, gumbo, poor boy sandwiches, soft-shell crabs, and our love of eating together.

I should have known. I’ve spent my entire adult life eating, thinking about eating, writing about eating, and talking about eating. But every time I think about the role our unique culinary culture played after Katrina, I shake my head and grin. (Fitzmorris 11-12)

While much has been written on foodways and gender, less has been written on the role of food as intangible culture and its role in recovery after a catastrophic loss such as

37 Hurricane Katrina. This chapter examines the existing literature on foodways and gender that I find particularly useful for my project. I begin with a somewhat broad review of the literature pertaining to foodways. Next, I explore the relevant literature on gender and foodways, specifically cookbooks and recipes. Particular attention is paid to the literature on the validity and importance of studying food in the context of feminist scholarship. I end with a brief review of the literature on New Orleans and Hurricane

Katrina.

Foodways

Victor Turner writes of the importance of performance in everyday life. "In a sense, every type of cultural performance, including ritual, ceremony, carnival, theatre, and poetry, is an explanation and explication of life itself (13)". Barbara Kirshenblatt-

Gimblett writes in her essay, "Playing to the Senses: Food as a Performance Medium,"

"Food, and all that is associated with it, is already larger than life. It is already highly charged with meaning and affect. It is already performative and theatrical. An art of the concrete, food, like performance, is alive, fugitive, and sensory" (1). The cultural performances I am most interested in are the rituals of sharing food whether through recipes or cookbooks, and the recounting and sharing of this culinary culture. As

Fitzmorris suggests in the above epigraph, New Orleans, in particular, grants food a very large stage in which to perform cultural meaning. Culinary narratives in New Orleans are performed through recipe collections, cookbooks, grocery stores, restaurants, festivals, rituals, cooking, eating and celebrations. These performances of cultural meaning are full of symbolic value from the fig cookies prepared for St. Joseph’s Day Altars, a Sicilian religious observance, to the ubiquitous king cakes during the Mardi Gras season, which 38 commences on the 12th Night and last until Ash Wednesday. Each of these events are tied to specific foods and culinary dishes. Food in New Orleans performs and signifies the importance of cultural identity and community. As Elsa Hahne writes in the introduction to her cookbook, You Are Where You Eat: Stories and Recipes from the

Neighborhoods of New Orleans, which I examine in Chapter 4:

Eventually, through all of these cooking stories, I began to learn about the history of the different neighborhoods, residential patterns, ethnic diversity, economic differences, family relationships, social infrastructure, and race relations, as well as the meaning of community and home. People described their hopes, dreams, and deepest memories in terms of food. Cooking plays such a fundamental role in their lives that some of them could not bring themselves to talk to me until they were out of their Katrina trailers and into their own kitchens again. (xii)

This project uses the discipline of folklore and the subset of foodways as a framework to explore the broader meanings of cookbooks and food as part of cultural identity in post-Katrina New Orleans. Foodways takes food studies, having its academic roots in anthropology, one step further. Foodways not only examines what we are eating, but why, where, how, when and with who. Folklorists and foodways scholars have created a framework within which to explore food and identity.

Foodways folklorist Lucy Long writes, “Folklore offers to food studies a conception of food as more than just ‘what we eat’. It is rather, the aesthetic domain of activities and practices surrounding that stuff” (7). Long highlights the importance of everyday events in this examination stating, “activities such as washing dishes, shopping for groceries, or growing herbs on the kitchen windowsill can be recognized as contributing to the ways in which we use food and find meaning in it” (7). Long’s theories of foodways are useful when examining the role of food and culinary culture in post-Katrina New Orleans. Food not only physically nourished bodies; my research indicates it also provided emotional 39 nourishment after the hurricane. Food serves as a mechanism through which the recovery of the city can be explored, through restaurant re-openings, cookbooks, Mardi Gras parties, St. Joseph’s Day Altars and other celebrations, events and everyday activities centered on food. As each restaurant reopened after Katrina, community members could experience recovery through visiting that restaurant. This marked the recovery that was present while also acknowledging the loss that was still present. Additionally, with each recipe that was recovered, there were those recipes that were lost and not recovered.

Long’s work, captures the deep connections between food and identity. She writes:

Identity in the present emerges out of identities in the past. Food is a common medium through which these processes occur and can be examined. Food advertising, films, cookbook publishing, restaurant trends, and even the fascination with television cooking shows and food tours are not simply celebrations of what we eat; they are vehicles for the public and private construction, negotiation and manipulation of identity. (3) Long writes that food often has distinct roles within a community or culture, as “a commodity valued both for entertainment and as a representation of public identity” (5).

This is particularly true with regards to tourism. New Orleans identity has depended on food and its culinary culture to create a shared imagination of New Orleans as a food city.

This shared imagination propelled the nation to focus on and aid in the recovery of New

Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. While I am primarily concerned with the ways that recipes in post-Katrina New Orleans served as cultural circulation for the local community, I recognize that if it was not for New Orleans national identity as a “food city” and cultural treasure, the government and tourist dollars might not have flowed into the city so readily. According to a 2013 New York Times article, the restaurant scene in

New Orleans has continued to grow while also contributing greatly to the economy.

40 The high concentration of restaurants here has built on itself, as chefs are attracted to a city where eating out is so popular and the most successful ones expand. In that sense, it represents an industry cluster along the lines of the financial industry on Wall Street or high technology in Silicon Valley. More than 10 percent of the jobs in the metropolitan area are in the restaurant business, compared with an average of 8.2 percent nationwide. (December 2, 2013)

Richard M. Dorson explores what he calls “folk cookery” in his book, Folklore and

Folklife: An Introduction. He defines folk cookery as “traditional domestic cookery marked by regional variation” (325). He writes, “The study of folk cookery includes the study of the foods themselves, their morphology, their preparation, their preservation, their social and psychological functions, and their ramifications into all other aspects of folk-culture” (325). He further states, “Folk cookery of course represents more than a mere primitive satisfying of elemental needs. Like all aspects of folk culture it was related, integrally and functionally, to all other phases of the culture, and in its elaboration became, like dress and architecture, a work of art” (338). This is all part of what Dorson calls physical folklife. He offers this explanation:

In direct contrast to this oral folklore is physical folklife, generally called material culture. Now we deal with the visible rather than the aural aspects of folk behavior that existed prior to and continue alongside mechanized industry. Material culture responds to the techniques, skills, recipes, and formulas transmitted across the generations and subject to the same forces of conservative gradation and individual variation as verbal art. How men and women in tradition-oriented societies build their homes, make their clothes, prepare their food, farm and fish, process the earth’s bounty, fashion their tools and implements, and design their furniture and utensils are questions that concern the student of material culture. (2-3) Dorson’s work marks a shift in folklore. Cookbooks and recipes are considered part of what Dorson calls material culture. These artifacts provide further understanding of a culture or regional area. Through material culture, one can learn what is important to a culture and how they live. One can come to understand the culture or region through 41 these artifacts. Cookbooks are my primary interest in this project. I suggest, as do others, that cookbooks provide much more to the reader than just a list of ingredients and cooking instructions. Cookbooks are often a way of experiencing another culture or region. They are a window into the customs, traditions and rituals of a people.

Cookbooks are also important in that they historically have provided a gendered space for women to express themselves creatively. Cookbooks serve as modes of transmission articulating what parts of a culture are circulated.

Important also to foodways is the value placed on the everyday. In her book, Much

Depends On Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions,

Perils and Taboos, of an Ordinary Meal, Margaret Visser explores in great depths the everyday ritual of eating dinner. Visser sees the importance in the everyday as an explanation of culture and identity. She writes about the everyday stating:

One of the greatest eye-openers of the twentieth century (like every discovery it springs from our need) is the realization that the use of humble everyday objects is not only habitual—which is to say that we cannot do without them—but that these things are ‘ordinary’ in the earliest and fullest sense of the world also: they embody our mostly unspoken assumptions, and they both order our culture and determine its direction.” (12) Visser views food and what and how we eat as part of the everyday. I am interested in how the everyday creates rituals and traditions that become part of the family structure and identity. She continues exploring the importance of food, as the everyday, in societal identity. We echo the preferences and the principles of our culture in the way we treat our food. An elaborate dessert moulded into the shape of a ruined classical temple can be read as one’s vivid expression of a society’s view of itself and its ideals; so can a round ground hamburger patty between two circular buns. Food—what is chosen from the possibilities available, how it is presented, how it is eaten, with whom and when, and how much time is allotted to cooking and eating it—is one of the means by which a society creates itself and acts out its aims and fantasies. Changing (or unchanging) food choices and presentations are part of society’s

42 tradition and character. Food shapes us and expresses us even more definitively than our furniture or houses or utensils do. (12) Food is inherently part of the everyday, particularly in New Orleans. There are special foods for days of the week, like red beans and rice on Mondays, as well as foods reserved for each month, like king cakes in January and February, Italian fig cookies in March and oysters in all months with the letter “R”. There is a robust calendar of food and eating for all New Orleanians, turning the everyday into something special and ritualistic.

These New Orleans food traditions often began as part of a particular cuisine associated with identities such as race/ethnicity, religion and class. Many of these food traditions including king cakes and fig cookies, have their roots in Catholicism, however, both of these, particularly king cakes have become a part of the larger New Orleans identity. Red beans and rice, like many other New Orleans dishes, suggest frugality by combining kitchen stapes and leftover scraps of food. Leathem and Nossiter write about red beans and rice stating, “Like many of our other iconic dishes, red beans and rice is an easy and cheap way to feed a crowd. And it is this communal aspect to red beans that is in large part responsible for its popularity” (130). They continue, writing about the ritual of food in New Orleans stating:

While other Crescent City foods have their place in rituals—king cake during the Carnival season, fig and sesame cookies for the St. Joseph’s Day altars, gumbo z’herbes for Holy Thursday—red beans and rice claims its place in the New Orleans pantheon of food due, in part, to its status as a weekly ritual. As every New Orleanian and many a visitor know, red beans and rice is a Monday dish. (131-132). Red beans and rice was traditionally a Monday dish because of the relative ease it takes to prepare the dish, as Monday was typically washday, thus women needed a dish that did

43 not require a lot of attention. Food in New Orleans is a site in which one can explore identity and the way in which identities have influenced food traditions.

In their book, Ethnic and Regional Foodways in the United States: The Performance of Group Identity, Linda Keller Brown and Kay Mussell explore the difference and commonalities among ethnicity and regionalism of foodways. They write:

Foodways bind individuals together, define the limits of the group’s outreach and identity, distinguish in-group from out-group, serve as a medium of inter-group communication, celebrate cultural cohesion, and provide a context for performance of group rituals. Although this process may be easier to discern in ethnic groups than in regional contexts, it is no less operative in the latter. Indeed, region and ethnicity are often intertwined. (5). Much of the regional culinary culture in New Orleans and surrounding communities is deeply intertwined with race and ethnic identity. New Orleans, perhaps more than any other American city, has a rich history of the melding together of different cultures and ethnicities. This is perhaps most apparent and most successful in the kitchen. The food of New Orleans is a reminder of the past history with its diverse ingredients and traditions. Race and class stratification, however, played a role in the recovery of New

Orleans. Certain areas and neighborhoods of New Orleans were able to recover more quickly than others. Theses were the areas that were able to open their restaurants and rebuild their homes sooner.

Race and class played a role in which areas of New Orleans were rebuilt first after

Hurricane Katrina. This led to the recovery of certain foodways and restaurants sooner.

For many watching the recovery from afar on their televisions and online, race and class became visible markers of difference. “When Katrina flooded New Orleans, the working-class poor, mostly African-Americans, were abandoned to their fate. ‘Relief’

44 later arrived in the form of military occupation, like Baghdad under water. Katrina turned the spotlight on U.S. capitalism’s social disaster of class polarization, poverty and racism” (Belkhir and Charlemaine 126). As mentioned earlier, the aftermath of

Hurricane Katrina displayed race and class inequities in a way they previously had not been visible. This was most evident when one looked at who was able to evacuate and who was not as well as what neighborhoods were flooded and what ones were not and later what neighborhoods were rebuilt and which ones were not. Space and geography as well as resources were linked to race and class as well. Belkhir and Charlemain write about the segregated past of New Orleans and other cities, in which public housing was constructed in undesirable areas with limited employment opportunities. They write:

The most impoverished lived in squalor-like conditions concentrated in certain neighborhoods within cities, with little or no employment, poor education, and little hope for the future of their children or grandchildren. It is against the backdrop of the social geography of cities and the differential access to resources that we can best understand the Hurricane Katrina disaster. Race, gender and class are certainly factors that help explain the social vulnerability of the South. This is the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina. Few outside of the region knew of the impoverished conditions for many New Orleanians. (128) This segregation led to much of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. This history dictated what was recovered and what was not.

Gender, Cookbooks and Narrative

Food studies has continued to expand as a field of scholarly study. Feminist foodways scholars, such as Counihan, Van Esterik and Avakian, suggest women’s studies has played an integral role in this growth.

Without a doubt feminism and women’s studies have contributed to the growth of food studies by legitimizing a domain of human behavior so heavily associated with women over time and across cultures. The recognition of food as a feminist

45 issue has expanded beyond the subject of eating disorders to cover the wide diversity of feminist approaches to food and women’s food stories. (Counihan and Van Esterik, 1-2) Just as we now look at the quilts crafted by African American women in slavery as both the result of enforced labor imposed upon them by the slaveholders and as the creations of enormously skillful craftswomen or even artists, I think we need to look again at food and its preparation. Cooking is something that was and continues to be imposed on women, but it is also an activity that can be a creative part of our daily lives. As such, the work of cooking is more complex than mere victimization. (Avakian 1997 6) These scholars suggest that foodways is a legitimate area for critical analysis in the lives of women and that food and cooking actually offers more to examine than merely the perceived imposition of cooking on women. Women have historically used those roles imposed on them to creatively express themselves, cooking is no different. In fact, cooking can offer not only a creative outlet for women, but also a way to influence community structure and identity. It is through cooking and recipe collections that I suggest women had an invaluable role in the rebuilding of the intangible culture of New

Orleans, particularly, in the recovery of recipes. Chapters 3 and 4 examine the recipes women shared and recovered as part of this process. This allowed for circulation of culture to persist in New Orleans.

In their book, From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on

Food, co-editors Arlene Voski Avakian and Barbara Haber draw connections between foodways and gender studies. Like the folklorists mentioned earlier, Avakian and Haber also place importance in the everyday, writing:

…. Studying the most banal of human activities can yield crucial information and insights about both daily life and world view, from what is in the pot to the significance of the fire that heats it. Particularly within the context of the postmodern questioning of reality[ies], looking closely at the material culture of the food of ordinary people has the appeal of the concrete within a world of uncertainty. (1) 46 Food offers a path to understanding a culture. It gives scholars an opportunity to understand what is important to a group of people. It offers a glimpse into the daily lives of a people. Food scholarship also provides a path for examining the lives of those often left out of more traditional forms of transcribing knowledge and life stories, particularly women and other targeted identities. Food does this, as it is part of the everyday and something that everyone partakes in at some level. Family relationships, community and identity are negotiated through food. That is, what foods are prepared, who prepares them and how are they shared. Avakian and Haber write about the connection of food studies to gender studies. I find this passage particularly useful in grounding my study of cookbooks and recipe collections. Avakian and Haber lament the fact that little feminist scholarship has been done on food in a positive sense. My project speaks to this gap.

The excitement associated with this new scholarly interest in food, cooking, and eating is reminiscent of the early 1970s explosion of work in women’s studies. Like women’s studies, the emerging field of food studies is interdisciplinary and includes attention to the daily lives of ordinary people within its purview. Until recently, however, few scholars in food studies brought a gendered or feminist perspective to their work on food, and feminist scholars focused only on women’s food pathologies. While work on anorexia, bulimia, and other eating disorders among women is vitally important, other aspects of women’s relationship to food are at least equally significant. Feminists organized around housework and women’s studies scholarship addressed domesticity, but cooking was ignored as if it were merely a marker of patriarchal oppression and, therefore, not worthy of attention. Similarly, food studies whether in anthropology, sociology, nutrition, or agricultural studies ignored or distorted what could be learned from and about women’s relationship to food practices. Despite the fact of women’s centrality to food practices, until the last decade, few in the plethora of new works on food focused on women, and only a minority of those had a feminist analysis. (2) Food and its preparation is a vital component to the study of women’s lives, as women have historically had more obligations with regards to managing and preparing food than men, particularly everyday food, that is food that is prepared and cooked for family and friends in the home. This affords one a glimpse into the everyday and into the lives of 47 women. Foodways inhabits much more than women’s personal spaces in their own kitchens, it has also been a way that women express themselves creatively. This can create a tension between the obligatory and the creative, as women have historically been the primary home cook, which is often an obligation. They have also had the opportunity to express themselves creatively through imagining, planning and preparing celebrations and events. This is a form of creative expression as well as cultural expression. Avakian and Haber continue their advancement of food studies as an integral component of gender studies writing: “The recent scholarship on women and food conclusively demonstrates that studying the relationship between women and food can help us to understand how women reproduce, resist, and rebel against gender constructions as they are practiced and contested in various sites, as well as illuminate the contexts in which these struggles are located” (2). Women often reproduce cultural circulation through cooking and recipe collections. Through cooking and cookbooks, particularly community cookbooks, women have the opportunity to influence cultural production and circulation. They can create their own recipes as well as circulate the recipes they choose to. The idea of passing down recipes from one generation to the next is an example of this reproduction and one that I am most interested in. They continue drawing on these connections, writing:

Some women’s studies scholars have discovered that food practices and their representations, interwoven as they are into the dailiness of life, can reveal the particularities of time, place, and culture, providing an excellent vehicle to contextualize women’s lives. Just as the kitchen is no longer off limits for women’s studies, some of the latest work in food studies is beginning to recognize that food practices are gendered. (7) The authors continually highlight the role of both food studies and women’s studies as disciplines that place value on the lives of those that have often been left out, forgotten or 48 deemed unworthy of scholarly analysis. It is through these modes of transmission that one can observe the cultural circulation of a community. This is particularly important when that community, in this case a community of women, has historically been overlooked or ignored. Through both women’s studies and food studies, the lives of women are examined and new connections can be made between culture, tradition and gender. Avakian and Haber write:

One of the most basic assumptions of scholarship in both food studies and women’s studies is that the daily life of ordinary people is not only worthy of study but necessary to any understanding of past and present worlds. Necessary for physical survival, daily meals are no less crucial to the construction of cultures and people within them. (16) Much of this project is grounded in the model of cultural circulation. This passage notes that “ordinary people” are necessary in understanding circulation and continuity. Women play a large role in this process and not paying attention to the ways that they do this would offer incomplete narratives of culture.

I am interested in food writing and the ways that women tell their culinary stories through recipes. Traci Marie Kelly offers a framework for women’s food writing. Kelly categorized three forms of storytelling through recipes. The first, culinary memoir, is chiefly a memoir with food as a reappearing theme. The second, the autobiographical cookbook, is an autobiography in which recipes are interwoven. The third, the autoethnographic cookbook, has two goals. The first, seeks to offer self-representation and the second, to contradict misrepresentation by the dominant culture. This framework is useful in examining the writings of women with regard to food. Theophano and Bower also provide useful frameworks, which will be explored in depth later in this chapter.

49 I am also interested in the role and space for feminists in the study of folklore. This is examined in the collection of essays, Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore.

Foodways, a subset of folklore, is informed by the work of these scholars. Rayna Green asks if folklore missed out on the experiences of women and what they had to say about those experiences. She writes:

While I was asking myself these questions, many other female folklorists had begun to ask them as well. Inspired by the rise of feminist theory and practice in literary and historical domains and honed by French studies of everyday life and American performance theory, feminist folklorists had begun to challenge everyone’s notions about expressive culture. (3) She continues writing: This volume is certainly more about those interesting questions than about answers. It does begin to address the many questions we all have about women, the way they talk, what they think, and how they think and talk about the world they inhabit. Certainly, what they think and talk about is less about men than men would have imagined and possibly homed. As with the expressive repertoire of other “oppressed” peoples, the oppressors are not the only or primary topic. A surprise perhaps, but an even more important surprise or disappointment to many. Home and family, kinship, relationships, food and kitchen, sex—all the “traditional” female topics are what women talk about and share. (3) This collection of essays offers a space for feminist folklorists to explore the role of women in folklore particularly with regards to feminist interpretations. A number or perspectives are offered. M. Jane Young and Kay Turner write, “Folklore, as much as any other discipline or perhaps more than any other, can elucidate the full politics of women’s domestic and maternal powers, both as their powers intersect with other forms of power and as they make their own critical claims” (20). Amy Shuman writes,

“feminist studies of folklore are always faced with the conflicting possibilities of traditional forms as oppressive or liberating” (71). She continues stating:

Gender scholarship questions how cultural categories are reproduced and under what conditions women are complicit with or resistant to the reproduction of

50 conventions. Among other possibilities, women can be seen as the bearers of tradition, or the women’s domains can be seen as separate, as standing outside of or in competition with what is identified as “the culture”. (71) This dialogue exposes some of the areas of folklore that seem to privilege the male experience. The contributions of these folklorists seek to understand women’s role in the everyday.

Janet Theophano’s extensive research on women’s lives through cookbooks serves as a framework of both feminist theory and methodology for my dissertation. Her book, Eat

My Words: Reading Women’s Lives Through the Cookbooks They Wrote, examines the role of cookbooks in telling the stories of women’s lives. These stories are collected through both personal and community cookbooks. Theophano suggests that all cookbooks are communal, however, because recipes are passed down from one generation to the next and transmitted through family, friends, acquaintances and home laborers. This is a form of cultural circulation. It is through cookbooks that the personal often becomes communal. In my research this was particularly true for the recipe archive. Recipes were circulated through the newspaper as well as the online archive.

Some of these recipes were family recipes while others were from local restaurants.

Through the archive the personal became communal and the communal became personal.

Theophano uses cookbooks as primary documents to read women’s lives throughout history. She is primarily concerned with works from the seventeenth to early twentieth centuries. Theophano proposes that cookbooks offer a glimpse into women’s lives during a particular time and in a certain region. She suggests, “women’s cookbooks can be maps of the social and cultural worlds they inhabit” (13). These maps create a narrative that tells the stories of women and their families, as well as the events of the

51 time in which the cookbook was produced. Theophano uses historical analysis and close readings to examine women’s lives through cookbooks. She is not only looking at cookbooks as historical documents, but also as literary texts. Additionally, she provides a theoretical framework within which to theorize cookbooks from a feminist perspective including the intersections of gender, race and class. Theophano offers four theoretical frameworks that are particularly useful for my work. These include: cookbooks as collective writing, cookbooks as sites of cultural identity and memory, cookbooks as autobiography and cookbooks as social commentary.

“Cookbooks as Collective Writing”

Theophano suggests that cookbooks are an example of women’s collective writing.

Recipes are transmitted from person to person through various relationships that have historically included family, friends, alliances, churches, temples, social clubs and home laborers. Recipes are altered and modified as they are exchanged, each person adding their own unique influence to the recipe. This might include changing an ingredient or two, offering an opportunity for creative flair. This is an example of creative expression and this is present in the archive I explore in Chapter 3. As recipes pass through the hands of women, they become an interwoven collection of stories. Theophano states that cookbooks do more than just describe foods; they are “records of women’s social interactions and exchanges” (13). Women often collect index cards or slips of papers, with handwritten recipes given to them by others, in their recipe collection. These visual maps display the connections women have to other women through formal and informal relationships. This is an example of cultural circulation as well as the networks this circulation creates. This notion of collective writing provides a type of collective agency. 52 This collective agency was present after Katrina as women sought to rebuild recipe collections as well as the culinary heritage of New Orleans. Through the archive a community of survivors was created. The women in this network were empowered to create a sense of community and shared purpose after Katrina.

In her often-cited article, “Recipes for Reading: Summer Pasta, Lobster á la

Riseholme, and Key Lime Pie,” Susan J. Leonardi suggests that recipe sharing is a site in which social boundaries are transcended. Much like Theophano suggests a communality,

Leonardi defines recipe sharing as, “a loose community of women that crosses the social barriers of class, race and generation” (342). This allows women from varying backgrounds the opportunity to come together to share favorite recipes. After Hurricane

Katrina, community was recreated and sustained through the collection of sharing recipes online and in cookbooks. Women from various networks found areas of commonality through recipe collecting. Through the The Times-Picayune recipe archive women from different neighborhoods and backgrounds were able to come together through a recipe recovery project. Despite the social differences in New Orleans, food and celebration remains a site in which these differences are often transcended. Celebrations such as

Mardi Gras and festivals such as New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival are sites in which people from all neighborhoods participate. The traditions of New Orleans are many and these traditions cut across race, class and gender identities if only for a day or two. Tom Piazza writes about this with regards to St. Joseph’s Day, a ritual celebration I further explore in Chapter 4. He notes the ways in which different cultural identities create their own customs and traditions around St. Joseph’s Day.

53 The city’s old-line celebrate St. Joseph’s Day for a week beforehand by making “St. Joseph’s altars,” on which food of all description is piled high in homes and at churches; people come to view and comment on the altars and give donations to the church; at the end the food is donated to charity. Black New Orleans celebrates St. Joseph, too, with Indians taking to the streets and roaming all over town on St. Joseph’s Night.

New Orleanians, poor, rich, and in-between, white and black and in-between, take their cooking and eating seriously, just as they take their music seriously, and their dancing, and their masks and costumes, and their celebratory rituals, because it is not mere entertainment to them. It is all part of a ritual in which the finiteness, the specificity and fragility and durability and richness and earthiness and sadness and laughter of life, are all mixed together, honored, and given tangible form in sound, movement, and communal cuisine. (35)

“Cookbooks as Sites of Cultural Identity and Memory”

Cookbooks are sites of cultural identity and memory. Theophano writes, “Women have conserved a whole world, past and present, in the idiom of food. In their personal manuscripts, in locally distributed community recipe compilations, and in commercially printed cookbooks, women have given history and memory a permanent lodging” (49).

Cookbooks serve as records of cultures. Cookbooks vary by cultural groups and regions each telling the unique story of that particular group. Cookbooks are sites of collective memory recording foodways, tradition and culture. Each culture has specific foods that are symbolic and iconic, representing aspects of that cultural group’s history. This collective memory is sustained through the performance of creating that dish which often remains the same from one generation to the next and is not modified much. The purpose of these dishes is one of remembrance (50). Theophano writes, “to alter even an ingredient would disrupt the evocative, symbolic qualities of a dish” (50). These dishes are often associated with religious holidays, rituals and celebrations. Often, recipes must change based on social conditions. Immigrant recipes demonstrate how different cultures

54 negotiate their cuisines based on the availability of ingredients. The collective cultural identity and memory of food, serves as a site of remembrance whether the recipe is modified or not. “Used or not, unchanged or transformed, these recipes and the rituals in which they are embedded continue to shape a group’s current image of itself” (51). I am particularly interested in cookbooks as a site of cultural identity and memory. At the core of my theoretical framework are notions of tradition and cultural circulation. Cookbooks circulate recipes and rituals, remembering the past. After Hurricane Katrina, women sought to preserve recipes through the newspaper recipe archive as well as through published cookbooks. This circulation of recipes and cultural knowledge contributed to the rebuilding of New Orleans culture. It granted the memories of food, both everyday and celebratory, a role in the recovery process. As previously mentioned, the role of the vernacular or intangible culture was particularly important for the recovery of New

Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Cookbooks did this work.

“Cookbooks as Autobiography”

Theophano suggests cookbooks can be viewed as a form of autobiography.

Cookbooks tell the personal stories of the women writing them, though they may not be aware they are producing this narrative. “Self-conscious or not, recording everyday acts of cookery is an act of autobiographical writing and self-representation” (Theophano

121). Theophano refers to cookbooks as a hybrid autobiography composed of “letters, memoirs, diaries, and scrapbooks blending raw ingredients into a new configuration, a form of daily writing centered on woman’s work” (122). Women’s own stories are told through the recipes collected, the notes in margins, the foods cooked for special occasions and the letters tucked inside the books. Theophano writes, “women inscribe

55 themselves in their recipe texts as testimonies to their existence” (121). This act of writing oneself into being is a powerful concept, particularly for women, whose stories are often left incomplete or untold. Sidonie Smith writes about the power inherent in this act stating, “Autobiographical storytelling becomes one means through which people in the West believe themselves to be ‘selves.’ In this way, autobiographical storytelling is always a performative occasion” (109).

Ann Bower, whose narrative analysis of cookbooks is central to my project, also suggests that cookbooks have a narrative quality and that this is a useful way to examine them for their purpose and role. Just as Theophano suggests, Bower also states community cookbook authors construct their own stories whether or not they are aware of this. It is important to consider the ways in which women tell their story. Bower proposes that as a result of feminist and poststructuralist scholars our notions of narrative have changed to include both literary and nonliterary texts, including material objects.

Bower suggests that the stories found in community cookbooks are best described as

“communal partial autobiographies” (30). According to Bower, women often write their life stories in nonlinear and fragmented ways, while men’s autobiographies often follow a

“grand” linear path (30). In community cookbooks, the reader only receives partial life stories. The reader often has to fill in the blanks, which offers an interactive role for the reader to assume. Women’s autobiography theorists, including Bower, suggest that women’s autobiographies are fragmented much like their lives. This fragmentation includes the daily pressures facing women both inside and outside of the domestic space including family, jobs, domestic roles and social pressures (32). The narratives I collected for this project, particularly those from the recipe archive, demonstrate the ways

56 in which the narratives are often partial or incomplete. I would suggest that this is also partially due to the fact that women are given a relatively small space in which to tell their story in the cookbook or in this case the archive. They must pick and choose which part to tell.

Cookbooks serve as the record of an individual’s life, sharing stories of daily life. The recipe archive and cookbooks that I examine for this project reveal the lives of women in the narratives that accompany the recipes. The women in the narratives collected for this project often share many details of their lives in relatively small narratives. The write about their hopes for a post-Katrina New Orleans as well as their memories from a pre-

Katrina New Orleans. They share their holiday traditions as well as the names of their favorite dishes. The also write about their “Katrina story”, that is their story of evacuation and rebuilding. These women are narrating their lives perhaps unaware they are doing so. I explore this further in Chapter 3.

“Cookbooks as Sites of Social and Political Commentary”

Theophano also suggests that cookbooks can be viewed as a site of social and political commentary. She writes, “For women of varied cultural and religious backgrounds, the genre of cookery literature – and the terms of kitchen practice – have provided a vehicle for constructing, defending, and transgressing social and cultural borders” (227). After

Katrina, the recipe archive served this purpose. It is through this forum that women were able to find their political voice and express not only creativity but also opinions. They often made comments about the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in the narratives that accompanied their recipe requests. This was an outlet for women to

57 express their frustrations over how the government was handling the recovery of New

Orleans.

Gender and Cookbooks as Readable Texts

Anne Bower examines community cookbooks as narrative in her edited anthology,

Recipes for Reading: Community Cookbooks, Stories, Histories. Bower provides a very useful framework within which to examine cookbooks as women’s narratives of autobiography and community. Bower’s theoretical framework is quite useful for my project. Bower examines the role of recipes and cookbooks in the telling of women’s life stories. According to Bower, the readability of recipes and cookbooks is due in large part to feminist scholars redefinition of what is considered a readable text. Bower states that women, often excluded from certain discourses, expressed and represented themselves through other texts both print and non-print. This includes diaries, letters, quilts, crafts and cookbooks. She writes, “and in those materials they not only recorded and reflected the world around them, they worked to construct their world. Whether complicit with or pushing against the constraints and categories that bound them, women acted to shape the communities around them” (6). These forms of expression act as self-representation for women. These were also modes of cultural circulation and networks for such circulation to occur.

Bower cites three reasons community cookbooks were not historically deemed as literary texts worthy of scholarly examination. The first is the premise that cookbooks were produced by women and for women. Food, historically associated with women and domestic life, was therefore deemed unworthy of scholarly analysis. Bower suggests cookbooks be reconsidered as “a text that enacts within it a group of women’s mental,

58 theoretical, thoughtful positions or statements” (7). This often includes reading between the lines at what is and is not represented in the text. The second reason Bower maintains that scholars have not historically studied community cookbooks is the word recipe.

Bower suggests that this word implies instructions to be followed, a type of formula.

This historically has not appealed to scholars. She argues, however, that recipes offer much more than just directions to make a dish. They tell stories of community. The final reason is the overabundance of community cookbooks. Not all of these cookbooks offer rich stories. It is necessary, therefore, to seek out those community cookbooks that offer glimpses into the lives of the women who contributed to them. Bower urges scholars to

“place community cookbooks in broad contexts, seeing them as documents that tell much more than just the stories of food habits” (12). Cookbooks offer rich narratives worthy of study. They can serve as historical documents, narratives, autobiographies and maps of women’s lives. Additionally, I suggest that cookbooks are sites of community building and recovery.

Bower’s research is primarily concerned with community cookbooks. She is interested in the ways that communities share their narratives through recipes and cookbooks published in the community cookbook format; that is soliciting recipes from the community and then printing them. In many ways, the recipe archive, that I explore in Chapter 3 is a type of community cookbook, as recipes were solicited then reprinted in the archive and in the subsequent cookbook. Bower is less concerned with interrogating identity in community cookbooks. The cookbooks I have selected for this project as well as The Times-Picayune recipe archive are what I consider community cookbooks. Each of these texts relies on the community to share recipes and stories. It represents

59 something much larger than one single author or editor. It is representative of the larger community and experience.

For many people in New Orleans and southeastern Louisiana, entire recipe collections were washed away during Hurricane Katrina. These recipe collections and family cookbooks consisted of newspaper clippings, index cards with handwritten recipes and personal notes. Recipes were recovered through The Times-Picayune online recipe archive. Food editor Judy Walker established this online recipe exchange at the request of a reader. Readers began submitting requests and recipes at a fevered pace. This column was eventually named “Rebuilding New Orleans, Recipe by Recipe” and began

October 27, 2005, two months after the flooding of New Orleans and surrounding areas.

When requests were made for recipes, a memory was usually shared, as was an experience associated with Hurricane Katrina. I am particularly interested in the stories that accompanied these requests for recipes. A selection of these recipes was later published in the cookbook, Cooking Up a Storm: Recipes Lost and Found from The

Times-Picayune of New Orleans and an analysis of this cookbook occurs in the next chapter. In the introduction of this cookbook, the editors write that the newspaper “had long known about New Orleans’ deep and abiding relationship with its food. But in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, they were about to get a lesson in just how profound that connection was, and remains, today. In New Orleans, food is culture. Food is family.

Food is comfort. Food is life” (10).

Bower proposes that there are many elements of narrative in community cookbooks.

These include setting, characters, plot and theme. She begins with the setting. She writes, “explicitly or implicitly, it is the kitchen, dining room or the ‘table’ as the center

60 of home and domestic life” (32). She adds that particularly for fundraising cookbooks there are other settings such as local organizations, churches and temples. Setting also includes a particular region and historical time. Cookbooks with regional settings often include pictures and illustrations of the region along with recipes that are unique to the area. The setting of community cookbooks also takes into account the historical time.

Many of these cookbooks are fundraising cookbooks, thus raising funds for events that happened during the time of publication. For my research the setting of the cookbooks I am interested in is New Orleans and southeastern Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina. The setting also takes place in the often-damaged homes of the readers and contributors, or in the FEMA trailers. The setting of the New Orleans recipes I collected also spans over time and often several generations. Contributors write about recipes they lost that were passed down from generation to generation. This presents a temporal setting spanning generations.

Bower writes that community cookbooks often lack individual “characters,” as community takes precedence in these compilations. Individuals, whose names often appear below the recipes, usually contributed the recipes. Sometimes these recipes are accompanied with more than a name, such as serving suggestions, locations and perhaps a memory associated with that food. The recipes requests and recipe recoveries I examine from the newspaper archive are often anonymous, as individual contributors and those requesting recipes were only identified primarily by their initials. Readers, however, can still get a sense of who they are by the memories and narratives they share.

I suggest that this narrative is part of the character development of these New Orleans residents highlighted in the archive. The cookbooks examined in Chapter 4 do introduce

61 specific characters to the reader, in fact, the cookbook, You Are Where You Eat: Stories and Recipes from the Neighborhoods of New Orleans, is centered around the individuals showcased in the book and their recipe contributions. I would still maintain that this is a community cookbook because at the premise of the book is recipes and stories of the contributors.

Bower uses the methodology of identifying narrative components in cookbooks to offer a readability of cookbooks. She writes, “Setting, characters, plots, themes – artificial delineations, are yet useful starting terms for pointing out narrative aspects of familiar texts that most people have not read for their narrativity” (49). Bower identifies three themes present in community cookbooks. The first she identifies is “the breaking of silence, the coming to public voice of people denied that voice in the past” (46-47).

This is a theme present in many texts, literary and nonliterary, historically produced by women and other targeted groups. Another theme is the importance of the domestic role of women. Bower defines this role as “angel, minister, nutritionist, manager” (47). The final theme Bower identifies is food as art that expresses culture. Community cookbooks often link poetry and quotes from literature with recipes.

Each recipe offers a “plot” with the beginning, middle and end, but Bower encourages viewing the entire community cookbook for plot. She writes, “the plots of community cookbooks unfold subtly, highly dependent upon reader interaction with the text” (37).

Bower identifies four types of plots found in community cookbooks; I suggest a fifth plot of recovery.

Integration Plot

62 The first is the integration plot. According to Bower, this type of plot offers “a communal autobiography of social acceptance and achievement” (38). It is a story of the authors gaining status through acceptance and often assimilation. Bower notes that these cookbooks most often appear in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She cites an example of a community cookbook written by group of Jewish women to support synagogue programs and efforts in in 1909. Though the recipes were gathered by Jewish women, there were no traditional Jewish recipes present in the text and as

Bower notes there were some foods that religious Jewish people would not eat. It is apparent that the women were downplaying their Jewish identity. Bower also notes that many cookbooks present women as fully assimilated into their domestic role in the home.

She cites the Junior League cookbooks as fully upholding the image of the domestic housewife as hostess, mother and wife.

Differentiation Plot

The second plot is that of differentiation. According to Bower, this occurs much more in the twentieth century than in the nineteenth. Within the differentiation plot, the women share the ways in which they are different from one another. She notes that while celebrating the differences among each other they are careful to always include that they are part of the larger group. Thus, Bower maintains that differentiation plots always contain integration plots (41). Differentiation plots are present in many immigrant cookbooks of the twentieth century. These heritage cookbooks often appear in two languages side by side. These two languages represent differentiation and integration

(non-English text/the English text). Contributors demonstrate that they are different, but not too different as to maintain their place in the community.

63 Moral or Religious Triumph Plot

The third plot is that of moral or religious triumph. This plot is most commonly found in both nineteenth and twentieth century community cookbooks and according to Bower coexists with both integration and differentiation plots. This plot has two purposes: “the cookbook is used to define woman’s role as moral center of the home and/or to demonstrate the ways that food rituals can reinforce religious teachings” (41). Recipes in these cookbooks are often used in religious holidays and rituals. Tradition and faith are themes present throughout these cookbooks. This plot is particularly useful as I examine the recipes associated with St. Joseph’s Day Altars. This includes recipes of foods prepared for presentation to the altar and food for the community feast. The altar has many foods that are placed on the altar as offerings to St. Joseph. These include fig cookies, pasta dishes and decorative breads shaped like crosses and other religious figures.

Historical Plot

The final plot is the historical plot. Bower notes that this plot begins to appear in the twentieth century perhaps because “women have grown confident of themselves as constructors of history, entitled to publicly claim their share in the past” (44). These cookbooks often prioritize historical information and accounts above recipes. Bower cites one such cookbook, The Historical Cookbook of the American Negro, produced in

1958. This cookbook focuses on the history of African Americans often linking recipes with important historical dates and people. Thus the recipe for “Nat Turner Crackling

Bread,” provides a recipe along with historical photographs and a historical account of

Nat Turner. It would seem this plot provides a historical lesson to those who may not

64 otherwise have the opportunity to learn such information. Bower states that her discussion of plot in community cookbooks highlights “the alignment of people within society – their attempts at differentiation and assimilation and at assertion of spiritual or historical experience and values” (46). I might add, that historical plots can deliver history lessons to women who may not have had the opportunity for formal schooling.

Recovery Plot

I would like to suggest a fifth plot, the recovery plot. This plot seeks to recover those recipes that have been lost. This loss can occur through a number of ways. For instance in my project, I am most interested in those recipes that have been lost due to catastrophic events such as hurricanes. Though, other disasters such as wars, fires and the like can contribute to the loss of recipes. Recipes can also be lost when communities are uprooted quickly and must leave their belongings including treasured family recipes behind.

Recipes are also lost when family members, for whatever reason, fail to pass their recipes on to subsequent generations. Recovery plots speak to an idea of how culture circulates or does not circulate. Recovery plots explore what impedes circulation, what facilitates it and how a recipe getting lost is not about it being taken away but rather about a failure in the ordinary circulation that may or may not be recovered. Recovery plots offer an opportunity to examine cultural tradition and circulation as well as ritual. In the recovery plot, I suggest a new template that is made legible through Hurricane Katrina.

Food, Gender and Memory:

Memories of cooking and eating are a broader theme to my research on foodways in post-Katrina New Orleans. Memories were shared by many in the requests of recipes through The Times-Picayune recipe archive. After Hurricane Katrina, the collective

65 memory of food, celebration and ritual, so much a part of the city’s landscape, acted as sustenance to the community. Restaurants reopened as soon as workers could be found to staff the kitchens and dining rooms. It was important for restaurants to serve one or two dishes that were on the pre-Katrina menu so diners could find comfort in the memory of tasting, smelling and seeing a dish that they were familiar with and had memories of eating. Often the restaurants served only limited menus because they had limited staff and limited ingredients. Line cooks and wait staff, like many other New Orleanians, had evacuated and not returned. Fitzmorris writes about Metairie, the closest suburb to New

Orleans:

At first, it was everything the returning people of Metairie could do just to get enough food to live on. It wasn’t long, however, before there were enough people to reopen more stores and restaurants. And that’s when I first heard of an unexpected, encouraging trend: Any restaurant that managed to get its doors open was besieged. Not by people who were starving to death, but by customers who were looking for any way to reconnect with their former lives. Real food from a real restaurant performed that magic better than almost anything else could. They would wait hours to get it. (144)

The act of eating is a powerful sensory experience that can often transport one to another time and place. Simply the smell of specific foods has the power to do this. For my own research I am particularly interested in the memories associated with recipes.

The importance of recipes with regard to memories is illustrated in From Memory's

Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezin. This text is a collection of recipes written by women starving to death in Terezin, a concentration camp near Prague. The women recorded their memories of recipes in a small notebook that was brought to the daughter of one of the women over twenty-five years later in . The recipes were then published. These recipes were the culinary narratives of women living in

66 Terezin. The women, who were starving, spent their days remembering their joys of cooking, celebrating and sharing food with loved ones. These memories served as a kind of emotional nourishment in the absence of physical nourishment. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett writes, "The recipes themselves nourished the hungry women who wrote them down for the recipes were all they had. In the face of death, they hoped for the time when they might once again work their alchemy in the fire of their home kitchens." (19). According to Cara De Silva, who edited the cookbook, the notion of the women remembering their recipes and recording them as written narratives demonstrates the power of food with regards to loss and memory. She writes about the cookbook:

Born out of the abyss, it is a document that can be comprehended only at the farthest reaches of the mind. Did setting down recipes bring comfort amid chaos and brutality? Did it bring hope for a future in which someone might prepare a meal from them again? We cannot know. But certainly the creation of such a cookbook was an act of psychological resistance, forceful testimony to the power of food to sustain us, not just physically but spiritually. (xxvi)

Recipe narratives create a sense of immortality. The recording of recipes and the subsequent "passing down" of these recipes to family members brings a sense of continuity and permanence. This is also cultural circulation. Theophano also writes about the importance of In Memory’s Kitchen. She states, “Talking about the foods was a way to relive them, both to sustain the knowledge of domestic arts they had honed and to imagine the physical sensations of eating a well-loved dish. The women’s talks assuaged not simply physical cravings for familiar food, but emotional longings for another time and place” (80). While the circumstances are much different than post-Katrina New

Orleans, this text highlights the ways in which food and the memories of food provide emotional nourishment to those in turmoil and despair. In Terezin, the women were

67 reciting memories when they had no food. In New Orleans, the women I examine were recovering recipes after enduring Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath. My research suggests the role of recipes in New Orleans was one of recovery.

The loss of food brings forth remembrance of culinary memories that serve to sustain individuals and community. As Walter Isaacson states in his essay, "How to Bring the

Magic Back" in My New Orleans: Ballads to the Big Easy by Her Sons, Daughters, and

Lovers, "All of us from New Orleans have savored that Proust-bites-into-the-madeleine moment when a stray taste, sound, smell, or sight brings remembrances of things past"

(25). Marcel Proust demonstrates the impact of sensory memories of food in his narrative, Swann's Way. Proust writes of the power connected to memory of food, specifically the madeleine, in sustaining him. The narrator felt immortal at the smell of the madeleine. The power of culinary memory is immense. The women in Terezin called upon their memories of food to lift them out of their harsh reality. De Salva writes:

Food is who we are in the deepest sense, and not because it is transformed into blood and bone. Our personal gastronomic traditions – what we eat, the foods and foodways we associate with the rituals of childhood, marriage, and parenthood, moments around the table, celebrations – are critical components of our identities. To recall them in desperate circumstances is to reinforce a sense of self and to assist us in our struggle to preserve it. (xxvi)

As Kirshenblatt-Gimblett states, "In the absence of food, speaking the recipes was a way of cooking and eating the dishes they once made." (19) Food evokes memories of ritual, celebration and loss. The smell and taste of food signifies important milestones such as birthdays, graduations, marriages and even funerals. Thus, food is not simply physical sustenance, but also helps to narrate life events.

68 Avakian and Haber offer an analysis of writer M.F.K. Fisher’s literary text, How to

Cook a Wolf, which explores the role of food and cooking during wartime. They write of

Fisher’s ability to see food as much more than the everyday, but also as emotional sustenance during difficult times.

In How to Cook a Wolf, her book about eating well during wartime, she makes clear that she intuitively knew that people under stress need more from food than just its nutritional content. For Fisher, the sense of well-being came from such simple dishes as polenta, spaghetti, baked apples, and rice pudding, favorite foods made from cheap and available ingredients. (5)

It is through Fisher’s work, that the gravity of food and cooking is made apparent. My research indicated to me that for many families in New Orleans food and cooking brought comfort after Hurricane Katrina, whether it was through the actual sensation of a warm cup of soup or the memories of cooking a favorite meal.

New Orleans after Katrina

Other than the cookbooks that I will examine in the subsequent chapters, there were several books published after Hurricane Katrina that informed my project. Some of these specifically focus on food in New Orleans, while others focus more broadly on New

Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. These texts not only informed my project, they are a testament to the cultural importance of food in New Orleans.

In the previously cited text, Hungry Town: A Culinary History of New Orleans The

City Where Food Is Almost Everything, Fitzmorris examines the restaurant scene, pre- and post-Katrina, in New Orleans. I begin this chapter with what I acknowledge is a rather lengthy epigraph, but one that is worth reading in its entire context. As Fitzmorris portrays the role that New Orleans’ culinary heritage played after Hurricane Katrina in a way that only a New Orleanian foodie truly can. Fitzmorris, a steady figure within the 69 New Orleans culinary landscape, has written a weekly restaurant review in addition to editing magazines and writing books. He is well known for his three-hour daily radio talk show on food. It is broadcast during the afternoon drive time on the well-respected and well-known New Orleans radio station, WWL. After receiving so many emails from followers regarding which restaurants were open and which were not after the storm,

Fitzmorris created the New Orleans Restaurant Index, a list of restaurants that opened after Katrina. It is still updated daily. It was a way for residents to see which of their favorite restaurants had reopened, as many were eager for the familiarity of dining out in

New Orleans and the surrounding communities. Fitzmorris’s account of New Orleans’ food scene after Hurricane Katrina is important to my project. It sets the stage for New

Orleans as a food city. Fitzmorris provides not only a historical account of this evolution but also a firsthand account of the restaurant scene after New Orleans. While my project is primarily concerned with the home cook, Fitzmorris’s project is primarily concerned with the restaurant chef. I include his book in this chapter, as it was one of the only books published after Katrina that has as its primary focus food, and is not a cookbook.

Fitzmorris describes his first time back on the radio airwaves after Katrina in Baton

Rouge, as the New Orleans office and studio of WWL was badly damaged. He was warned that callers would be enraged with FEMA, the government, leaders and insurance companies and would be calling to complain about that, rather than talk about food. His first caller expressed relief that there would be a reprieve from the usual talk and that the focus would be food. Fitzmorris describes this stating:

Everyone else who called during the next four hours felt the same way, save for one caller who tried to sneak in with a flood-insurance complaint. For the next month, I did shows of between four and six hours every Friday, Saturday, and

70 Sunday. I received no more hurricane-distress calls. Even more reassuring, nobody called to demand that this frivolous gourmet stuff be taken off the air while so many people were still suffering. It was great to learn that even stressed New Orleanians could still compartmentalize. Either that, or they knew that without our cooking, music, and the rest of our local culture, we were of little value to anyone. (183)

Fitzmorris again and again reiterates his belief that food, in particular restaurants, could and did rescue New Orleans from being a forgotten city that would never be rebuilt. He offers these suggestions, almost manifesto-like in his delivery.

New Orleans’s greatest asset is its uniqueness. We must maintain that at all costs. It is what makes people love our town…and, often, know more about the city than the locals do. These people will not break faith with us. We have a few things to do.

1. We must believe in a bright future. We must maintain the image of the unique culinary culture of New Orleans, both here and elsewhere. Let the world know that we’ll be back, and that they’ll have something they’ve never tasted in their lives waiting for them. 2. We must organize and plan. The restaurants and diners of our city need to communicate, create a plan for a big renaissance, and come back with the biggest culinary special event in the history of our city.

Say it, and it becomes true. I say the serious eaters of the world cannot live without New Orleans food. And that when we give it to them again, it will be the best we’ve ever cooked. (173)

Fitzmorris clearly sees the role intangible culture such as food has on his beloved city.

His writing is truly a testament to the power of food in recovery. It is through food that he suggests the community reconnected after the storm. Food brought periods of enjoyment to a dire situation.

Fitzmorris does remark on the differences of experiences in New Orleans. There were those who suffered indirectly as a result of the storm and those that suffered directly.

There were those that could afford to rebuild their homes and those that could not. There

71 were those that would return to New Orleans and those that would never set foot in the city again. He writes:

Yes, the people who lost all of their resources had an appalling story to tell and needed the support of the rest of us. But if the rest of us hadn’t come back to administer CPR to the collective New Orleans lifestyle, how could the city ever have returned to consciousness? What would New Orleans be without food? Music? Fun? Why would tourists and conventioneers—the customers of the city’s largest industry—come to town if there were nothing delicious to draw them? (188-189)

For Fitzmorris, food was as integral to the recovery of New Orleans as the FEMA trailers and checks, the celebrity support by the likes of Brad Pitt and the ubiquitous construction sites. Food was what brought not only life back to the city’s inhabitants, but it also brought tourism and conventions back to the city, the center of the city’s often struggling economy.

He also writes about the importance of memory and the everyday. For Fitzmorris, the comfort of familiarity in the form of New Orleans restaurants was part of the recovery for

New Orleanians. I suggest that cookbooks have this same effect.

It’s well known that people who survive a disaster grasp for whatever reminds them of their world as it was. Even for things they didn’t particularly like before. That’s what happened to most New Orleanians, and it’s one of the reasons that restaurants enjoyed such a spectacular renaissance after Katrina. With very few exceptions, they recognized that their customers needed the familiarity, and they gave it to them. (201)

He continues stating:

What didn’t come back, though, was the trendy food-magazine, television-chef food that had been on the verge of taking over before the storm. In its place was more unambiguously Creole and Cajun food than had been served in some time. We even saw the revival of many dishes from the old interchangeable menu days. Oysters Bienville and its kin, little seen for two decades outside the likes of Galatoire’s and Antoine’s, became proud specialties of chefs who might never have eaten—let alone cooked—them before. (201)

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New Orleanians were grasping for the familiar. Classics and comfort food were sought out by diners and home cooks alike. Perhaps this is also why the food editors of The

Times-Picayune saw so many requests for recipes published from years past.

Fitzmorris sets out to make the case that New Orleans is unique because of its culinary culture and that this uniqueness could play a pivotal role in the recovery and rebuilding of

New Orleans. His account of the role of food and restaurants as vital to New Orleans is a testament to the necessary role of intangible culture in recovery. He writes, “What this all added up to—and what my restaurant index proved—was that New Orleans could not survive unless its native food culture was saved first. The passion for food here is integral. Pandemic. Indispensable. Like breathing” (209).

Sara Roahen, a New Orleans transplant who worked with the Southern Foodways

Alliance to document the foodways of New Orleans, published Gumbo Tales: Finding

My Place at the New Orleans Table after Hurricane Katrina. Roahen’s work focuses on the food of New Orleans. Each chapter is an exploration of and testament to a legendary

New Orleans delight, from sazeracs to sno-balls to the aptly named turducken, which is of course a chicken, stuffed inside a duck, stuffed inside a turkey. This is a favorite dish at Thanksgiving tables for many in New Orleans and surrounding communities. Her stories of food are part of the story of her life lived in New Orleans. This is her narrative.

She writes:

I cannot stress enough that these are my New Orleans food stories. New Orleans is a city of friends and neighbors, restaurants and cooking, and it swells with stories about how they all interact. Put yourself in the middle of them and you become part of the story yourself. Eat an Italian salad, take a long lunch at Galatoire’s, cook a pot of red beans, and you’re in. There’s no admission price, no required reading. Food and the people who cook it, and the rituals that honor

73 it, and the places that serve it, and the reasons for preserving it—that’s what happens here, who we are, what matters. (261)

Roahen draws connections between food and life narratives. She suggests that these

“New Orleans food stories” are personal while also communal. They are available to all who partake in the uniqueness that is New Orleans culinary culture. While her book does not focus primarily on the role of food and Hurricane Katrina, it does draw some connections. She writes, “The food culture of New Orleans has proven that as long as the city survives, it will thrive” (201).

In Why New Orleans Matters, Tom Piazza makes the emotional case for rebuilding

New Orleans not only for those living there but also for those that have before and will one day enjoy the cultural contributions of the city and its people. These contributions include music, food, architecture and quite simply the New Orleans way of life, which he states is a bit slower and a bit more spontaneous. Piazza, another writer who has made

New Orleans home after moving there from New York City decades ago, writes in a way that demonstrates not only a deep affection for the city, but also an urgent plea for recovery. For Piazza, his passion for music was his introduction to the city, recounting his first visit to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival held the last weekend in

April and the first weekend in May. The festival brings together New Orleanians’ love for music and food. Piazza acknowledges all of the aspects of New Orleans culture that create passion. He writes of food:

Food in New Orleans is rarely a means to an end. It is an end in itself, and one in which the participants are emotionally invested. As with New Orleans music, it is part of a shared ritual in which life itself is appreciated and honored in all its specificity and variety, its thereness. It is not the master-and-commander relationship to food of the wine taster, the distanced, appraising relation of the food critic (although so much of it would stand up to the toughest appraisal)—it is

74 the passionate, grateful, sacramental relationship of a kind of nonsectarian communion. You are free to believe this or not, but those who have experienced it know it is true. (22-23)

Again, the relevance of New Orleans culinary culture is made clear. That New Orleans grants food a large stage in which to perform meaning is very evident.

This chapter has laid out the literature that has informed my project. Focusing on relevant literature in foodways and feminist scholarship as well as books published after

Hurricane Katrina. The next two chapters will examine cookbooks published after

Hurricane Katrina as a means of recovery for the city.

Drago’s Famous Char-Broiled Oysters

Since this recipe was published in the newspaper in January 1998, readers have asked for it many times. It is a signature dish of Drago’s Seafood Restaurant in Metairie. As the butter drips onto the grill, the resulting flare-ups create the characteristic smoky taste of the dish. If you wish to serve the oysters on oyster plates, simply place them on the plates when they come off the grill.

{Makes 4 to 6 Appetizer or 2 Entrée Servings}

1 pound (4 sticks) butter or margarine ½ teaspoon black pepper 2 tablespoons chopped garlic 24 large raw oysters on the half shell ¼ cup grated Parmesan cheese ¼ cup grated Romano cheese ¼ cup chopped fresh parsley Combine the butter with the pepper and garlic in a small saucepan. Heat until the butter is melted. Prepare a hot fire in a charcoal grill or preheat a gas grill. Put the oysters on the grill and spoon the butter mixture over the oysters. Then sprinkle a pinch of the each cheese and a pinch of parsley onto each oyster. Broil until the oysters puff up, about 3-5 minutes. Serve at once. (Bienvenu and Walker 38)

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Chapter 3: Recipes Lost and Found

Everyone who loves New Orleans learns to love it with its flaws. It may be hard for people who have never been to the Crescent City to understand the passionate love people have for it, to understand why it’s worth fighting for—why it matters. There would be so many things to explain, and so many of them are visible only between the lines. You would have to show them the St. Charles Avenue streetcar rolling slowly along its track in the morning haze under the avenue’s great oak trees, past some of the most beautiful houses in America, or a second-line parade in which everyone following the brass band (and the brightly costumed members of this or that Social Aid and Pleasure Club) dance intricate steps through the streets of the neighborhood where they grew up, or you could show them a Mardi Gras Indian practice. You could bring them to zydeco night at Rock ‘n’ Bowl, where a live band plays for dancers up on the mezzanine level while people bowl happily a few feet away, or to Snug Harbor to hear Ellis Marsalis play piano, or you could even sit them down at one of those cramped counters at Central Grocery and put half a muffuletta sandwich and a Barq’s root beer in front of them, or give them a Pimm’s Cup at the Napoleon House, or best of all, some of the at Willie Mae’s Scotch House across from the Lafitte projects. (Piazza xix)

Food permeates all parts of the New Orleans landscape, from the lively restaurant scene to the bakeries filled with doberge cakes and éclairs to the home cooks who whip up large batches of gumbo, jambalaya and crawfish pasta to feed family and friends. For a city with such a strong connection to food, it is only fitting that the local newspaper,

The Times-Picayune, inspires and fills the appetites of many with their robust food section. After Hurricane Katrina, the newspaper played a vital role in the recovery of the city, particularly with regards to the city’s culinary heritage. Much has been written about the role of restaurants in the recovery of the city in national newspapers such as

The New York Times and The Washington Post and in books such as the aforementioned

76 Hungry Town. Less has been written about the role of recipes and cookbooks, after

Katrina.

Cookbooks and recipe collections are gendered spaces, often the domain of women, while restaurants too are gendered and are often the domain of men. This chapter and the next, seek to examine the role of post-Katrina recipe collections, collected and published by women. I suggest that recipe collections and cookbooks published after Katrina do the critical work of recovering New Orleans’ intangible culture, which was so integral to rebuilding the city. I also suggest that recipe collections like the online archive and cookbooks published after Hurricane Katrina are a way to examine gender and also the way women took agency of their lives in post-Katrina New Orleans. I suggest these gendered spaces are marked by recovery, creativity, invention, community, networking and nostalgia. I use the framework of tradition and cultural circulation to analyze the ways in which the recipes were transmitted. I utilize the work of Bower as well as others such as Ann Romines, to examine the recipe collections, and I suggest a fifth plot to

Bower’s framework of narrative elements in cookbooks, the recovery plot. The recovery plot is present in the requests and cookbooks published after Katrina. The recipe archive and the cookbooks served as modes of recovery for traditions, recipes and community.

After Hurricane Katrina, the loss of recipe collections was profound. Recipes, carefully cut from The Times-Picayune newspaper as well as those handwritten and passed down from one generation to the next, were drowned in the floodwaters of

Katrina. I seek to answer questions of circulation of culture and gender with regards to recipes in post-Katrina New Orleans. At the core of this chapter and the next, are five central questions. First, what recipes were lost as a result of Hurricane Katrina? Second,

77 what recipes were recovered and how were they recovered? Third, how did the recovery of recipes also become a recovery of culture and tradition? Fourth, how did rebuilding recipe collections serve as a form of recovery for New Orleans and the community?

Fifth, more specifically, how did rebuilding recipe collections impact communities of women and what roles did race and class play in this? In this chapter, I begin by examining The Times-Picayune online recipe archive, “Rebuilding New Orleans, Recipe by Recipe”. I follow this with an examination of Cooking Up A Storm: Recipes Lost and

Found from the Times-Picayune of New Orleans, the cookbook published as a result of the online archive in 2008. This chapter includes passages from both the newspaper and the cookbook. These passages are important to this project as they are serving as first- hand narratives and accounts of recipe recovery after Katrina. Therefore, I include them, in the text, as a key component of this project.

The Role of The Times-Picayune in Post-Katrina New Orleans

The Times-Picayune has been published in New Orleans since January 25, 1837. The current publication was the result of a 1914 merger of two newspapers, The Picayune and

The Times-Democrat. The Times-Picayune has served as the primary newspaper of New

Orleans and surrounding communities since then. The newspaper won numerous awards for its continued work during Hurricane Katrina including the Pulitzer Prize for Public

Service, as well as Pulitzer Prizes for individual contributions. After Katrina, there were only three days in which the paper was not published in print format, August 30, August

31 and September 1. During this time, however, an online edition was published.

Evacuated residents utilized the newspaper’s website, www.nola.com, to post to forums and blogs, searching for family members and offering assistance to those in need. After

78 only three days of online-only publication the newspaper resumed printed publication, first in Houma, Louisiana and later in Mobile, Alabama. On October 10, 2005, the newspaper returned to New Orleans to publish.

The Times-Picayune played an important role in the recovery of New Orleans and surrounding areas after Hurricane Katrina. My parents, long subscribers to and avid readers of the newspaper, depended on the paper not just for information about the recovery efforts, but also for a sense of continuity after the storm. Reading the newspaper together each morning was a familiar ritual they shared. I still remember my mother’s excitement when the first newspaper after the storm was delivered to their home in Slidell. My parents, unlike many of their friends and neighbors, chose not to evacuate and often felt out of touch and cut off from the rest of the world on a deserted street without power or phone service. The newspaper is an example of cultural circulation and the readers are considered a network within this circulation. The newspaper readers created powerful networks to not only create and sustain community, but also to recover lost recipes after Katrina. After Hurricane Katrina, the newspaper was a site of recovery.

It provided commentary on the rebuilding process as well as disseminated information on everything from navigating insurance policies to contacting FEMA. It also served as a site of recovering recipes lost in Hurricane Katrina. The newspaper was particularly important as a site of recovery as many areas still did not have power and were not able to watch television coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Many did turn to battery-operated radios as a site of information as well as community. The radio was a space in which people could “call in” and express their frustrations and grief as well as their small victories.

79 The Food section of the paper resumed publication on October 27; eight weeks after the storm devastated the area. Almost immediately upon publication, readers began to seek their lost recipes through the Food section’s recipe exchange column, “Exchange

Alley”, named after a street in the French Quarter. Readers were seeking the familiarity of cooking and recipe collecting. A long time reader, Phyllis Marquart, suggested to

Food Editor Judy Walker that the column be renamed “Rebuilding New Orleans, Recipe by Recipe”. This column became the way in which home cooks recovered their recipes lost to Katrina. This performance of loss and recovery is central to my notion of a recovery plot. Readers sent requests that were then published by Walker in the column.

These requests included the name of the recipe that was lost, the personal importance of the recipe and often a memory about the recipe. Readers also often included their Katrina story as well, recounting the damage and grief they endured because of the storm.

Everyone who came in contact with Katrina either as a resident of the area or a family member of a resident had a Katrina story to share. (For instance, my sister often recounts her Katrina story which included: very limited preparation consisting only of buying wine, rather than other necessities --which has come to be an ongoing family joke; her small puppy barking and crying through the storm; meeting neighbors for the first time after the storm passed, and grilling out and drinking together; and the moment when my parents arrived at her door after my mom’s insistence that they make the drive to check on their youngest daughter.) Walker would then reprint the requested recipe if she were able to find it in her own newspaper archives. If she was unable to find the recipe, she asked that readers look through their own collections and send the recipe to her if it was found. Walker recognized that the New Orleans readers took their cooking seriously and

80 often had recipe collections as large as or larger than the newspaper. Within a week or two, the recipe was usually found and reprinted in the column. Of course, there were those recipes that were lost forever. Many wrote down family recipes that had been passed down from generation to generation. These recipes were often handed down through ritual practice, that it is the idea of cooking the recipe together. Those that received the recipe often wrote it down and included it in a personal family collection.

These were the recipes that were often lost forever, as they were personal to families and not recorded in other ways except for notebooks and recipe boxes. This performance of recovery also demonstrates the ways that culinary culture circulated after Katrina. There are several layers of networks present including home cooks who lost their recipes and home cooks who recovered recipes. The recipes often passed through several networks as they circulated leading to their recovery. These layers of networks included family, friends and the newspaper. This process demonstrates the ways in which community was connected through culture, specifically food and recipes.

The column grew to also include beloved recipes of New Orleans as well as recipes that were served in the legendary restaurants in the city. The column started, however, with the everyday recipes carefully clipped out of the paper and treasured in a notebook or recipe box. These recipes were often tattered and torn and had stains from repeated cooking, the wear indicating that they were a favorite. These were recipes most often cut out of the paper by mothers, sisters, daughters, wives, grandmothers and friends who wanted to share their love through cooking food for the people they cared about most.

These were the recipes that were most sought out after Katrina, the recipes that were the most treasured, remembered and longed for. My research suggests that these recipes

81 were most meaningful because they were associated with memories from life before

Hurricane Katrina. The recipe requests I examine in this chapter indicate the prominent role memories played in the request. These memories and thus these recipes and foods served as a connection between pre-and post-Katrina. Some of the first recipes requested were for “favorite” dishes. Readers also requested recipes that were served at holiday gatherings such as Thanksgiving and Christmas indicating the role tradition played in the recovering of recipes, as many readers suggested that their holidays would not be the same without the presence of particular dishes. The recipe archive was instrumental in rebuilding the culinary heritage of New Orleans and surrounding areas after Hurricane

Katrina, particularly the culinary heritage within the home. The recipe archive served as a way to remember the celebrations, rituals and meals that were a part of life before

Katrina and continued to be a part of life in post-Katrina New Orleans. I suggest it served as a mode of transmission for cultural circulation. A way to remember and recover life before Hurricane Katrina. In the sections that follow, I share some of the recipe requests I gathered from the archive that highlight my idea of a recovery plot.

Before I continue with further examination of The Times-Picayune column, I would like to establish a narrative framework in which to consider the subsequent data in this chapter as well as the cookbooks examined in Chapter 4.

Narrative Elements in Recipe Requests, The Recovery Plot and Domestic Ritual

As stated earlier in Chapter 2, several feminist writers have encouraged critical analysis of cookbooks through narrative discourse including Bower, Theophano, Avakian and others. Colleen Cotter writes in her essay, “Claiming a Piece of the Pie: How the

Language of Recipes Defines Community”, “One way to look at a recipe is as a form of

82 narrative—a particular kind of storytelling—and viewing it formally and structurally as a narrative enriches our reading of it” (52). Cotter also considers the elements of language when critically analyzing cookbooks. She writes:

Examining cookbooks at the level of language use gives us many ways in which to investigate a cookbook’s content and how it reflects the social mores and expectations of its time. We will see that recipes share common features, as well as exhibit vast differences. Especially as they are recycled over time and through different social contexts, the shared features of recipes can provide, like narrative, a form of cultural cohesion. So besides the dictionary definition of “recipe” with which we are all familiar, we will see that the humble recipe can be dressed up for scholarly purposes: it can be viewed as a text form that is “locally situated” as a community practice, and as a text that embodies linguistic relationships and implies within these relationships a number of cultural assumptions and practices. (53)

As Cotter states, cookbooks are locally situated. They provide insight to the community during a specific time and place. For this project, I am most interested in the cookbooks published after Hurricane Katrina, by women, and the expanded roles these cookbooks took on; roles of recovery and rebuilding not only of recipe collections, but also of scattered communities and scattered memories as well. Perhaps nowhere in the United

States is food granted a larger stage in which to perform cultural meaning than in New

Orleans. Cookbooks as well as recipe collections in post-Katrina New Orleans were an important part of the community’s recovery process. Cotter also suggests that recipes can be viewed as a text. Viewing recipes in this way suggests that texts are present in varying domains. Cookbooks and recipe boxes are one such domain in which to consider literacy.

As I indicated in Chapter 2, I would like to suggest the addition of a fifth plot to

Bower’s very useful framework for “reading” recipes. Bower proposes that one can read

83 beyond just the recipe to read entire cookbooks for narrative elements including setting, characters and plot. She writes:

The only sequence of events such a reader desires is the linear process of the recipe: for a beginning—take these ingredients; for a middle—go through these processes; and of course, for an ending, voilà!—a dish to please the tummy and the tongue. But reading for more than a recipe, reading the full cookbook as a text, can yield inklings of different beginnings-middles-ends and a new sense of plot. (16-17)

Bower suggests that the narrative plots in cookbooks can be read through works of two narrative theorists, Peter Brooks and Ann Romines. Brooks suggests the “female plot of ambition” and Romines suggests the “home plot”. Bower finds these frameworks useful in addition to her four plots of integration, differentiation, moral or religious triumph and historical. She writes:

While the dominant plot in all these books can be understood in terms of Brooks’s “female plot of ambition,” one needs to see it also in terms of the “home plot”: Ann Romines explains that “the ‘home plot’ of domestic ritual has generated forms and continuities very different from those of the patriarchal American canon and pushes readers to attend to texts that are not inscribed in conventionally literary language. Domestic language often seems invisible to those who have not learned to read it. (37)

Romines argues that domestic language is often invisible to those who have not learned to read it. This is important to consider when thinking about literacies. What forms of literacies are valued and what forms are invisible? Traditionally, women’s forms of literacies, particularly those that occur in the home, have been overlooked. This project seeks to critically examine the role of women’s texts through recipes and cookbooks as a mode of recovery and rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina. I am also particularly interested in Romines’ work on domestic ritual and how domestic ritual practices impact community and individual responses after Hurricane Katrina as part of a larger recovery

84 narrative. In Chapter 4, I will further explore domestic ritual practices in post-Katrina

New Orleans through an examination of the Sicilian tradition of St. Joseph’s Day Altars in New Orleans and surrounding communities. I suggest it is through these types of food rituals that continuity is sustained year to year and through catastrophic events such as

Hurricane Katrina. Domestic ritual, such as the St. Joseph’s Day Altar, provides an example of culinary domestic ritual in New Orleans that is part of the recovery narrative.

Romines recognizes that domestic ritual practices can appear to be small or non- important, but their legacy can be lasting and the work they do is in fact extremely meaningful to the family structure and household. This work, I suggest, was also important to the recovery of New Orleans after Katrina. I utilize her work as part of a larger recovery narrative with regards to domestic ritual. Romines writes:

Mothers and other female elders have traditionally taught domestic work to girls and young women by imprinting them with processes, work order, and rituals. Like my mother and grandmother, the last thing I do before I leave my kitchen is to wring the dishcloth and hang it dry. Like them, I make cornbread dressing, seasoned with sage, for the Thanksgiving turkey. I toast the cubes of cornbread in a jellyroll pan, as my mother does. The home plot honors such processes, order, and rituals, by perpetuating them, in rhythms very different from men’s traditional plots. (293)

Through the above passage, one can begin to think about one’s own family processes and domestic rituals that have been passed down from one generation to the next. This ritual practice involves the repetition that often comes with the work. Rather than being written down, it is passed down through practice. This often creates the very core of family identity. What seems mundane and ordinary is in fact an integral and very important component of family structure and process. Recipes and cooking are a part of this work.

85 Romines continues writing about the home plot as a way to examine and make visible the often-marginalized work of women in the home.

The home plot, as opposed to quest stories and Aristotelean conventions, offers us a way to think about the shapes of many obscured lives, especially those of women. Inscribing housekeeping, thinking about home plots, we bring the attention, validation, and enormous resources of public, prevailing culture to women who have previously been marginalized and effaced by that culture, which did not know how to read—or to see—their lives. The institution of canonical American literature is a history of such effacement; it has traditionally said that domestic ritual is not worth reading. (294)

The cookbooks and recipe collections published after Hurricane Katrina offer a way to read the lives of women after Katrina through non-traditional texts. These collections make visible the role of intangible culture while also making visible the gendered work of collecting recipes. I maintain this work contributed to the recovery and rebuilding efforts after Katrina and is part of a larger recovery narrative in post-Katrina New Orleans.

The concept of ritual is important to this project as ritual is meant to be lasting and enduring. It offers a sense of continuity and familiarity as well as a sense of community identity. It is part of my larger framework. It is through this ritual practice of cooking and recipe collecting that New Orleans residents could begin to feel a sense of familiarity and thus begin the recovery process after Hurricane Katrina. Romines describes domestic ritual as, “performed in a house, a constructed shelter, which derive meaning from the protection and confinement a house can provide” (12). She continues stating,

“Thus a domestic ritual can be a large, important household occasion, such as a family reunion or a home wedding, or it can be an ordinary household task such as serving a meal or sewing a seam. All such rituals help to preserve the shelter” (12). She continues stating, “The tendency of human-made shelters is to accede to nature and thus to decay

86 and to change. Ritual opposes that tendency” (12). One of the outcomes of ritual is that it seeks to preserve culture and create continuity. Romines writes, “Thus a woman who is committed to domestic ritual is participating in an enterprise connected with the continuity of a common culture and the triumph of human values over natural process”

(12). The role of ritual as enduring is evident in post-Katrina New Orleans and surrounding areas. After the destruction of hurricane winds and flooding, women relied on the domestic rituals surrounding cooking to create continuity and a sense of safety.

Despite physical displacement, loss and overall feelings of discomfort and grief, women sought to rebuild their collections of recipes in hopes of one day soon being able to cook and serve some of their beloved recipes again. After the rupture of their day-to-day life, domestic ritual served a restorative role. There was a notion of something better to come, a kind of “light at the end of the tunnel”. Ritual often provided that “light”. The role of the familiar cannot be underestimated in the recovery of New Orleans and ritual provided that familiarity to many. Also connected to ritual is recovery. Ritual allows an opportunity to recover traditions as it seeks to preserve culture. Through ritual, one can find solace and continuity after fractures in day-to-day activities. Amy Cyrex Sins who wrote one of the cookbooks examined in Chapter 4 writes about how she cooked to cope with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. She states that cooking calmed her nerves and comforted her. It is through recovery of domestic rituals, such as cooking, that one can move forward with rebuilding and begin to feel a sense of normalcy after a chaotic or life changing event. It is also important to note that rituals must often be adapted throughout time or circumstance. For instance, after Hurricane Katrina families living in FEMA

87 trailers had to adapt some of their cooking techniques. Microwave recipes popped up in the Times Picayune recipe archive as a way to modify food preparation.

“Rebuilding New Orleans, Recipe by Recipe”

As The Times-Picayune received request after request for lost recipes to be reprinted in the newspaper Food section editor, Judy Walker, sought to fulfill these requests.

Below are some of the directions and updates that Walker provided for contributors and those asking for lost recipes. I include these at it demonstrates the level of organization required for undertaking a large restoration project such as this. It also provided guidance for how recipes were to be submitted thus leading to a kind of organized and intentional mode of circulation. This is different than recipes being passed down from generation to generation as a form of circulation, though both are examples of circulation through networks.

GROUND RULES FOR RECIPE RESTORATION: Again, for recent returnees and others, here is some basic information that bears repeating: 1) Requests for recipes cannot be taken over the phone. See the end of this column for ways to submit requests. 2) If you have lost or missed a recipe that was printed in these pages since October 2005, you can find it in our recipe archive, located on the Internet at blog.nola.com/recipes. About 400 recipes are sorted into categories. The rest are listed under “Archived Posts” at the bottom of the left page. Click on Archived Posts to see all posts listed by month. From there (until I have time to sort the rest of the recipes) you have to guestimate the month of publication. Click on the month and scroll down.2

I just have to celebrate: All 660-plus post-Katrina locally generated recipes can now be found on our recipe archive Web site, http://blog.nola.com/recipes. Have you bookmarked it yet? Not all the recipes are completely sorted, but at least they're all in one place. More than 400 recipes are sorted into 40 categories, mostly by main ingredients. The rest can be found at the bottom of the category

2 Walker, Judy. The Times-Picayune. 27 March 2008. 88 list. Click on "archived posts" and scroll down to find the month you want. Click on the month, and you can see all the stories and recipes published at that time. We started saving recipes this way in October 2005. Last July, we were able to sort by category, which saves tons of scrolling. (I hope to have spare time at some point to categorize the recipes that are not sorted. In this lifetime.) It's exciting to continue to refine and improve the (limitless) electronic archive of Times-Picayune recipes.3

Food editor, Judy Walker, encouraged readers to search the archive she created with help from readers after Hurricane Katrina. In the passages above, Walker provides directions and reminders for readers to stay connected through the recipe archive. The archive was a grassroots initiative that created community between readers’ shared Katrina and culinary experiences. It was also a type of network. Cotter recognizes the importance of recipes to identity and community. She writes, “In a satisfying way, we are all bound by our language, history, family, food and community. Recipes in many ways can reflect that” (51). For Cotter, recipes reflect much more than mere directions to be followed to produce food to eat. Recipes are in fact a reflection of the community’s identity. They tell the stories that make up a community and in this case I suggest they tell a story of recovery and rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina. Cognard-Black and Goldthwaite write,

“..a recipe provides information beyond mere data. Whether written on notecards, published in cookbooks, or posted online, recipes contain food traditions, where culture and history are transmitted as well as transformed. Practices of sharing, preparing, and eating food create and convey human interaction” (3). Additionally, recipes are a form of domestic ritual to maintain continuity. The newspaper archive served as a mode of

3 Walker, Judy. The Times-Picayune. 6 March 2008. 89 circulation for the “lost” recipes of New Orleans. It was through these networks that recipes were found and re-circulated throughout the community.

In the first passage, Walker highlights the rules for “recipe restoration”. It is apparent by Walker’s choice of words that she views the archive as much more than just a collection of recipes, but also as a restoration or recovery project. In the final passage

Walker celebrates the over 660 “locally generated” post-Katrina recipes. Walker states that she hopes to have the “spare time at some point” to categorize all of the recipes.

Through this line, it is evident that Walker is the primary person doing the work on this project. She recognizes the importance of food and more specifically recipes in the role of recovery in post-Katrina New Orleans. The work that is done by women on a daily basis to maintain culture often continues to be undervalued. This work was and still is essential to post-Katrina recovery efforts. Also of interest in this passage is the fact that the recipes were “locally generated”. These recipes were present in the community and recovered through the networks generated by the archive.

Recipes Lost and Found

The recipes in this section illustrate common themes among many of the entries in the recipe archive. Those themes are remembrance and longing: remembrance of culinary dishes made prior to Hurricane Katrina and longing for that particular culinary experience again. The memory is usually of a celebration or a favorite recipe. The recipe provides the continuity of life between pre and post-Katrina. It is a bridge between these two worlds. This is a mode of transmission. The narrative before each recipe entry allows the narrator an opportunity to share personal grief over the loss of the recipe and an opportunity to share a memory to demonstrate why that recipe was important to them; so

90 important that they would write to the newspaper to request it. The grief expressed over the loss of a recipe is also grief over the damage of Hurricane Katrina. That is the grief of the recipe is representative of the larger grief that was experienced as a result of

Hurricane Katrina. As evidenced in the reader requests in this chapter, one often stated that they lost everything including their recipes and would like to recover a particular recipe. Often after catastrophic loss, focus is put on recovering smaller pieces of life from before, relics of “normalcy”. This recovery is part of the larger process of rebuilding. I am particularly interested in the request printed before the recipe. For this project, I have included only the request and not the actual recipe, though all of the recipes can be located in The Times-Picayune recipe archive found on their website, www.nola.com.

TIME TO BAKE STRAWBERRY BREAD: “A dear friend, 85, lost all her recipes during Katrina and would love to find the recipe for strawberry bread that was printed in The Times-Picayune years ago,” writes K.B. She used to make it often for her family and friends and says that everyone loved it. She recalls that it was made with sliced, frozen strawberries. If you or one of your readers has this recipe, please print it for L.B. “Many thanks for your efforts in helping folks rebuild their beloved recipe collections.”4

This passage illustrates a common theme of neighbors, family and friends helping one another recover their recipes. This is an example of circulation through networks. It was not unusual to come across these types of requests for someone who did not have access to the internet or who may not have been able to or know how to request recipes online.

This is an example of community networks and the role that women played in recovering culture as a community. This is a type of agency of recovery on the part of women in the

4 Walker, Judy. The Times-Picayune. 29 March 2007 91 New Orleans community. As Romines writes, domestic ritual is a way to make meaning and order out of chaos. Recovering recipes and cooking served as a way for women to exert their control over the situation unfolding in New Orleans and surrounding communities. Additionally, the women created a network though the recipe archive of survivors, depending on each other for community as well as recipes. They also sought to contribute to the recovery efforts through recovering aspects of the New Orleans’ culinary culture. As Bienvenu and Walker write at the end of the introduction to their cookbook:

Cooking Up a Storm is a compendium of the very best of New Orleans cuisine, from seafood and meat to cocktails and desserts. But it also tells the story, recipe by recipe, of one of the great food cities in the world, and the determination of its citizens, in the face of adversity, to preserve and safeguard their culinary legacy. (13)

The strawberry bread recipe passage also illustrates the common theme of loss and recovery, as it is stated that all of her recipes were lost. The request also states that the strawberry bread was made for family and friends and “everyone loved it”. The loss is made present through the memory shared. This request highlights the ways in which women sought out the recipes that were most cherished and remembered. The memory associated with the recipe request makes visible the importance of the recipe in the recovery narrative. There is a “thank you” at the end of the passage directed to The

Times-Picayune and in particular Judy Walker for her guidance and work in helping to rebuild recipe collections. This passage highlights the networks of circulation after

Katrina. Often these networks were among family and friends.

92 EASY AND FRUITY: From Mandeville, A.M. writes, “I sure hope you can help me. I had a recipe for fruit salad I cut out of the paper and now I have lost it…. People loved it. Sure wish I could find that recipe again.”5

CATFISH EN PAPILLOTE: "Several years ago, you published a catfish recipe that included a red and green cabbage slaw, ginger and sesame seeds, cooked in parchment paper, " R.T. of New Orleans writes. "It was really a hit for my family. I lost the recipe during Katrina. If you can find it, I would appreciate it."6

CHEESE, CHICKEN AND GREEN CHILES: P.B. requests a recipe for "chicken lasagna, which had a white cheesy sauce. If you can help me locate this, I would appreciate it so very much. Thanks to Katrina, I've relocated to Lafayette, and hope to one day find all my great recipes."7

CLASSIC RUM CAKE: B.V. writes, "I lost all my recipes. I lived in Chalmette. I had a recipe for rum cake using yellow cake mix. I hope you can print it in the newspaper."8

These short requests for help in finding fruit salad, catfish, chicken lasagna and rum cake recipes again reiterate the theme of loss. “Finding” these recipes can be viewed as a type of agency. The recipes are indicative of the many losses endured after Hurricane

Katrina. “Finding” a cherished recipe creates a powerful sense of continuity despite the uncertainty. The first writer states that she cut the recipe out of the paper and has now lost it. One can imagine her carefully cutting out the recipe at her kitchen table and tucking it away into her collection of recipe clippings. The readers repeatedly write that they “lost” their recipes. As readers, we know that Hurricane Katrina took the recipe away from them. The narratives suggest that the recipes have been accidently lost and will hopefully be found again. As readers we know that the recipe may be recovered through the recipe archive. These images of recipes lost and found are what I suggest are

5 Walker, Judy. The Times-Picayune. 7 December 2006. 6 Walker, Judy. The Times-Picayune. 5 March 2007. 7 Walker, Judy. The Times-Picayune. 18 May 2006 8 Walker, Judy. The Times-Picayune. 9 March 2006. 93 a recovery plot. Central to the idea of the recovery plot is the circulation of culture among various networks. Readers are depending on shared networks to recover their lost recipes thus re-circulating them.

“You ran a recipe for fruitcake made in a blender,” writes A.G., who lives on the south side of Slidell and lost recipes and more. “My family and friends loved it. I even sent one to a friend in Iraq before Katrina. They are asking for it this year. I remember it had a whole orange. If anyone can help locate it for me I would be so grateful.”9

Again, the writer mentions a lost recipe that was loved by family and friends. The writer also remarks that this fruitcake was sent to a friend in Iraq before Katrina. The friend has requested it again this year. The recipe request displays the continuity of pre- and post-Katrina experiences. There is the experience of sharing the fruitcake with a friend in a pre-Katrina setting, then a request from that same friend to have the fruitcake again in post-Katrina. The reader ends the request by asking for help in locating the recipe. The networks of circulation that are present in this request are as far way as Iraq.

This recipe request demonstrates the role of the recovery plot as a way to continue a tradition of sharing the fruitcake with friends and family. The recovery of the recipe is crucial to continuing a tradition. After a catastrophic event such as Hurricane Katrina, the recovery of traditions such as foodways is an important part of the larger recovery process. This is a recovery of the everyday culture.

L.H. has managed to get back many of her recipes lost in Lakeview since the storm, but there’s one she hadn’t found – until now. “I’m like so many of your readers…lost all my recipes in Katrina (lived in Lakeview),” writes L.H., now of Metairie. “Thankfully, I always shared recipes and have thus been able to get a lot of them back. There is one I can’t locate anyplace. The recipe was for spinach and shrimp mixture wrapped in tortillas, placed in a baking dish and covered in a cheese or cream sauce. It was then drizzled with melted butter,

9 Walker, Judy. The Times-Picayune. 7 December 2006. 94 sprinkled with nutmeg and baked. It seems to me it was a reader’s variation of Emeril’s or some such noteworthy chef. I’ll keep my fingers crossed that you can find it. Thanks.”10

There are many points worth noting in the above recipe request. In this recipe request, from a reader in the badly flooded Lakeview neighborhood, she shares her loss of recipes and her relocation to Metairie, setting up her own narrative of recovery. She mentions that she always shared her recipes with others and has therefore been able to recover many of her lost recipes. Through this statement, it is made apparent how some women’s networks are formed and sustained through domestic ritual such as the collecting and sharing of recipes. This circulation through networks creates a type of community built around women’s domestic literacies. Women often take great pride in their recipe collections and are more than happy to share a recipe that is deemed a “big hit” at an office party or family gathering. This is a mode of circulation. L.H. created her own circulation of culture through sharing her recipes with these networks prior to the hurricane. This cultural circulation allowed for most of her recipes to be recovered.

Despite the recovery of her recipes, there is one recipe that she has not been able to recover, the spinach and shrimp enchiladas. Also in the recipe request, one can see the ways in which home cooks often create their own versions of “noteworthy” chefs’ dishes.

This is an example of women’s agency through creating their own versions of dishes appearing on menus across the city. The new versions are a way for home cooks to express themselves through adapting recipes.

10 Walker, Judy. The Times-Picayune. 2 August 2007. 95 “I am looking for a recipe that I lost during Katrina,” writes R.F. of Metairie. “The recipe is for chicken cacciatore made by Mosca’s restaurant on Highway 90. I think that was in The Times-Picayune about two years ago.”11

EASY OSSO BUCO: "You once printed an easy recipe for osso buco from Sal & Sam's restaurant," writes C.S.G. "It was very good, but I cannot find it. I know many would like it." This recipe was published a few months before Katrina.12

Readers often tried to give a timeframe of when they thought the recipe might have been printed. This illustrates the way in which recipes from The Times-Picayune were so entwined into the cooking of the community. Readers often could remember when they cut out the recipe to add to their own collections. These examples also highlight the connections between restaurants and home cooks. As previously mentioned, home cooks often sought to recreate some of their favorite restaurant dishes, particularly those dishes from restaurants that closed their doors after Katrina. It evident through these passages that recipes were circulated between networks of restaurants and home cooks.

CRAWFISH PATRICK FOUND: "I lost all of my recipes in the post-Katrina flood. Can you locate the recipe for crawfish Patrick?," writes K.C. of Algiers. Two years ago, Exchange Alley was concentrating on your most spattered recipes, proven to be the ones you made most often by all the drips and stains on them.

This one was sent in by D.D. of Goodbee, who said it was incredibly easy to make and "one of my most requested meals when out-of-town relatives come to visit." It doubles and even quadruples easily for a crowd, too.13

Walker writes that “Exchange Alley”, the recipe column, was several years ago focusing on the most often used recipes, those that had the most drips and stains on them from repeated use. She was able to locate this requested recipe through that column from

11 Walker, Judy. The Times-Picyaune. 24 August 2006. 12 Walker, Judy. The Times-Picayune. 14 February 2008. 13 Walker, Judy. The Times-Picayune. 2 March 2006. 96 two years earlier. The idea of recipes that were most often prepared by readers creates a sense of shared community. After Hurricane Katrina, the archive project provided a community of survivors with connections via food and recipes. I suggest that after so much loss and uncertainty, the recipe archive as well as cooking and food provided a sense of comfort and familiarity that is part of the larger recovery narrative. The women depended on one another to recover recipes and create community. It also gave them something in which they could feel a sense of control while perhaps feeling powerlessness in rebuilding their homes and businesses and interacting with FEMA.

"My mom and I are searching for a wonderful recipe that we both lost in Katrina. It was called Blueberry carry cake, great for picnics. It was similar to a coffee cake with a blueberry streusel topping, made in a 13- by 9-inch pan and was the best blueberry cake ever! We have both tried to find this recipe but have sadly been unsuccessful and very disappointed."14

The sense of community and continuity is evident in this request, first by the fact that two generations are searching together for the well-liked blueberry carry cake recipe.

This is an example of cultural circulation of tradition. Community is also present in the narrative as the writer suggests that the cake is great for picnics. The notion of gathering together for a picnic or celebration provides a sense of anticipation for the future. The writer expresses sadness and disappointment in not being able to recover this recipe.

A dip to die for: "About 5 to 10 years ago I clipped out a recipe the TP printed for Houston's spinach and artichoke dip, " writes A.L. III, now of Metairie. "Every time I made this for family functions, people loved it. Well, unfortunately, since Hurricane Katrina struck, I lost my house in Chalmette, along with all my possessions, including all my recipes which I collected throughout my life. If possible, could you see if you have a copy of this recipe?" We never printed a recipe for Houston's spinach and artichoke dip because the recipe is one of the restaurant's closely guarded secrets. However, several years

14 Walker, Judy. The Times-Picayune. 28 August 2008. 97 ago there was a big fad for this dip, and many facsimile versions were invented to duplicate it. Here is one we printed.15

This recipe also presents an image of the reader clipping out a recipe for a favorite dip from the popular New Orleans’ restaurant, Houston’s. It is through this performance that one can imagine the circulation of recipes from the newspaper to personal recipe collections. Many of the readers mentioned their personal recipe collections. They write about losing their collections, attempting to save their collections from ruin and then rebuilding their collections. This is part of the recovery plot. I suggest the process of creating ones own personal recipe collection is a form of personal narrative. The reader mentions that family loved this dish. The passage also indicates that the recipe for the spinach and artichoke dip was a “guarded secret” of the Houston’s restaurant. This is an example of recipe that was not circulating; therefore, an imitation was produced to allow for cultural circulation. The reader was living in badly flooded Chalmette at the time of

Katrina and a lifelong collection of recipes was lost.

MORE BREAD PUDDING: "Please re-print the recipe for Bally's Casino Bread Pudding, " writes P.A.R. "It was printed in the Food section about eight years ago. I had copies on my refrigerator when Katrina came through St. Bernard Parish. Needless to say, it was destroyed beyond recognition. The pudding was very light and fluffy."16

This narrative provides a vivid image of the requested recipe for Bally’s Casino Bread

Pudding. The reader can visualize the clipping hanging on the refrigerator in St. Bernard

Parish prior to Katrina and then the wet and crumpled up recipe clipping in post-Katrina.

15 Walker, Judy. The Times-Picyaune. 9 February 2006. 16 Walker, Judy. The Times-Picayune. 28 September 2006. 98 These very descriptive requests contribute to a shared imagination of recovery that is quite specific to recipes and food and is evident of what I suggest is a recovery plot.

"I haven't a kitchen yet; we are living in one end of the house while the other end is being put back together in slow-motion!" writes R.E. of Slidell, in a note to which many of us can relate. "We will get through this by the grace of God. Like many others I lost all my recipes, and I'm using (the Food pages on) Thursdays to put together my recipes again. Believe me, this is helping me mentally.”

"What I need is your recipe for Creole cream cheese, which I enjoy making. Some day I will make it again."

When The Times-Picayune started printing Miriam Guidroz's recipe for the old- fashioned local dairy favorite, there were very few commercial sources producing it. You readers and Slow Food's focus on Creole cream cheese helped bring it back; as Poppy Tooker of the local Slow Food group says: "Eat it to save it." Now we can buy it in supermarkets. It was saved. But if, like R.E., you enjoy making your own, here is a recipe. If you need to make molds, poke holes in margarine containers.17

This recipe includes a typical Katrina narrative of a home in disarray as it is rebuilt.

There is a notion of shared understanding as Walker remarks that this is something that many readers can relate to. This is part of the notion of a community of survivors after

Hurricane Katrina with a shared understanding of experience. The narrative allows for a shared sense of a “we are in this together” attitude. This network appeared to create a community of support. Sharing recipes through the archive seemed to be a way to sustain one another and the community. The reader mentions the recipes lost as well as the role that the column is playing in recovering these recipes. The reader also states that the column is helping to mentally cope with the despair and tragedy after Katrina. The reader asks for the recipe for Creole cream cheese and states that one day it will be made again, perhaps when the kitchen is complete and things are “back to normal”. It is

17 Walker, Judy. The Times-Picayune. 18 May 2006. 99 through collecting recipes that readers are able to imagine a future despite their current reality of a home in disarray and often lack of infrastructure and resources.

Recipes Lost

The recipe requests in the previous sections were those that had been lost, requested and then found. In this section are recipe requests that Walker published in her column.

Walker was unable to locate them in archive and is now reaching out to readers for assistance. McDougall writes that recipes are often products of communities. She states,

“Just as the cook’s presence is apparent in the food, the presence of the recipe writer is in the text along with recipe writers of the past. A recipe is never totally new; it is based on recipes and procedures of the past, reflecting the communal sense of cooking and the long tradition behind it” (107). This is evident in the ways recipes are circulated through culture and I suggest this took on greater importance after Hurricane Katrina in New

Orleans. Additionally, the online archive served a new mode in which to circulate recipes. Walker, recognizing that readers shared her passion for recipes and cooking, often called upon them to assist in finding lost recipes. This sense of community is present time and again in the column and is a network of circulation.

BARBECUE PASTA? C.W. writes, “I just wanted to thank you for posting recipes on NOLA.com for people who have lost their recipes. Currently I am in San Diego and have been craving barbecue pasta as sold at the Cheesecake Bistro. Do you have that recipe or something similar by chance?” I don’t, and I can’t find anything similar, so let’s ask the experts: the readers. Does anyone have this recipe, or a copycat version, for C.W.?18

“This is a request from my friend P.S., a displaced New Orleanian in Texas,” writes D. from Fort Walton Beach, Fla. “She lost electronic access, recipes and virtually everything else, so I’m trying to help, long-distance. She is looking for Danube almond crème torte, a recipe from the TP food section circa 1983.” The

18 Walker, Judy. The Times-Picayune. 29 March 2007. 100 recipe made a one-layer cake, split and filled with a very rich cream filling. The prepared cake pan is spread with a mixture of honey, sliced almonds and maybe coconut, and the batter poured on top of that. The still-warm cake is turned out of the pan so the honey-nut glaze is on top; when cooled, the cake is split and filled with what P.S. believes may have been a rich custard. There were quite a few ingredients and steps, but nothing too complicated, and it was well worth the effort, P.S. says. It was printed no earlier than 1983 and no later than 1985.19

The above recipe requests are both from individuals that have been displaced by

Hurricane Katrina. One is in San Diego and the other is in Fort Walton Beach making evident the ways that networks of circulation were influx. The first request expresses gratitude for the recipe archive. Gratitude appears as a constant theme in the requests. It is in this request that the reader writes of a craving for a particular New Orleans dish, barbecue pasta, from the Al Copeland restaurant the Cheesecake Bistro. Walker asks the

“experts”, the column readers, for help in recovering this recipe. It is through these requests of recovering lost and remembered recipes that the community becomes part of the process. This is an example of women’s agency in recovering culture. Despite feeling powerless after the storm, women were able to exert some control by reproducing knowledge and culture deemed valuable. Their contributions were important. Readers contributed to the recovery of these requested recipes through the column. This highlights two networks of cultural circulation. First, the network of those that are displaced, that is residents living in other states and cities who are longing for foods from afar. The second network is that of the “experts” or the readers who play a crucial role in the recovery of recipes. These networks are part of the recovery and rebuilding process.

SEARCHING FOR BARBECUE RECIPE: The files are not yielding anything in my search for A.M., who writes: “I am desperately trying to locate a recipe for barbecue in which the meat is simmered in a broth that includes seasoning and

19 Walker, Judy. The Times-Picayune. 5 October 2006. 101 pickling spices. I do not remember if the original recipe called for beef or pork, but I used a brisket or a pork butt. The sauce is made separately using ketchup, dry mustard, vinegar and some of the broth, then combined with the shredded meat. My mother-in-law had passed the recipe to me from the Times-Picayune over 25 years ago. As with everyone else, all my recipes were lost in Katrina.” Does anybody have a recipe clipped from The Times-Picayune that meets this description?20

This request highlights the transmission of recipes as they are passed down from one generation to the next. In this case, the reader’s mother-in-law shared this recipe.

Continuity is demonstrated throughout the request. The reader creates a sense of community with the phrase “as with everyone else, all my recipes were lost in Katrina”. I suggest this sense of shared struggle is an important component of the recovery plot.

Inherent in the recovery plot is also the circulation of recipes from generation to generation.

MISSING FRITTERS: "I am trying to locate the recipe 'Aunt May's Eggplant Fritters,' published in The Times-Picayune more than 15 years ago," writes A.N. "Like many others, I lost it in my Lakeview home. This recipe is very important to me because 'Tante May' was my great-grandmother Aimee Pierce. All of my family members who had this recipe lost it, too. If anyone has this recipe I would be very grateful if they would pass it on. Thank you." Can someone find this recipe for A.N. and her family? It is not in our files.21

The reader of this recipe request has a family connection to the recipe. She states that

“Aunt May” was her great-grandmother. The reader lived in Lakeview and lost the recipe. All of the family members who also had this recipe lost it too. Again, a sense of community is highlighted as the reader states, “Like many others, I lost it [the recipe]”.

This passage is interesting in that it takes the often-personal narrative of passing recipes down and makes it visible through the archive. The circulation of the recipe that had

20 Walker, Judy. The Times-Picayune. 5 October 2006. 21 Walker, Judy. The Times-Picayune. 2 March 2006. 102 been personally passed down through the reader’s family is now publically circulated through the newspaper archive. The great-granddaughter is relying on the newspaper archive to recover her lost family recipe. In this case the personal is becoming public.

Women are relying on their created networks to recover personal recipe collections. The role of community cannot be underestimated in recovering culture in post-Katrina New

Orleans.

B.Z. of Metairie, who lost everything to post-Katrina floodwaters in eastern New Orleans, would give anything to have a recipe again for a wheat germ cornbread. She got it from her aunt, and she's not sure where it came from originally. It included vanilla as well as corn meal and wheat germ. "It never got hard," she says, so it was wonderful to eat the next day.

I found this recipe on the Internet, but it doesn't have vanilla in it. The original source is supposed to be Bob's Red Mill, which makes a huge line of natural foods, including many grains and flours. If anyone has a recipe for wheat germ cornbread that includes vanilla, please e- mail it to me at the address listed in the tiny type at the end of this column.22

This reader requested a recipe given to her by her aunt. Again, this is an example of personal circulation of a recipe made public through the archive. Walker writes that she found a similar recipe online but that it does not have all of the ingredients the reader thought were in it. Through this passage, it is evident the work that Walker puts into recovering recipes for her readers, as if she does not want to let them down. Her role in the recovery of culture in New Orleans is indeed important and lasting.

HAVE YOU SEEN THIS CAKE RECIPE? Eastern New Orleans resident B.W. is seeking a cake recipe she cut from the newspaper and lost to Katrina. It was a lemon-orange cake with an orange liqueur glaze. The ingredients included the zest and juice of lemons and oranges, and it was probably baked in a 9-by-13 pan. I can't find this in our archive, so here's hoping one of you eagle-eyed readers recognizes her description and can supply the recipe.23

22 Walker, Judy. The Times-Picayune. 13 November 2008. 23 Walker, Judy. The Times-Picayune. 7 October 2010. 103

This request is for a lost cake recipe cut from the newspaper. The reader includes some of the ingredients in the request as well as the dish that is was most likely baked in.

Readers often included parts of the recipes or partial lists of ingredients as this reader did to assist with the recovery of the recipe. It is interesting to think of how partial recipes are circulated with the intent that this will lead to the recovery of the full recipe. These requests with partial directions or partial ingredient lists are part of my idea of a recovery plot. Often home cooks can remember portions of the recipe, particularly those recipes that they prepared regularly.

DRESSING WITH RICE AND CORNBREAD BOTH: "You must hear this a lot: 'I lost my recipe due to Katrina.' Well, I did," writes J.M. of New Orleans. "This one was for a dressing/stuffing recipe that my mom had gotten either from The Times-Picayune or the old NOPSI mailers from the late 1940s. It was for a dressing/stuffing that had rice, cornbread, oysters and pecans. It was passed on to me and was my favorite dressing for Thanksgiving & Christmas. Now it's my turn to host the Christmas dinner for the first time since Katrina, and I'd love to do that dressing. Can you help me?"

Many dressing recipes are in our files, but none that combine all four ingredients: rice, cornbread, oysters and pecans. If anyone has this recipe, can you please send it to me for J.M.? Thanks very much.24

This passage again reiterates the commonality of the Katrina experience among the column readers. This shared experience is part of the recovery plot. This request is from a reader who received this treasured holiday dressing recipe from their mother. As the reader states “it was passed on to me and was my favorite dressing for Thanksgiving and

Christmas”. The reader continues writing that it is now their turn to host the first

Christmas dinner after Katrina and they would love to make that dressing dish for the

24 Walker, Judy. The Times-Picayune. 24 November 2008. 104 occasion. The continuity from one generation to the next and from pre- to post-Katrina is highlighted in the reader’s words. The circulation is evident in the passing down of the recipe as well as the hosting of the Christmas dinner. It is especially pertinent as it is the first Christmas dinner since Katrina. This ritual of hosting yearly family dinners for holidays brings a sense of familiarity and continuity from year to year. Despite not being a daily ritual practice, it still provides continuity as a yearly ritual practice marking the passage of time.

ITALIAN MEATLOAF WITH PROVOLONE? "I am one of the lost souls who needs help, " writes C.S., formerly of Lake Vista, now of Uptown. "If someone has the recipe for the Italian meatloaf with provolone, basil and sun-dried tomato, please share. This is the only meatloaf that my 11-year-old son would eat. Thank you."

C.S. remembers clipping it from this newspaper a few years ago, but I cannot find it. Does anyone else have this recipe?25

This reader refers to herself as “one of the lost souls”. This again marks a network or community formed after and as a result of Hurricane Katrina. The reader remembers clipping the recipe out of the newspaper a few years ago, but can offer little else in the description. The performance of “clipping” the recipe out of the newspaper points to a mode of cultural circulation. She also points out that this was the only meatloaf her 11- year-old son would eat. This makes present the special concerns women often take into account when cooking and preparing food, thus basing much of their recipe collections on family favorites, allergies or picky eating habits.

SCALFINI'S, NOT SCALFANI'S: A.M.T. writes, "There was a restaurant in Harahan before Hurricane Katrina called Scalfini's Chicken & Ribs. On Thursday their lunch special was Chicken veloute. This was a fried chicken breast served over angel-hair pasta with a garlic-butter cream sauce.

25 Walker, Judy. The Times-Picayune. 9 March 2006. 105

"Scalfini's did not reopen after the storm and I have been searching for this recipe ever since. I have tried to re-create this dish several times but I keep coming up short. I am missing something. I am hoping that you can help me recover this recipe for this great dish. Thanks."

Readers, can you help A.M.T.? This is not Scalfani's in Metairie, by the way. Last year a reader wanted Scalfani's red snapper soup, a recipe we never received.26

This recipe request is for a dish from a restaurant that closed down permanently after

Hurricane Katrina. Readers often longed for dishes from restaurants that closed their doors for the hurricane never to open them again. Even in the absence of circulation, the cultural memory is still present. The cultural circulation exists in this memory. It is through this memory that the request is made. Memories are important parts of the recovery plot as they make visible that which is lost while also articulating the loss.

Merry Christmas, dear readers. We go into 2009 continuing our mutual recipe restoration project. Here is a request from R.T. of New Orleans, who lost her mother's recipe book (you know how). I'm hoping one of you might have this recipe in your files. Do you have this recipe? It would be the best holiday gift for one reader.

"Many, many years ago (it could be more than 20 years ago), The Times- Picayune published a recipe for The Crescent City salad. My mother made this salad many times, and the specialty of the salad was the wonderful dressing. The salad included lettuce, tomatoes and shrimp. The wonderful dressing had to marinate for a while. The dressing included caraway seeds, onions and mushrooms, along with many other ingredients....I would be forever grateful if you are able to locate this salad recipe. Thanks for all the great recipes in The Times-Picayune."27

In this passage, Walker acknowledges the upcoming holidays marking another year of post-Katrina New Orleans recipe recovery. Walker also refers to the archive project as

“our mutual recipe restoration project”, acknowledging the role of the readers and

26 Walker, Judy. The Times-Picayune. 31 July 2008. 27 Walker, Judy. The Times-Picayune. 24 December 2008. 106 community as well as distinguishing a network of circulation. The reader, in this request, lost her mother’s recipe book in the storm. The mode of transmission, her mother’s recipe book, was lost. The reader must rely on other networks and forms of circulation to recover her lost recipes. Once again, themes of family recipes as well as gratitude are present in the request and also part of the recovery plot.

NEW BUSINESS: "I always read your column on Thursday and find it interesting," writes J.H.D. of Abita Springs. "My girlfriend and I were talking about the barbecue sauce they served at the Smokehouse on Canal Boulevard in New Orleans. Any possibilities that someone would have this? ... Any information would be great. We used to dip our potato chips in the barbecue sauce as teenagers. I am 53 now! Not to be pushy, but I would also love the recipe for crawfish bisque from Lenfant's. Thanks."28

Again, this is another recipe request from a restaurant. It is a longing for the recreation of an experience from a restaurant long ago. Despite the fact that the restaurant is no longer open, the circulation is still present through cultural memory.

CHOCOLATE CAPPUCCINO CAKE RECIPE SOUGHT: L. of Chalmette writes, "I had a recipe for chocolate cappuccino cake that I got from the paper years ago. It was one of the winners in the baking contest. Needless to say, Katrina got my copy of this also, and I was wondering if you could possibly find it."29

Another Katrina victim, the reader is seeking out a prize-winning cake. Like other requests, the reader refers to the loss of her recipe stating that Katrina got it. She also asks Walker if she could find it. This theme of lost and found is crucial to the recovery plot.

FISHERMAN'S SPAGHETTI, ANYONE? L.L. of Bay St. Louis, Miss., writes, "Would you look in the recipe archives for 'Fisherman's Spaghetti'? It had crab meat, shrimp, green onions, milk and chili sauce, and was served on thin spaghetti. I can't remember the measurements, or if this is all of the ingredients.

28 Walker, Judy. The Times-Picayune. 6 March 2008. 29 Walker, Judy. The Times-Picayune. 26 February 2009. 107 "Of course, like everyone else, my recipe floated away in the hurricane. It was in the T-P in the late 1980s. I really appreciate your taking the time to look for this." I looked, but it turns out the recipe was printed around 1987, before our electronic archive came into being. Does anyone have this recipe, which sounds great to me and I'm sure deserves to be recycled? Thank you.30

This request is interesting as it also offers a partial list of ingredients. The reader vividly describes the recipe floating away during Katrina. The recipe was printed in the newspaper around 1987 before there was an electronic archive; therefore, Walker is calling on the readers for help in finding this lost recipe.

Rebuilding Recipe Collections

The recipe requests in this section offer more specific narratives on the recovery of recipes that do not necessarily fit in the previous sections.

LOST AND FOUND: "Now that we're pretty much trapped inside by the steamy weather, " writes frequent contributor P.M., "I've been taking time when I can to sort through the basket full of recipes I've clipped from magazines and The Times-Picayune. Lo and behold, yesterday I came to the very last food section on Aug. 25, 2005, before the big K. It was a shock to read over these yellowing pages and think about those lost days of innocence. I'm going to save this whole in my Katrina file, but I'm also thinking that others might like to have some of those recipes again as a remembrance of the days before the storm, when we all could sit at the kitchen table and open the paper to the warm pleasures of culinary possibilities."31

This particular passage is important as the reader, a frequent contributor, shares the last

Food section before Hurricane Katrina or “the big K”. The reader refers to the days before Katrina as the “lost days of innocence”. This “very last” Food section serves as the marker between a pre- and post-Katrina world. The reader writes about the

“remembrance of the days before the storm, when we all could sit at the kitchen table and

30 Walker, Judy. The Times-Picayune. 25 June 2009. 31 Walker, Judy. The Times-Picayune. 24 August 2006. 108 open the paper to the warm pleasures of culinary possibilities”. This illustrates the ways in which a pre-Katrina world is remembered, that is how those memories are recovered.

Part of what this reader is sharing is nostalgia, which is an important component of the recovery plot. Recovered memories are part of what I consider the recovery plot and nostalgia is often part of this. The reader is creating a narrative of nostalgia and remembrance. Nostalgia can often be viewed as conservative and idealizing. I suggest that nostalgia can in fact serve an important role in the recovery plot. In this case, it marks a traumatic rupture with the past and serves as a mode of recovery through remembering a life before that rupture. Cookbooks and recipe collections have an important nostalgic element in them. They are a way of recording and remembering the past. According to Sedikides et.al., nostalgia often has a largely redemptive theme

(305). This is evident in the recovery plot. According to their research, individuals often have nostalgic thoughts when faced with adversity or sadness. Thus, nostalgia is a way of recovering and rebuilding and was useful after Hurricane Katrina. Sedikides et.al. write:

Another key function of nostalgia is that it may facilitate continuity between past and present selves. Nostalgia may facilitate use of positive perceptions about the past to bolster a sense of continuity and meaning in one’s life. An additional function of nostalgia may be its motivating potential. Nostalgia may boost optimism, spark inspiration, and foster creativity…Of course, there may also be complex nuances that merit attention. Nostalgia may erode a sense of meaning in the present and may forestall motivation, if the individual is fixated on better days gone by. (306)

One can see this play out in the recipe requests as well as the recovery narratives examined throughout this project. Notions of nostalgia are central to the recovery plot.

Many individuals wrote about their longing for the past through the memories they

109 shared of pre-Katrina. This nostalgia also served as a motivating factor for recovery and rebuilding after Katrina. Nostalgia is present in Sins’ introduction to her cookbook examined in Chapter 4. She writes:

Where else do people maintain such hope after being struck down again and again? New Orleans has its own irreplaceable mix of the exciting and the unforgettable that makes the city so great. Who doesn’t want to experience live jazz music or taste Remoulade? And who doesn’t want complete strangers to welcome them like family? …As every day passes, I long for a return to the easier times when food and family were my way of life and worries were never an issue, a time when recipes were cherished and meals were shared with loved ones. Several events after Hurricane Katrina inspired me to work on this book, and several kept me going through the tough times. (xi)

Sins writes of her longing for her pre-Katrina life. Perhaps there is a bit of idealization of the past in her narrative, however, she uses this nostalgia to propel her forward in the recovery process. Thus nostalgia also has the potential to allow individuals to consider their post-Katrina life in new ways.

PUMPKIN CHEESECAKE FOUND: R.L. writes: "God bless you for reprinting all of these great recipes! Like so many of your other readers, my TP collection drowned in our Lakeview home and I was unable to save it. I look forward to seeing which old favorites will appear each week. I have a particular favorite which I am missing, a recipe for pumpkin cheesecake which appeared in the Food section about two or three years ago. Every time I brought that cheesecake to a holiday potluck, the platter was scraped clean!” "I had shared the recipe with several co-workers, but unfortunately, many lost their own collections as well. Your help in possibly locating the recipe again would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for filling my new recipe box, one at a time!"32

The reader expresses gratitude for the recipe column. The reader mentions the new recipe box that is being rebuilt and recovered one recipe at a time. This performance, of

32 Walker, Judy. The Times-Picayune. 2 March 2006. 110 rebuilding a recipe box, makes visible the recovery of recipes, while also creating a personal narrative.

G.M. sent one of the lighter notes that has come in since we started the mission to rebuild New Orleans recipe collections.

"My daughter rescued a lot of my clipped recipes from my house and I had them hanging on her clothesline drying out. LOL! And this was over two months after Katrina hit!" she writes.

They dried well and that made her very happy, G.M. says. Her daughter also rescued and clothes-lined "almost all the cookoff cookbooks from the paper as well.

"Whenever I see a request I always go to my stash and look for it, " G. writes. Here is the one recipe she didn't rescue that she wanted the most. She said it is quick and easy and tastes divine.33

This recipe requests is interesting in that the reader writes of her daughter “rescuing” her clipped newspaper recipes, by hanging them on the clothesline to dry. The reader looks in her collection of recovered recipes when she sees a recipe request in the newspaper in hopes of helping someone recover their recipes. She is playing an important role in the recovery of culture after Katrina. This narrative is indicative of the recovery plot.

While these recipes were requests for recipes that were lost from personal collections, cookbooks also played an important role in recovering culture in New Orleans.

Published cookbooks offer a way to gather and record recipes. Cognard-Black and

Goldthwaite write:

While we preserve personal recipes by recording them, sharing them, and eventually collecting them in containers such as a recipe box, even these measures will ultimately fail if the goal is to maintain the recipes for longer than one or two generations. In most cases, individual recipe cards and even community

33 Walker, Judy. The Times-Picayune. 9 February 2006. 111 cookbooks are not consistently preserved in library archives. Inevitably, then, published cookbooks are the best way for culinary memory to be collected and retained, even after the authors are long dead. (3)

Hurricane Katrina destroyed many of the recipe collections Cognard-Black and

Goldthwaite refer to. In the following section and the next chapter I examine cookbooks published after Hurricane Katrina as a way to recover and record recipes in post-Katrina

New Orleans.

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

When Walker decided to publish a cookbook with some of the recipes recovered after

Hurricane Katrina, she called upon her colleague and fellow New Orleans food writer,

Marcelle Bienvenu. Bienvenu had already published cookbooks as well as worked in some of the legendary restaurants of New Orleans including the Brennan family’s

Commander’s Palace. Bienvenu also had a popular column in the Food section of the newspaper, “Cooking Creole”. Fitzmorris describes Bienvenu in Hungry Town. He writes, “Marcelle grew up in St. Martinville, a small town in the heart of Cajun country.

She speaks with a Cajun lilt. Like most , she views cooking and eating lusty food as central to the good life” (63). Like Walker, Bienvenu realized that a cookbook was much more than just the recipes, but also the stories that brought the recipes to life and created opportunities for connections and community. She recognized cookbooks as a form of what I consider modes of cultural circulation, the carrier of traditions, networks and narratives.

The cover of the cookbook has four images on it. The first and largest image is that of the ubiquitous pile of crawfish on top of The Times-Picayune newspaper. This is an

112 enduring image for anyone from this area. There are many crawfish boils during crawfish season, which usually begins after Mardi Gras and continues through Lent.

New Orleans food often corresponds with religious holidays and observances. This is particularly true for the Sicilian tradition of St. Joseph’s Day Altars in March. This will be explored further in the next chapter as an example of continuity of ritual food tradition. The second photo is of Louisiana Creole tomatoes. Creole tomatoes were developed at Louisiana State University and are better able to tolerate the heat and humidity of Louisiana. The third photo is of a woman cooking in what appears to be a home kitchen. She is wearing an apron and there are pots and pans in the photo. The final photo is the corner street sign of Bourbon Street and St. Phillip Street in the French

Quarter. The photo was taken at night or possibly during the hurricane, as it is dark. The front cover also has two fleurs de lis on either side of the cookbook’s title. The fleur de lis has been the symbol on the New Orleans Saints uniform since 1967 and has always been present in New Orleans. It was after Hurricane Katrina that the fleur de lis came to represent New Orleans identity becoming very popular. The fleur de lis also became a symbol for New Orleans recovery. Jewelry, flags, artwork, cookies, logos and clothing all can be found with fleurs de lis on them. After Hurricane Katrina, my sister and I bought each other matching fleur de lis pendants from New Orleans jewelry designer

Mignon Faget. Faget has built an entire jewelry empire on New Orleans imagery and even has a line of jewelry dedicated to New Orleans food, which includes red beans, king cake babies, crawfish and sno-balls in the form of charms, bracelets, pendants, brooches, cufflinks and rings. For many years after Hurricane Katrina, I received gifts with fleurs de lis from tea towels to cookie cutters to cocktail napkins to artwork. I also remember

113 fellow Louisiana transplants, whether in Ohio or in my travels, seeing my fleur de lis pendant and remarking, “You must be from New Orleans, too”. That sense of shared identity through a visible marker such as jewelry was powerful, creating a network of circulation.

The cookbook begins with a dedication imprinted on top of a photo of a wrought iron gate. It reads, “This book is dedicated to the citizens of the Gulf Coast, whose lives were changed forever by the events of August 29, 2005, and whose determination to keep on cooking the foods of their culture inspired this project” (5). The setting of the cookbook is varied including home kitchens, the kitchen table and the Gulf Coast including New

Orleans. It also includes pre- and post-Katrina, as the stories of the recipes recount both.

The characters are the editors of the cookbook, the contributors to the archive, the readers of the newspaper archive and the cookbook and the greater Gulf Coast and New Orleans community. The dedication above highlights the role of the community in the publication of the cookbook and their role in what Bower would consider characters. The

“Acknowledgements” at the beginning of the cookbook starts with the recognition of the newspaper readers and contributors.

Over the years, thousands of readers have contributed their recipes to the Food pages of The Times-Picayune. This cookbook would not have been possible without their desire to share, even after many suffered their own catastrophic losses. We must thank dozens of people whose recipes are in this book, many of whom we know only by their initials. (9)

These contributors were highlighted in the previous section of this chapter in which I examined the actual recipe requests published in the archive. As Bienvenu and Walker mention above, they often only knew the contributors by their initials. Despite this anonymity, strong notions of community are invoked in this dedication. They go on to

114 also acknowledge the role of New Orleans chefs and those that work at The Times-

Picayune.

The “Introduction” begins with a brief history of Katrina and its impact on the newspaper. The authors do not underestimate the role of the paper in the recovery of

New Orleans. They write, “Beginning in the hours leading up to the storm and continuing through its devastating effects and the many months of difficult struggles that followed, The Times-Picayune of New Orleans has served as a strong voice for its city and a beacon of recovery” (10). The authors believe that the Food section also served an important role in the rebuilding of the city. They write that those that evacuated across the country quickly began cooking their comfort foods and introducing them to their temporary, or in some cases not so temporary, new neighbors. For those that did not evacuate or had returned, they were eager for their favorite restaurants and grocery stores to reopen so they could enjoy some of their favorite foods and meals. On October 27,

2005, Walker invited readers to begin to contribute to the newly renamed recipe archive,

“Rebuilding New Orleans, Recipe by Recipe”. It was reader and contributor Judy Laine who encouraged the genesis of the cookbook. Bienvenu and Walker recount this writing:

Then, Judy Laine wrote from her temporary digs in tiny Talisheek, Louisiana, “The bad news is I lost everything in New Orleans, my home (water up to the roof), our business and rental, and broke both my legs the night of the storm and couldn’t get to the hospital for two days because of all the trees down on highways. My husband set the legs as best he could”. After this harrowing account of her Katrina experience, what was foremost in Laine’s mind? Food. “I know I am not the only one who lost all their recipes and recipe books,” Laine continued, “I was thinking maybe you could all come up with a cookbook of all the recipes you printed over the years”. (12)

Laine was not alone in her request. “As dozens of these letters arrived, a portrait began to emerge of a community trying to rebuild its rich culinary history, one lost recipe and

115 one comfort meal at a time” (12). The newspaper’s editors decided to compile the many recovered recipes into a cookbook. The entire plot of the cookbook centers on recovery, the recovery of recipes, memories, traditions and of the city itself. Bienvenu and Walker acknowledge the role of food in rebuilding their beloved city and through their writing, it is evident that they see this as a community-wide initiative in which home cooks play as large a role as chefs in restaurants do. This sets up a network of circulation among home chefs that is worthy of examination. They conclude the introduction writing:

Cooking Up a Storm is a compendium of the very best of New Orleans cuisine, from seafood and meat to cocktails and desserts. But it also tells the story, recipe by recipe, of one of the great food cities in the world, and the determination of its citizens, in the face of adversity, to preserve and safeguard their culinary legacy. (13)

It is apparent both Bienvenu and Walker realize the role of personal narratives along with recipes to preserve the intangible culture of New Orleans. It is this intangible culture that

I suggest led to the recovery of New Orleans. The role of intangible culture should not be overlooked, as its role in the identity of a community is tremendously meaningful. It is through the recovery of recipes that intangible culture was recovered.

Bienvenu and Walker divide the recipes in the cookbook into the following categories:

Cocktails; Appetizers; Soups, Gumbos and Chowders; Salads and Salad Dressings;

Breakfast and Brunch; Seafood; Poultry; Beef, Pork and Veal; Pasta and Rice;

Casseroles; Vegetables; Cakes and Pies; Cookies and Candies; Puddings and Other

Desserts; and Lagniappe-A Little Something Extra. Lagniappe is a term very similar to

“a baker’s dozen”. This is something a little extra that people get when they purchase something. It is primarily used in New Orleans and surrounding communities. There is

116 even a Lagniappe section in The Times-Picayune newspaper, which highlights local entertainment. This term is an example of the French influence in New Orleans.

The cookbook is a collection of recipes that were collected from the newspaper column after Hurricane Katrina as well as recipes that were sent in to the editors specifically for the cookbook project. The editors also include several recipes that were favorites from the “Exchange Alley” and “Cooking Creole” newspaper columns. I am most interested in those recipes that were a part of the post-Katrina restoration recipe column, “Rebuilding New Orleans, Recipe by Recipe”. One of the first recipes in the cookbook that mentions this column is for Austin Leslie’s Mirliton Gumbo. Chef Austin

Leslie, known as the “the Face of Creole Soul”, was the chef at Chez Helene in the 1970s and 1980s. He and Chef Susan Spicer of Bayona restaurant fame were judges at the mirliton festival in the Bywater neighborhood. This recipe was originally published in the newspaper in November 1991. Mirlitons are small green squash that are typically known as chayote, but in New Orleans are called mirliton. As previously mentioned, there were many individuals who were affected by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in tragic ways. Chef Leslie was one of these individuals. Bienvenu and Walker write,

“Tragically Austin Leslie was one of the many elderly victims who died of stress following Hurricane Katrina. When his home flooded, he spent two days in his attic, then four days at the Convention Center, before he wound up in , where he died of a heart attack on September 29, 2005. Leslie lives on in his recipes, including this one”

(52). Sadly, Leslie’s story was not unusual after Hurricane Katrina as many individuals succumbed to the stress that Katrina brought. Several readers who lost their recipe collections after Katrina requested his recipe for mirliton gumbo. Republishing the

117 recipe is a form of recovery and also a type of memorialization for Leslie. His recipes are a way for his legacy to continue.

Many of the recipes in the cookbook are considered Louisiana “comfort food”.

Several of the recipe stories highlight the importance of comfort food after Katrina. The recipe for Crabmeat Higgins Soup is one such recipe story that does this. This recipe was requested by a New Orleans resident who recognized the important role food took on after Katrina. “Comfort food has never been so true a term as post-you-know-who” (56).

Two readers, who were craving the comfort this dish brought them, requested Sweet

Potato, Corn, and Jalapeno Bisque.

In November 2005, we heard from two readers craving the exact same recipe. One wrote: “Funny how when life is in 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! It is Sweet Potato, Corn, and Jalapeno Bisque.”

“I would love to have the sweet potato soup with jalapeno peppers recipe that appeared on the front page of the Food section some time last winter,” wrote the second reader. “Alas, my copy didn’t make it, and if ever I need some comfort food, it’s now.” The recipe appeared in the newspaper in 2014. (61)

The Times-Picayune dedicated several Food section cover stories to comfort food after resuming publication. This one, Margie’s Oyster Soup, is from the mother-in-law of a famed New Orleans chef.

When The Times-Picayune resumed publication following Katrina, the first several cover stories of the Food section featured comfort food, comfort food, and more comfort food. A story on soup for the holidays included this recipe from a beloved chef, the late Warren Leruth. The source was his mother-in-law, the late Marie Margarite Huet Rizzuto. Leruth included the recipe in a booklet that was privately printed and given away at the 20th anniversary of his restaurant in 1983. (65)

118 It is interesting to consider how food retains and also changes significance in a post-

Katrina New Orleans. Foods provided a sense of comfort after Katrina in ways that it perhaps did not before. Comfort food is connected to notions of nostalgia as it recalls, often with fondness, special dishes, menus and celebrations. These dishes were links to the past, a pre-Katrina life. Some of these dishes were special occasion dishes while others were often quite ordinary everyday dishes. The common factor among these dishes is that they offered a sense of nostalgia, which is an important component of the recovery plot.

Community connections of recovery were made through the newspaper column as well as through the cookbook. One of these was a request for Masson’s Oyster and

Artichoke Soup that was found on an annual tea towel made by the restaurant.

In August 2006, Judy Walker wrote a story about tea towel—recipe calendars. (These were calendars given out by Masson’s in the form of a linen dish towel. Each year, there was a different recipe printed with the calendar on the towel.) Y.R. of Metairie had written that she lost a tea towel—calendar with Mason’s Oyster and Artichoke Soup recipe on it. After her home flooded, it was thrown out in the chaos.

Another reader we’ll call W., whose home in Lake Terrace did not flood, had the towel and sent it to Y.R. “We were very good friends with the Masson family, and I have quite a few tea towel—calendars,” wrote W. She also delivered to The Times-Picayune a color photocopy of the 1984 Masson’s Restaurant François towel, so the recipe could be shared with other readers. We will never know all the endless kindnesses that were bestowed in the wake of the storm. W.’s generosity is one of the countless examples of how New Orleans residents helped each other heal. (66)

The tea towels are a form of circulation and also of literacies. The towels provided a kind of archive with recipes and calendars printed on them. Collections such as these provided a continuity from year to year. The tea towels were a material object providing visibility of the New Orleans culinary culture. For many, the tea towels also had a

119 practical use as well. The tea towels are indicative of the culinary culture that permeates

New Orleans.

Connections were also made from those that were not as geographically close. The recipe story below displays the ways in which Hurricane Katrina became not only a local disaster, but a national one as well. Many churches, schools, universities and other groups came to the Gulf Coast to help rebuild the area. Many others also donated their time and their money from afar as well. The recovery effort on the national scale was quite large and comparable in size to the 9/11 national recovery efforts. Celebrities, politicians, writers, musicians, chefs and many others contributed to rebuilding New

Orleans and the Gulf Coast. This outpouring of support certainly warrants its own study.

The following narrative shares the role that one church group played in rebuilding a reader’s cookbook collection. These passages mark the networks of circulation that were created as a result of Hurricane Katrina. Additionally, they highlight how circulation of recipes from Oregon and Pacific Northwest were transmitted to a Louisiana professor.

Kelly Hamilton, a history professor, runs the excellent culinary history tours in the French Quarter. About a year after Katrina, she sent a recipe to the newspaper. “I have a story to share,” she wrote. “Our home in Gentilly flooded, and the kind people from a Presbyterian church in Oregon gutted the house. Well, word got out back in Oregon that I lost my cookbook collection. So these amazing people, total strangers, have been sending me cookbooks! One man even sent his grandma’s 1942 cookbook he inherited called Woman’s Home Companion Cook Book.

“I believe I have the largest Oregon/Pacific Northwest collection in Louisiana! Food speaks a universal language and I have enjoyed reading the recipes, particularly the seafood ones as there are similarities. I can’t begin to describe how touched I am by their generosity. For the rebuilding recipe collection, here’s one of my favorite ways to prepare shrimp.” (131)

120 Gratitude was also a common theme found in many of these requests. Readers of the column were genuinely grateful to Walker and The Times-Picayune for working so hard to help recover these lost recipes.

A reader sent this message: “God bless the staff member who gave birth to this marvelous idea [of restoring lost recipes]. Ever since Katrina I have lamented over my one and only gumbo and étouffée recipes that I clipped from the T-P many years ago, at least twenty. My copy was soiled and taped, but it produced the best gumbo I ever had. Hope you can still find it that far back. [The recipes] were part of a series from the Saints football players. The article included a roux, the best I ever tasted, okra seafood gumbo and étouffée. Just getting those recipes back would make my subscription worthwhile.” Even though several of us spent hours searching, we could not find the Saints recipe series. However, we did find a recipe from 1986 for this excellent seafood gumbo. (71)

As demonstrated in the above passage, recipes were often not recovered, but instead recipes that were similar were shared. Readers also requested their favorite holiday recipes. Holidays are a time of tradition and ritual. Food and cooking are a big part of that. The passages below highlight the importance of recovering recipes for holiday traditions creating a sense of continuity from year to year.

“I hope you can help me find a recipe,” one reader wrote. Her best friend’s mother, who had passed away two weeks before the hurricane, had given her a recipe for shrimp and grits. She continued, “As with many of your followers, I lost my entire recipe collection. . . This was a dish I loved to share annually at Christmas brunch. Thanks for all your help.” (137)

“Thank you so much for this project! There have been many recipes over the years I have liked,” wrote one reader who had lived in a suburb of New Orleans devastated by Katrina. “The one I really need is the mirliton casserole. It tasted like my Grandma’s. I have tried to duplicate it over the years but never quite could. I made the recipe for Thanksgiving after it was in the paper and my mother wondered where I got the old family recipe!” The reader called it “the best mirliton recipe ever” and noted that her family missed it on the Thanksgiving after Katrina.

Seafood casseroles made with mirlitons (called “chayotes” elsewhere) are a Thanksgiving favorite in our area. This is the recipe the reader was looking for.

121 It was created by native New Orleanian Carole Katz. The recipe halves easily. (225)

The first request, for shrimp and grits, was given to the reader by her best friend’s mother, an example of cultural circulation. She mentions that this is a dish she serves annually for Christmas brunch. The notion of serving the same recipe for each holiday is an important part of domestic ritual. This provided a sense of continuity after Hurricane

Katrina. The second request for mirliton casserole is a favorite at this family’s

Thanksgiving table. The reader got the recipe from the newspaper and remarked that it tasted just like her grandma’s version. She stated that it was missed at the Thanksgiving after Katrina as she lost her recipes and had not yet found this. This makes evident what is lost or missing and then recovered. In the passage below, one reader shares a holiday recipe with the readers of the column. She states she was “one of the lucky ones”, as she did not lose her home or her recipe collection.

For Christmas 2005, a reader we know only as A.W. shared a gift with other readers. She wrote, “I’m happy to be able to contribute something to those trying to rebuild their New Orleans recipe collections. I’m one of the lucky ones: I didn’t lose my house and I didn’t lose my treasured recipe collection. In fact, my recipe box was one of the items I took with me when I evacuated!” (311)

The passage below comes from a reader in a small town in Mississippi. She sent in her favorite recipe for Baked Stuffed Oysters. This passage illustrates the continuity of recipes. The reader states that the recipe appeared in The Times-Picayune over two decades ago and that she copied it directly from the newspaper except that she added eggplant. She shares that she still has the clipping after all of these years. This passage is also important as it demonstrates the ways in which women often adapt recipes to make them their own. She kept the entire recipe the same except she added eggplant. This

122 demonstrates a type of creativity. This is an opportunity for self-expression, adding personal flair to the recipe. Cooking is often a creative outlet, a means in which to express oneself.

Many readers sent in their favorite recipes to be included in this book. This one comes from Patti Ohlsen of Carrierre, Mississippi, who told us, “This recipe was in the newspaper about two decades ago. It is written exactly as the paper printed it (because I still have the clipping) but I added the eggplant then I cooked it.” (119)

The request below for Nanny’s Dill Pot Roast with Sour Cream Gravy is from a displaced New Orleans resident now living in Tennessee. The cultural circulation is evident in this passage highlighting how “word slowly filtered out” about the recipe archive and that emails soon arrived from all over.

As word slowly filtered out to displaced citizens about The Times-Picayune’s recipe replacement project, e-mail arrived from all over the country. The request for this recipe came from a former New Orleanian who was living in Tennessee. She treasured the recipe, and so did the person who originally gave it to us, Susan Fortier Breedlove. Breedlove found this in the files of her late grandmother, Ann Bradoc Spring, whose heritage was Czech. (182)

Evident in the above passage is also the circulation of recipes being passed down from one generation to the next in this case from the files of her grandmother. Recipe collections are often a site where generational circulation is made visible.

Tamales, traditionally a staple in the Mexican and Mexican-American kitchen, also have a home in New Orleans. These tamales were inspired by the Mississippi Delta-style tamales, also known as “hot tamales”. They differ somewhat from the Mexican style tamale. They are smaller, simmered rather than steamed and they often use cornmeal instead of masa. These hot tamales are influenced my Mexican foodways traditions.

123 According to the Southern Foodways Alliance, the tamales made their way to the

Mississippi Delta when migrant farmers came to the area in the early twentieth century.

From her new home in Houston, K.W. wrote, “I too lost all my recipe books in Katrina. Fortunately, I typed all my clipped recipes and saved them on my computer at work. Several people have been looking for a recipe for Manuel’s Hot Tamales. “My mother found this recipe in the T-P in the 1970s and it has been a family favorite. I passed it along to a good friend who swears it’s the easiest tamale recipe she has ever made, since it does not require making a corn meal paste but just rolling the meat in a dry corn meal, which makes a perfectly even coating.” Manuel’s was a popular local brand of Delta-style tamales. The family-owned company, located on Carrollton Avenue, was wiped out by the flooding after the levees failed, and never reopened. (186)

J.C., originally from Chalmette, and now living in Thibodaux, wrote us, “A couple of years ago, I clipped a recipe for tamales with green salsa from The Times-Picayune. My whole family and friends enjoyed them very much. I would love to be able to replace that recipe. I left it on the kitchen counter when we did the Katrina road trip. I was planning to mix up a batch that weekend. My Chalmette home was destroyed that Monday/Tuesday. Please keep those recipes coming. It’s my comfort connection to our old life.” (188)

In the first passage, K.W. shares the frequently requested recipe for Manuel’s Hot

Tamales. K.W. writes that she compiled all of her clipped recipes onto her computer at work so they were spared. She writes that her mother “found” the recipe in The Times-

Picayune several decades ago. Manuel’s was a popular spot for these Delta-style tamales. Unfortunately, Manuel’s was one of the restaurants that never reopened its doors after Katrina. The second passage from J.C. is a request for tamales with green salsa. She writes that she was planning to make these the weekend of Katrina and left a copy of the recipe on her kitchen counter. Her home was destroyed. She asks Walker to continue printing the “found” recipes, as they are a “comfort” and “connection” to their

“old life”, a form of nostalgia. In the midst of chaos and uncertainty they provide continuity and familiarity, this is part of the recovery plot.

124 The recovery of recipes for the cookbook and archive depended very much on the community as a network of circulation. The fulfillment of recipe requests often depended on someone reading the request in the paper and then sending in the recipe. After

Hurricane Katrina, this simple act allowed residents to feel part of something bigger than themselves, a shared sense of community. It also gave them the opportunity to share their recipe collections with someone who might have lost everything in the storm. This sharing of knowledge created a sense of community and connection. This entire process is cultural circulation. Recipes are reproduced and shared. In the following passage,

M.L.B. requested a recipe for Piña Colada Cake.

M.L.B., who was displaced to Oklahoma after Katrina raged through Arabi, requested a recipe for this cake. We searched our files, but nothing came up. Then we received a batch of recipes mailed by A.W. in Terrytown, and in the package was this recipe. It was meant to be. (277)

This reader, like many New Orleans residents, was displaced to another state, Oklahoma.

Recipe requests often came from across the country as individuals sought out a taste of home and the familiar. This also served as an opportunity for displaced New Orleanians to connect with the city and the community though networks created after Hurricane

Katrina. In the passage below, another displaced resident, this one in Houston, requests the recipe for Rosie’s Sweet Potato Pies. She writes that she held onto this recipe for “the longest”.

M.B., a displaced New Orleanian in Houston, asked us for this recipe. She wrote, “I tried to hold on to that recipe for the longest, until Katrina came along. It was the best sweet potato pie ever”. (280)

Many people’s homes flooded during Katrina. Some had a few feet of water, some homes’ entire first floor was flooded while others had to take an ax to their roof to escape

125 the waters. For the reader below, her home was flooded and she lost almost everything.

She was able to save some recipes from a shoebox in her attic. She sent in this recipe for

Praline Cheesecake.

A reader who lost almost everything in the Katrina floods was able to retrieve a few recipes from a shoe box in her attic. She sent us this recipe, which she had clipped from The Times-Picayune in 2001, so that others might enjoy it. This cheesecake is incredibly rich and ideal for just about any occasion. (278)

The following passages demonstrate the ways that cooking temporarily changed after

Hurricane Katrina as many were living in FEMA trailers that had a reputation for being quite small with cramped kitchens. This required new techniques in cooking. The Times-

Picyaune sought to provide readers with alternate recipes to fit these needs.

For more than a year after Katrina, the Food pages tried to provide recipes for microwaves and slow cookers, since so many people in our readership area were without access to ovens or more conventional ways of cooking. This recipe came to us from Mount Hermon, a small community in Washington Parish, north of Lake Pontchartrain. The sender said this recipe was made several times in a microwave hooked up to a generator after Hurricane Katrina knocked out power there. “We had to use a lot of meat in our freezers with simple recipes,” the note said. (148)

Plenty of FEMA-supplied travel trailers still dotted the Katrina-damaged region when a mother from Metairie sent in this recipe in June 2006. “This recipe is for those living in trailers like my daughter, who is afraid to light the oven or doesn’t want to use up the propane gas too quickly,” she wrote. Even after residents were able to start sleeping in their damaged homes, many continued to cook in FEMA trailers while their kitchens were being restored. Others, who were rebuilding their flooded houses, were living on the second floor, where they cooked for months in improvised kitchens located in bathrooms, spare bedrooms, and laundry rooms. A microwave oven was invaluable. (274)

I suggest that through recovering recipes, women sought to rebuild their communities and New Orleans. These cookbooks and recipe requests set up a recovery plot within the narrative framework of cookbooks. This recovery plot also highlighted the ways in which culture was circulated. In this case, through networks of women eager to rebuild

126 their culture and city. As Lee and LiPuma write in their article, “Cultures of Circulation:

The Imaginations of Modernity”, “…self-reflexivity, circulation, and exchange interact to create different types of collective agency” (207). The women who sought recipes as well as recovered recipes were a network of circulation. These women, through their own collective agency, sought to rebuild the culture of New Orleans through culinary tradition. It is through this framework that women’s contribution to the cultural recovery of New Orleans is made visible.

Spicy Cajun Shrimp

B.M. sent this, her favorite shrimp recipe, to include in the cookbook. It’s a great one! “I cut this recipe out of the paper many years back”, she wrote, “and we have enjoyed it ever since. We like spicy food, but the 1 teaspoon of cayenne was entirely too much. Don’t use more crushed red pepper flakes either”. As a variation, you may use half shrimp and half scallops instead of all shrimp, or substitute other fish or shellfish.

{Makes 2 To 3 Servings} 2 dozen large fresh or frozen shrimp, thawed if frozen, peeled, and deveined ¼ teaspoon to 1 teaspoon cayenne pepper ½ teaspoon black pepper ½ teaspoon salt (optional) ½ teaspoon red pepper flakes ½ teaspoon dried thyme leaves, crushed 1 teaspoon dried basil leaves, crushed ½ teaspoon dried oregano leaves, crushed (optional) 1/3 cup butter 1 ½ teaspoons minced garlic 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce 1 cup diced tomatoes ¼ cup beer, at room temperature Hot cooked rice for serving (optional) Rinse the cleaned shrimp under cold running water. Drain well, then set aside. In a small bowl combine the cayenne, black pepper, salt (if using), red pepper flakes, and herbs. Combine the butter, garlic, Worcestershire, and the pepper-herb mixture in a large skillet over high heat. When the butter is melted, add the tomatoes, and

127 then the shrimp. Cook for 2 minutes, stirring well. Add the beer, cover, and cook for 1 minute longer. Remove from the heat. Serve over rice, if desired. (Bienvenu and Walker, 141)

128

Chapter 4: Continuity through Cookbooks and Tradition

New Orleans culture is of a piece. You can’t really lose one part of it without losing the whole thing. The music is part of the parades, and the basis of the dancing that you see, or do, at the parades. The parades are part of the rhythms of the year, and of life—the anniversaries, holidays, birthdays, and funerals. They wind through the streets of the neighborhoods where people live; they stop for refreshment in the tiny corner bars where people drink and pass the time, and at the day’s end, after all the parading, people settle down to familiar food like red beans and rice, or crawfish, or stuffed mirliton or shrimp creole or oysters, with the music and the dancing and all the things that happened still ringing in them, and that is part of the whole package, too. It amounts to a kind of cultural synesthesia in which music is food, and food is a kind of choreography, and dance is a way of dramatizing the fact that you are still alive for another year, another funeral, another Mardi Gras. (Piazza 32-33)

This chapter examines two cookbooks published after Katrina. The first, Ruby

Slippers Cookbook: Life, Culture, Family and Food After Katrina, is a compilation of recipes, stories and photography. The cookbook documents the lives of New Orleanians after Katrina through recipes and food. The second, You Are Where You Eat: Stories and Recipes from the Neighborhoods of New Orleans, offers thirty-three first-person accounts and the recipes of those individuals. I use my framework of the recovery plot to examine the ways in which these books are part of the larger recovery narrative of New

Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. I end this chapter with a brief overview of the St.

Joseph’s Day Altar ritual and tradition in New Orleans and surrounding communities. I suggest the altar as an example of the ritual that Ann Romines writes about, as a continuity that occurs in the home despite what has happened or is occurring outside of

129 the home. Each of the cookbooks examined in this project offers recipes that are a part of the St. Joseph’s Day Altar tradition. I provide this overview and analysis as an example of a New Orleans tradition that has been sustained after Katrina. This is also an example of a domestic ritual practice, important to the culinary identity of New Orleans. I utilize

St. Joseph’s Altar as a way to contextualize the connections of gender and recovery examined in this project.

“There’s No Place Like Home”:

Amy Cyrex Sins offers a personal narrative of her experience during and after

Hurricane Katrina in her self-published cookbook, Ruby Slippers Cookbook: Life,

Culture, Family and Food After Katrina. Sins also shares a collection of recipes for special New Orleans occasions such as “New Year’s Day”, “Parade Route” and “When the Saints Go Marching In” (a menu for the St. Joseph’s Day Altar feast). Central to Sins narrative are recipes and celebrations. In the introduction, Sins states, “I can’t imagine being without the city that I love, but that’s what almost happened in August 2005. I only hope that everyone else can’t imagine it either. What a deficit there would be to live in a world without New Orleans” (xi)! Sins, like many in New Orleans, understand it to be unique and a cultural mecca for food, music and architecture. She laments for an easier time, a time before Katrina, writing:

As every day passes, I long for a return to the easier times when food and family were my way of life and worries were never an issue, a time when recipes were cherished and meals were shared with loved ones. Several events after Hurricane Katrina inspired me to work on this book, and several kept me going through the tough times. (xi)

130 Sins begins the cookbook sharing her own story of evacuation (she just happened to be visiting a college friend in and flew to Houston from there after it was decided that she could not return to New Orleans). She speaks to her husband, who is in New

Orleans, about their evacuation plan. She remembers their conversation as being so nonchalant, something I also remember when I spoke to my parents before Hurricane

Katrina hit. That Saturday evening, she and her friend went to dinner at the Chicago molecular gastronomy restaurant, Moto. As usually happens, when Sins struck up conversations with nearby tables and shared she was from New Orleans, people wanted to talk about the city. Usually people want to talk about the great food of the city but this time they also wanted to talk about the path of Hurricane Katrina. She writes, “Of course, Katrina was still the topic of conversation, but the mood stayed light, and the other dinner guests were supportive. Everyone wanted to talk about New Orleans: the food, the music, the people and the bars. Everyone there loved New Orleans and had some wonderful story about visiting” (4). Following this story, Sins shares a recipe from the Chicago restaurant on W. Fulton Market, Moto, for Tostitos with Salsa Jelly and

Margarita. Sins writes that she often reminisced about her experience at Moto prior to

Katrina and the sense of normalcy it gave here. “When things were rough during the following months, I found comfort in my fascinating culinary experience prior to Katrina and shared it with others” (4). As with any meal cooked in the molecularly gastronomic style, it was far from typical comfort food with its frozen and smoking elements, however, this meal provided Sins with a memory and recollection of a pre-Katrina world, perhaps a time when things were easier.

131 Sins watched much of the flooding and devastation unfold at her sister’s home in

Houston with other family members who had evacuated there. Her husband was in St.

Francisville, Louisiana with his family. Sins turned to food for comfort as she watched her city flood. She writes:

The next morning I had major stress and issues to deal with, the only way (to) cope was to cook and eat. I know you shouldn’t turn to food in a situation like this. When all is said and done, maybe I can get counseling. But honestly, don’t you always feel better after a home cooked meal, or that little something sweet? I know I do. (7)

Food often provides comfort and stability during times of stress or despair. Sins compares the “comfort food” she ate to counseling, recognizing that perhaps she might need more than just the food to get through the events that were unfolding in her life.

She states, however, that the food brought a level of comfort to her that was satisfying and helpful. Sins home was on much of the national news coverage, so she witnessed her home flooding from afar. Her house was ten houses away from the levee break on the

17th Street Canal. She turned to cooking and food to get her mind off of this. She writes,

“And so I started cooking. Bubba’s son Christian was enlisted in kitchen patrol to help satisfy my cravings. The first order of business, bake a cake! And so we did. We baked the best cake in the world. It was a Chocolate, Chocolate, Chocolate Cake. And then we ate until life became good again” (7)! Sins used food as a way to cope with some of the stress she was facing. After finding some comfort from baking, Sins at last heard from her husband. They were able to reconnect and also to cry over their loss. That evening

Sins reflected on her future and a life in post-Katrina New Orleans. She writes, “I knew my husband had evacuated and was safe, and most of my family had checked in by text message. I felt fortunate that I was safe. I had some clothes, money, and most of all I

132 had a family that loved me. At that moment, I realized I could get through this; we could all get through this” (8). Sins’ determination to look forward and begin to imagine her new life after Katrina is reflected in this narrative. She also began to think more about her memories writing, “I started thinking, about my childhood and recent past and the things I remember and know and love about New Orleans that could be gone forever” (9).

This narrative, of moving forward while still remembering the things that made up her life before Katrina, was a common narrative after the hurricane and devastation. Sins and her husband relocated temporarily to Prairieville, a small town one hour away from New

Orleans. They stayed in a small apartment above the garage of an extended family member. This was not uncommon after Katrina. Many families and individuals sought temporary refuge in the homes of their extended networks. Sins writes of her excitement when they first saw the apartment. “We had furniture, we had dishes, and we had pots and pans, we even (had) Blue Plate Mayonnaise an Zatarain’s Seasoning Mix” (10). Sins specifically mentions two local favorites used in cooking, Blue Plate mayonnaise and

Zatarain’s Seasoning Mix. Sins was thrilled to be able to cook again. She writes, “Best of all, I could start cooking again! I think that our neighbors put on about ten pounds, as did we, with all of the leftovers I delivered to their door. Being with my husband made me happy. Cooking also made me happy, and I was delighted to have the chance to share my cooking with others” (10). After much agonizing, Sins and her husband decided to rebuild their home and move back to New Orleans. Following Sins’ own narrative of recovery, she then divides the cookbook into eighteen meals or chapters with several recipes included in each chapter. The recipes are her own as well as family, friends, neighbors and other New Orleanians she met through her project. In addition to these

133 recipes, she also shares a couple of recipes at the end of each chapter from local restaurants. Sins also includes stories from others as well as stories about Katrina and

New Orleans food. In the following sections, I offer a close reading of several of these chapters.

Sins offers a chapter on the often-combined New Orleans holiday of St. Joseph’s Day and St. Patrick’s Day, as they occur within days of each other. New Orleans has both significant Italian- and Irish-American communities. I will explore the ritual of St.

Joseph’s Day later in this chapter, as an example of they type of food ritual that promotes continuity. Sins’ chapter, aptly named “When the Saints Go Marching In”, offers several

Sicilian- and Irish-American local recipes and two cookie recipes from the famed mid- city ice cream parlor and bakery, Angelo Brocato. Recipes in this chapter include:

Audrey’s Stuffed Artichokes, Anchovy Gravy, Mimi Mary’s Meat Sauce, Danno’s

Corned Beef, Aunt Verlyn’s Cabbage Casserole, Irish Coffee and Angelo Broacto’s

Italian Sesame Seed Cookies and Italian Fig Cookies. In addition to these recipes, Sins offers photos of local St. Joseph’s Day Altars. The photos capture the altars’ intricacies of saint statues, food offerings and other “decorations” used for the altar display. Sins’ shares the story of Karen and her family’s sweet dough pies, which they prepare as a family every Holy Week. This narrative is of particular importance to my project as it has themes of family, gender, tradition, domestic ritual practice, memory and networking.

Sins writes:

Throughout this project, I have met many fascinating people and have acquired many great new recipes. Karen’s family tradition of Sweet Dough Pies on Good Friday stands out as “tops” on my list. Until I embarked on this project, I had never spoken with Karen. A genuine Louisiana lady, she greeted my request for family favorites with passion and fervor.

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Karen’s family tradition of creating sweet dough pies dates back over fifty years to her grandmother. Every Holy Week the women in the family baked pies on Holy Thursday. Karen’s grandmother made large half moon shaped pies. Karen noticed that many pies were being wasted because everyone wanted to taste numerous pies and decided to make smaller pies so more people could enjoy the variety. There would also be fewer pieces and parts left over. With so many family members living nearby, the cousins, aunts, moms and sisters all get together and cook as a family. The men would often take the kids crawfishing to ensure the children were out of the way.

Years later, they realized the more they merrier and changed the baking day to Good Friday so more female family members could participate. At the end of the day, the entire family then gathers for a large crawfish boil.

Their family tradition turns out hundreds of pies to share with neighbors and friends for Easter. Every year, the pies are a little bit different. Karen assures me that perfection comes only with years of practice at a mentor’s side. (73)

This passage is important for many reasons. It highlights the role of tradition in communities of women as well as the transmission of the ritual throughout time. Sins begins by stating that she met many interesting people and received many new recipes while working on her cookbook. The recipe for sweet dough pies and the story behind it was one of her favorites. Sins sets up Karen’s authenticity as a “genuine Louisiana lady” early in the passage. Sins uses the word “tradition” throughout the passage to mark the pies as much more than just a recipe, but rather as a ritual practice and part of their family heritage. The sweet dough pies are a tradition that occurred in pre- and post-Katrina New

Orleans. This is what Romines would call domestic ritual. Despite Hurricane Katrina, the domestic ritual continues. The pie baking has occurred for over fifty years with

Karen’s grandmother beginning the tradition. The recipe and knowledge is circulated through time. Karen and her family adapted the tradition for their needs when they realized that the pies, traditionally made as a large pie folded in half, were often left half

135 eaten, as the family members wanted to try the different flavors. As a result, Karen began making them smaller so everyone could sample more. This is an example of circulation and the changes and adaptations that occur. The pie making was gendered as the women gathered to make the pies while the men often took the young children fishing so the women could give their full attention to the pies. Again, most likely as more women began to work outside of the home, the tradition again changed. Rather than having the baking day on Holy Thursday, they began to gather on Good Friday, which is typically an observed holiday in New Orleans and surrounding communities in part because of the large Roman Catholic population. Sins writes that this allowed for more female family members to partake in the baking. This creates a familial network of women. At the end of the baking day, the large extended family gathered for a crawfish boil. The crawfish boil marks the completion of the pies and a kind of celebration and family ritual. The end result is hundreds of pies to share with family and friends creating a sense of community through baking and eating. Karen’s family is known in the community for their tradition and pies. Community members most likely look forward to the pies and probably associate the Easter holiday with her family’s pies. Karen lets Sins know that the pies change each year and that perfection is only achieved through years of practice and the help of a mentor. This sets the women up as experts in their field of pie making. They take great pride in making and sharing the pies with their family and the community. It is these ideas of tradition and recovery that are part of the rebuilding of

New Orleans and its culinary heritage. I suggest that ritual practices such as these promote recovery and create continuity from one year to the next despite outside forces such as Hurricane Katrina.

136 The next two passages highlight two different women who make their profession through cooking. Sins’ shares the story of another New Orleans resident, also named

Karen.

After traveling through the lower Ninth ward one day, I was overwhelmed by the sights and destruction. While there, I met a family that was standing over the ruins of what was once a home. They were obviously upset and looked as if they were discussing what to do next.

Karen’s family, like many others in the New Orleans area, was forced to deal with the loss of several family homes. Her in-laws’ Ninth Ward home was completely demolished, while Karen and her husband lost their home in New Orleans East. On top of all that loss, Karen’s business was completely destroyed by the flooding in her area. As a caterer, her recipes were her business and most were lost.

With the help of her sister in St. Martinville and her strong faith, Karen and her family are starting over and attempting to get their lives back on track.

When I asked Karen if she was returning to New Orleans, her answer was simple, “YES, YES, YES!!”

Karen has teamed up with her sister Rita, and together they have searched their hearts for recipes they loved. With Rita’s support, the entire family is recovering, and Karen is returning to a profession she enjoys. Karen and Rita’s recipe for okra gumbo won first place in the African American Museum Okra Cookoff in St. Martinville, LA. Enjoy it with your family and know that it is food from the heart and food for the soul. (189)

Sins shares Karen’s story of destruction and recovery. Karen, like many other families, lost several homes within one family network. This made it particularly hard as families who were rebuilding homes often stayed with other family members. Karen also made her profession as a caterer. After Katrina, she was without many of her catering recipes.

Despite the destruction, Karen answered with a resounding, “yes”, when asked if she planned on returning to New Orleans. Like many other New Orleanians, Karen probably could not imagine leaving the city she loved. Karen received support from her sister in

137 remembering their recipes so that Karen could return to her work. These familial support networks were often part of the recovery process for many New Orleanians. This passage has several themes of recovery including recovery of homes, recovery of recipes and recovery of her career as a caterer.

Maria was the “typical New Orleans resident” who doesn’t evacuate for hurricanes. Her neighborhood didn’t flood for Betsy. So, why should she evacuate for Katrina?

On Sunday morning, she saw her neighbors, and childhood friends, packing up an RV and planning to leave. Maria could hardly believe her eyes; they never left for storms!

At that moment, Maria realized if she stayed, she would alone. The “typical New Orleanian” decided to leave; she packed her bags and headed for Dallas and watched the destruction during the following days on the news.

As a chef and business owner, Maria is in a very difficult situation. Her business was destroyed, many of her customers have moved, and she is now forced to be a nomadic chef, using unfamiliar kitchens just to stay afloat. But cooking is what keeps Maria going.

She was born to cook. After pursuing a medical career, Maria decided to go to culinary school at the age of thirty and follow her passion. She believes that food creates powerful friendships, brings joy to others and nurtures the spirit.

Maria is still grieving the loss of a wonderful city and is hopeful that New Orleans can fully recover. Even though her business was shattered, Maria says that all she needs is a place to rub two sticks together, make a fire, and she can create a meal that will bring smiles to the faces of New Orleanians again. (127)

Maria, like many other New Orleans residents, chose to evacuate for Hurricane Katrina, after not previously evacuating for other hurricanes. Maria, like others, assumed that

Katrina would not be nearly as bad as Hurricane Betsy, the gauge with which many residents measured hurricanes. Until Katrina, most New Orleanians viewed Betsy as the worst hurricane they had endured. Maria was a chef and business owner in New Orleans.

138 It was particularly hard for small business owners after Katrina as many had to rebuild not only their homes, but their businesses as well. This passage highlights the ways in which food provided sustenance to residents after Hurricane Katrina. It was through the recovery of food and recipes that New Orleans communities were rebuilt.

Sins’ compilation of recipes and stories centers around a plot of recovery. The settings are Chicago (before Hurricane Katrina), Houston (during Hurricane Katrina),

Prairieville and New Orleans (both before and after Hurricane Katrina). Sins is the main character of the cookbook. She shares her own narrative of evacuation, rebuilding and recovery. Additional characters include her husband and family members as well as friends and other New Orleans residents she met while working on her project. Central to

Sins’ writing is the notion of recovery and rebuilding New Orleans and the central role that food has in this process.

The recovery plot is evident throughout Sins’ cookbook. Part of the title of her cookbook, Life, Culture, Family and Food After Katrina, highlights this recovery of

“life” after Katrina. Sins begins the cookbook sharing her own recovery narrative. She recounts the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina as well as her own evacuation story.

Food figures prominently in this narrative as Sins views food as a way of coping with

Hurricane Katrina. Sins describes the destruction she saw in her neighborhood. She writes, “I’ve learned that you can never be prepared enough for the shock of seeing your home and neighborhood for the first time after a devastating event. I assume that I felt similarly to those who face forest fires, tornadoes, earthquakes and man made disasters: overwhelmed” (10). Sins draws comparisons between her experience and those of others who have experienced both natural and man made disasters. This is part of the recovery

139 plot, an acknowledgement of others that have also endured tragedy. This creates a network of survivors. She continues, writing, “The entire experience was like a being in a black and white movie. It looked as if a bomb had gone off, but without the fire. I just looked around trying to find any shade of color other than gray” (12). Sins then spends some time writing about the rebuilding process. This is another component of the recovery plot. She writes, “I couldn’t consider the possibility of not helping to rebuild a wonderful community full of life, culture and history. I would not consider missing out on the cuisine forever. Once we made up our minds, we decided that no matter what, we will return home” (17)! Sins again mentions the role of food in their decision to rebuild their home and return to New Orleans again permanently. This statement of rebuilding and recovery is part of the recovery plot. Sins acknowledges in her recovery narrative that the rebuilding process is a difficult one. She writes:

One thing I am learning to understand is that we can’t go back to the way things were; we can only go forward and create a future. We must pick up the pieces, put them back together as best we can and move on into the “new normal”. If we follow the road back after Katrina, New Orleans will be a vibrant and colorful city once again. Hopefully soon, the levees will be improved, homes will be repaired, and we will move from this world of gray to Technicolor once more. Then we can all stop clicking our heels because we will be home. There’s no place like home in New Orleans! (18)

In this narrative Sins writes about the changes after Katrina and a recognition that things cannot go back to the way they were, but they can go forward. There is a sense of hope in her narrative and love for her city. For Sins, food is the lens in which to view and understand the recovery of New Orleans, as city she loves so much.

You Are Where You Eat

140 In You Are Where You Eat: Stories and Recipes from the Neighborhoods of New

Orleans, writer and photographer Elsa Hahne shares thirty-three first-person narratives and eighty-five recipes. Hahne is particularly interested in the recipes of home cooks and their stories, as well as how location influences their cooking styles and recipes. Hahne begins the cookbook writing:

This is a book about home cooks in a city that is obsessed with cooking, eating, and talking about food. For natives and newcomers alike, New Orleans seems to inspire a heightened appreciation for the sensual experience of eating and drinking and for the skill of preparing food well. Even after the disasters of 2005, following hurricanes Katrina and Rita, it is still easier to strike up a conversation with a stranger about food than about the weather or what you do for a living…. Home cooks have plenty to live up to here because each dish is lustily compared to similar fare savored in the past. Cooking for one’s family takes skill and stamina, creativity coupled with a grasp of tradition, thick skin, and certain bravado. Most of all, it takes lifelong devotion. (xi)

Hahne’s appreciation for the home cook is evident from the beginning of this compilation of recipes and first-person narratives. Hahne offers the reader not only very personal recipes, but exquisite photographs and very intimate narratives. After Hahne’s introduction, the only words that follow are those of the individuals she interviewed.

Their narratives coupled with their own recipes make visible the very strong connections between personal narratives and recipes and cooking. Much like the personal accounts the home cooks share about their lives and food, the recipes also communicate this.

When one reads the recipes, after reading the first-person narrative, it is hard not to see the individual present in their recipe.

Hahne also recognized, when she first moved to New Orleans, that much of the attention with regards to food and cooking was paid to restaurants and chefs, when in fact

141 home cooking made up such a integral part of the New Orleans culinary landscape. She writes:

After making New Orleans my home in 2002, I was surprised to find that almost all the attention paid to local cooking was focused on restaurants, while more people seemed to cook at home every day in New Orleans than in any other place I had been. Restaurant cooking is a vital part of New Orleans cuisine, but many of the chefs and line cooks in New Orleans come from homes filled with great cooks who never worked, and rarely eat, in a restaurant. Grandmothers and uncles pass on cooking traditions that are so much part of daily life here that they almost pass unnoticed until a food critic discovers them in a French Quarter restaurant, hidden under cream sauces, red wine reductions, and trend ingredients du jour, looking like something out of Gourmet magazine. (xi)

As indicated in earlier chapters, much of what has been written about New Orleans food has focused on legendary restaurants and chefs as well as hole-in-the-wall sandwich and gumbo shops. Much less has been written about the role of the home cook in New

Orleans culinary heritage, despite the significant role home cooking and home cooks play in this heritage. The recipe collection in Hahne’s project seeks to elevate the position of the home cook to one that is rendered visible and important to recovering the culinary culture of New Orleans. Hahne writes, “Home cooks rarely consider what they do as art, but they nevertheless contribute immensely through their everyday cooking to the culinary artistry and cultural wealth of New Orleans. They keep their families and communities together with food, and entire neighborhoods continue to build and rebuild around kitchens” (xi). It is apparent that Hahne recognizes the important role of food in a post-Katrina New Orleans. She writes that home cooks often do not view their work as art or part of the larger “cultural wealth” of the community, but in fact, they participate in a type of community building through the food they prepare. I suggest this work was crucial in the recovery of New Orleans.

142 Throughout her book, it is apparent Hahne understands the magnitude of food in New

Orleans and the influence it has over much of the city. When conducting her interviews, she writes of this important role. “People described their hopes, dreams, and deepest memories in terms of food. Cooking plays such a fundamental role in their lives that some of them could not bring themselves to talk to me until they were out of their Katrina trailers and into their own kitchens again” (xii). Like many residents, several of those interviewed for Hahne’s book were in Federal Emergency Management Administration

(FEMA) housing which consisted of small trailers. As mentioned in the previous chapter, it was often difficult to plan meals around the small kitchen and stove. Many turned to their microwaves for meal preparation, while longing to be back in their own kitchens.

Hahne recognizes the importance in the everyday. She writes about her motive for the book stating:

I wanted to write it (the book) because I find what regular people do every day to be both interesting and incredibly important. Places and cultures should be defined by what happens there on a daily basis, because it’s the things we do every day that become our lives. Almost every cook in this book considers the cooking he or she does as nothing special, “just ordinary cooking. Just ordinary food.” But ordinary cooking and ordinary life in New Orleans seem truly extraordinary when compared to many places in the U.S. where home cooking has become more and more reduced to special occasion cooking for holidays and family affairs. (xiv)

Both folklore and gender studies examine the everyday lives of individuals, that is the daily tasks that make up their days and thus their lives. As Hahne writes, this work is often considered “ordinary”, but in New Orleans the work of home cooks is far from

“ordinary”. In New Orleans, food is integral to all components of life woven into day-to- day practices as well as celebrations. The epigraph at the beginning of this chapter

143 highlights the ways in which food is connected to all of the cultural elements within New

Orleans. One part does not exist without the other. Hahne understands this importance.

She writes, “Hurricane Katrina devastated many lives in New Orleans. The portraits in this book, however, testify to the strength and survival of life here, built around friends, family, and food” (xiii). Recovery and rebuilding in New Orleans often centered around food, and the activities that went along with food including cooking, eating and celebrating. This text, as well as the others I have examined for this project, put food at the center of the recovery of New Orleans.

Hahne offers the story of home cook, Thania Mae Elliott, from the badly flooded

Lakeview neighborhood. Elliott expresses her love for cooking for large crowds. She hosts a red beans and rice night for family and friends the first night of Jazz and Heritage

Festival every year. She also hosts an annual New Year’s Eve celebration for family and friend as well. Elliott prepares the same menu for New Year’s Eve each year, including: three kinds of punches (pineapple daiquiri, champagne punch and piña colada), appetizers and sweets on the dining room table, “hot stuff” in the breakfast room and a pot of gumbo on the stove. The domestic ritual practice of preparing and serving the same foods and meals to family and friends for special occasions offers continuity from year-to-year. This continuity is particularly important after Hurricane Katrina. It offers familiarity through tradition. Elliott shares her experience with Katrina.

I’m the oldest of the three sisters here in New Orleans. I do have an older sister, she stayed in Cameron. She’s still in Cameron, in fact. We went through Hurricane Audrey, a hurricane that destroyed Cameron Parish in 1957, and we lost three children. The whole town was wiped out almost. Our house went over. I floated away. I was in the water fourteen hours. That’s why Katrina didn’t bother us as much, because it was just property. All of us are coming back to Lakeview. Six blood relatives. Six houses. (72)

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Elliott’s experience of surviving a hurricane as a child played a role in how she viewed

Hurricane Katrina. After losing lives, her family home and floating in the water for fourteen hours as a young child, she experienced Katrina differently than many. Despite losing family homes in Lakeview and the subsequent process of rebuilding those homes,

Elliott viewed this as something not to worry about, as she saw the homes as “just property”. Elliott reflects on how food became such a part of their family traditions, as well as her mom’s influence on food and culinary tradition in her family. She states, “I think everything we ever did was food centered. And I think that came from Mom. It wasn’t like Mom had parties, but she always cooked lots and lots of food” (73). Elliott offers the readers two recipes, Aunt Mae’s Famous Chex Mix and Crawfish Étouffée.

Elliott recognizes the role that food had in her family life. She attributes the importance of food to her mother. This marks a circulation of food from one generation to the next as a central part of family gatherings and family life.

Hahne shares the story of Greek-American, Karen Michael Kyame Clark of the

Gentilly neighborhood. Gentilly was also a badly flooded neighborhood in New Orleans.

Clark grew up eating Greek food. She refers to her family and their foods as “our own little subculture within the city” (103). The food Clark and her family ate was an important part of their identity. Two years after Katrina, Clark and her husband were still living in their FEMA trailer. She states:

The way Katrina has affected things—it’s like being on another planet all together. It’s like the astronauts up there at the space station, “I only have a month more, let me do the science experiments I’m supposed to and eat my MRE meal”. Like Rocket Man. We’re here in New Orleans but we’re not. You’d think cooking would be therapy right now, but it’s not substantial enough to feel normal. When I ended up in the trailer, I said, “Let me see how I can cook”, but

145 it’s so crowded in there you don’t feel like cooking. I feel like I have an Easy- Bake Oven and a little toy sink. I’m anxious to be in a real kitchen. I think I’m going to go crazy once I get into our house and am able to seriously cook. (105)

Clark compares her post-Katrina living situation to living on another planet. She knows she is in New Orleans, but she says it is as if she isn’t living there. It is not the same city in many regards. She states that one would think cooking would be therapy, but in fact she is not able to enjoy cooking in her small FEMA trailer kitchen. She is quite eager to move into her new home so she can do some serious cooking. Thoughts of cooking in her newly rebuilt kitchen give her something to look forward to while living in her

FEMA trailer.

Food is a good thing to focus on doing well since it’s something that happens every day. It won’t be perfect, life’s never perfect. But at the end of the day you sit down with a meal. Here’s heritage, history being passed on in a very organic way, a common way, it’s not in the history book, yet it’s a part of the whole chain of history and life. (105)

In this passage, Clark recognizes her role in tradition and heritage. She understands the day-to-day work of cooking as an integral component of culture and history. It is through domestic ritual practice such as this that women often make meaning of their lives. This domestic ritual practice allows for continuity and familiarity after a catastrophic event such as Hurricane Katrina. Clark understands her role a one that passes down history and heritage through food and cooking. Through this passage, one can see the ways in which the narrative of the everyday and domestic and the narrative of recovery intersect. The everyday and domestic is integral to the recovery plot. Clark shares three of her Greek recipes with readers, Garlic Bread Dip (Skordalia), Greek Lasagna with Cinnamon

(Pastichio) and Baklava.

146 Hahne also shares the story of Kathleen Elise Fallon of the Marigny neighborhood in the New Orleans French Quarter. Fallon shares her love for cookbooks, instilled in her by her mother, in her first-person narrative. She shares:

The greatest thing my mother did for me is that she instilled the joy of cooking and the joy of reading cookbooks. Now I pick up an interesting cookbook and just sit down and read it from cover to cover. It’s not that I actually follow recipes anymore, I get ideas of how recipes go and then I’ll do things. I rarely pull out a recipe, unless it’s something like a cake. (142)

Fallon shares her recipes for Stuffed Artichoke and Daube Glacé. For Fallon, her love of

“reading” cookbooks came from her mother. She recognizes the ways that cookbooks can be read. She states that she often reads cookbooks for enjoyment rather than for cooking directions. This project suggests that the cookbook itself becomes part of the recovery as it is a site of memories and continuities and not just a list of ingredients and instructions.

One of the many common components of the recipe collections examined in my larger project are recipes for the annual St. Joseph’s Day Altar and accompanying feast in New

Orleans. This ritual food practice serves as a site of recovery and continuity. Hahne shares the story of Estella Francesca Cirincione Mantia an Italian immigrant living in

Metairie, the closest suburb to New Orleans. Every year, Mantia bakes cookies for the altar with the Italian Cultural Society of Greater New Orleans. The society makes over twenty thousand cookies each year. She shares a story from the baking.

When we were baking for St. Joseph this year, we messed up one batch of sesame cookies, because one woman was doing the eggs and the sugar and everything, then somebody else measured the sugar again and put it in the mixer and I came, I didn’t know, I said “let me put the sugar”, so I put sugar again. The cookies taste good. I’m going to say it’s a new recipe. Every year it’s the same story. They never learn! For the St. Joseph altar, I want everything perfect, and guess what! Nothing is perfect. (184)

147

This passage demonstrates the ways in which women create community while cooking and also sometimes unintentionally create new recipes. Mantia shares her recipes for

Sesame Cookies for St. Joseph and Chocolate Cookies for St. Joseph. This passage also displays the ways in which recipes and knowledge are circulated and sometimes changed through time.

Hahne’s text offers a first-person account of the residents who call New Orleans home. They share their own stories of food, memory, tradition and recovery. Utilizing

Bower’s framework, the setting for this cookbook is in New Orleans. Hahne provides very specific neighborhoods in New Orleans as part of the setting. This is important to

Hahne to demonstrate the different ways that neighborhoods and communities cook and celebrate. The neighborhoods also make visible the unique identities of its residents.

Readers are able to see the different foods prepared based on ethnicities and traditions.

The characters are home cooks from across New Orleans. Hahne points out that she has chosen to make visible the work of home cooks and their contributions to the New

Orleans culinary heritage and landscape. Finally, I would suggest that the plot is one of recovery. Central to the book is the recovering of New Orleans culinary heritage after

Hurricane Katrina and the role food played in the overall recovery of New Orleans.

While Sins shared more of her own recovery narrative, Hahne provides space for the residents of New Orleans to share their own voices as part of a recovery plot. Their narratives make up the recovery plot. Hahne writes, “Hurricane Katrina devastated many lives in New Orleans. The portraits in this book, however, testify to the strength and survival of life here, built around friends, family and food” (xiii). Clark’s narrative of

148 recovery highlighted above demonstrates the ways in which the recovery plot is present in this collection of personal narratives and recipes. Clark describes life after Katrina, comparing it to living on another planet. She shares her story of cooking in her FEMA trailer and the frustrations that it brings. She is hopeful for her life after the FEMA trailer and the ability to once again be able to cook in her own kitchen. This narrative, along with the others in the book, provides insight into the ways Hurricane Katrina and the recovery were experienced across New Orleans.

As previously stated, domestic ritual practices were an important component of continuity and stability after Hurricane Katrina. The domestic ritual practices I am most interested in are those centered on food and cooking. In addition to the recovery narrative elements identified in the previous two cookbooks, I would like to discuss the role of ritualized food preparation as an element of the recovery narrative. By its nature, ritualized food preparation is a form of continuity. The same foods are prepared each year and the same recipes are passed down through generations. The St. Joseph’s Day

Altar demonstrates this continuity. Throughout this project, recipes were shared in the archive and cookbooks for altar menus, marking its continuity throughout New Orleans food culture and its prominence within the traditions of the city. This ritual and tradition continued after Hurricane Katrina and provided a sense of continuity and familiarity for many during an unstable and uncertain time.

I suggest that the St. Joseph Altar is an example of Romine’s idea of domestic ritual.

Romine’s writes that domestic ritual is a site of continuity despite changing forces. She suggests that the home is the site of this continuity. Throughout my research on recipes and cookbooks in post-Katrina New Orleans, altar recipes and menus were present. This

149 makes evident the important role this domestic ritual continued to play in the lives of many New Orleanians in a post-Katrina New Orleans. This is part of my larger framework on recovery through foodways including food ritual practices. The altars provide a site of tangible recovery. This includes recovery of memories, traditions and continuities. This recovery is made present in the construction of the altars, preparation of the food and presenting of the altar to the community. After Hurricane Katrina, the altars provided a space to gather with family and community to make meaning of both tradition and domestic ritual while also trying to understand the impact of Katrina on the

New Orleans’ community. Through the altars, the narratives of domestic ritual and of recovery intersect, which is at the core of this project.

Saint Joseph’s Day Altars:

Each year around March nineteenth, in New Orleans and surrounding communities,

Saint Joseph’s Day Altars are constructed and a Saint Joseph’s Day Feast is prepared.

This is the culmination of weeks and often months of preparation. This tradition, brought to New Orleans by Sicilian immigrants, is a site of collective identity for many Sicilian-

Americans and New Orleanians alike. The tradition of presenting a feast and altar to

Saint Joseph dates back to the Middle Ages when decorated altars giving thanks to Saint Joseph, the patron saint of workers, for protecting them from famine.

Sicilian Americans have offered Saint Joseph Day feasts since first arriving in New

Orleans in the 1880s. The Feast of Saint Joseph was first held in famine stricken Sicily in the Middle Ages. Sicilian Catholics prayed to Saint Joseph, promising to always honor him if he ended the famine. Today, many of the altars are devoted on a personal level, often asking for help in healing a family member. During World War II, altars and feasts

150 were offered to Saint Joseph requesting the safe return of soldiers to their families. This practice has continued with subsequent wars and conflicts.

Present day altars are held in many places including churches, homes, garages, party halls, restaurants and schools. I am most interested in the home altars. While Sicilian-

Americans began this tradition in New Orleans, many New Orleanians, despite their ethnic heritage, participate in the altar ritual practice today. In many ways it has become synonymous with New Orleans identity and very much a part of the cultural and culinary landscape of the city.

The St. Joseph Day Altars are a domestic ritual practice that has been circulated throughout families and networks in New Orleans and surrounding communities. The rituals that are a part of the altar preparation are detailed and each family member has a specific role. These roles are often gendered. The women spend much of their time preparing for the altar by prepping food and baking cookies and breads. They also communicate to family, friends and their church parish when and where the altar will be held. They decorate the altar and on the day of the feast, they welcome guests into their home and serve the food. They also coordinate the donation of leftover food to local food banks and often collect money for local charities. Folklorists Turner and Seriff have written about this domestic ritual practice. They write:

More than during any other holiday, celebration, or community-based activity, the intensive and specifically woman-identified labor of St. Joseph’s Day provides an opportunity for women to express their commitment to their families and, especially, to each other. Women unite with other women in an extended kin network to cook, clean, bake, decorate, construct, serve, and do all things necessary to assure the successful fulfillment of their promise. (105)

151 Men also contribute to the altar presentation. The men often build the altar and then bring it out of storage each year. The men usually clear the furniture from the room the altar will be presented in and then set up the altar as well as return it to storage after it is cleared off.

Food is an integral component of the St. Joseph’s Day Altar ritual and tradition. In many ways it is the very center of the tradition. There is no meat at the feast as it falls during the Catholic observance of Lent, instead fish, pasta, vegetables and sweets are in abundance. An Italian fig cookie is made by women weeks prior to the event as an offering to Saint Joseph and a sign of their devotion to him. Women often gather at someone’s home and spend hours laboring over these cookies. The altar itself is decorated with many food items including breads baked in the form of religious objects, dried pastas, fruits, cookies and wine. Each food is important to the altar as it serves not only a decorative purpose, but also symbolizes important aspects of the altar ritual practice. The bread is often baked into symbols such as crosses as well as ladders, hammers and nails representing the occupation of Joseph as a carpenter. The parish priest typically blesses the bread on the altar. Some of this blessed bread is cut up into small cubes and distributed to the altar guests. Guests are encouraged to place the bread in their freezer symbolizing the belief that they will be protected from hunger. I have a small cube from attending an altar of a family friend in 2007 still in my freezer in a zip- loc bag. The bread has been with me through three moves and most recently was transferred to our newly purchased refrigerator. The fig cookies represent Sicily, as do the olive oil and olive salad present at the altar. The grapes and wine represent the vineyards of Sicily. The breadcrumbs often sprinkled over the pasta dishes represent the

152 sawdust of Joseph, the carpenter. Food is not only used to decorate the altar, it is also served to the guests that visit the altar. Typically, home altars are open throughout the day and evening on or around March nineteenth. That evening, a large feast is served to guests. It is not unusual for one family to serve over 100 people in their home. The St.

Joseph’s Day Altars are widely publicized in church bulletins, in ads in newspapers and online. Everyone is welcome to attend the altar. When guests leave, they receive a small brown paper bag filled with a Saint Joseph card and medal, a cube of bread, some cookies and a fava bean. The fava bean was believed to be the only crop that survived during the long ago famine in Sicily. The fava bean is one of the most well known traditions of the

St. Joseph’s Day Altar today. It is commonly believed that anyone who carries his or her

“lucky bean” with them will never be without money.

Those offering the feast are often encouraged not to purchase anything, but rather ask for donations. The feasts are open to all community members and no one is turned away.

Those attending the altar are expected to make a monetary donation to the family or the church to use for their particular charitable cause. Prior to the feast, the priest blesses the meal. Three individuals, usually children, representing Joseph, Mary and Jesus taste and bless the food. The feast is then open to everyone.

Food and the Altar

Many families create homemade booklets to hand to guests when attending an altar.

They often highlight the family’s rituals and gratitude for St. Joseph as well as the memories they share of the ritual. In March 2007, while visiting my family in Slidell, a suburb of New Orleans, I had the opportunity to attend a St. Joseph Altar hosted by a family friend. According to the 2007 Familigio family booklet I received when visiting

153 the altar, “This booklet is lovingly dedicated to St. Joseph and the Holy Family. Along with prayers and recipes, we have included thoughts from our family and friends about what it means to participate in St. Joseph altar and why this altar is so important to us”.34

The booklet provided a space for the Famiglio family and their friends to share their stories of the St. Joseph’s Day Altar and the meaning of the altar to them. Joseph

Famiglio, Sr. is the first family member quoted in this booklet. The week before the family’s 2007 altar, Joseph Sr. passed away. The altar went on despite the recent passing of the family patriarch. As noted in Chapter Three, ritual and tradition are particularly important during and after times of rupture or despair. Joseph Sr. credits the St. Joseph’s

Day Altar with family healing. He states in the booklet, “I have frequently used the relic to bring me closer to our Lord, for spiritual comfort and for physical healing for all of us.

I feel strongly that two cases of the latter are 1) the restoration of Theresa’s severed finger and 2) being suddenly cured of diagnosed shingles within days of a prognosis of several months”.35 The altar is often credited with healing family members. The booklet names several other instances in which the altar is viewed as a site for healing.

In another testimonial, Joseph Sr.’s daughter, Catherine Famiglio Tanguis, reflects on the role of the altar when her husband was diagnosed with prostate cancer. She states:

Now that several altars have come and gone, I can’t imagine life without them. Even though my husband Frank was scheduled for surgery for prostate cancer just the week prior to our altar last year, I knew it still had to go on. This altar now transcended our family and our day-to-day trials and problems. We were

34 In 2007, I attended a St. Joseph’s Day Altar hosted by a family friend. We attended these altars throughout the years. The Famiglio family hosted the altar each year in their home. This year, like other years, they handed out homemade spiral bound booklets with prayers, memories and devotions as well as the recipes they used to make the feast for the altar. The booklet has four photos of Joseph with baby Jesus on the cover and the words “Ite Ad Joseph” which means “Go To Joseph”. 35 “Ite Ad Joseph”. 2007. 154 now part of something larger than ourselves. But how were we going to pull it off? I didn’t have a clue, but once again I was involved in something greater than my limited imagination. Enter my son, Frankie, and Johnnie Hernandez. Incredibly, because of these two, the altar went off without a hitch, while Frank rested quietly on the sofa.36

This narrative illustrates an important aspect of ritual, the notion that many who are a part of such rituals feel as if they are part of something bigger than themselves. These feelings create a symbolic community of tradition and domestic ritual passed down through generations. Romines writes, “Ritual implies a repetition because the repeated act has or creates meaning, which becomes tradition through its continuance. Domestic implies an enclosure, somehow sacralized, which is both the house and the perceiving self” (29). Tanguis states that after several family altars, she could not imagine life without them. The repetition creates meaning and tradition. The home altar is very much enclosed within the home and also within each person who is a part of the altar. The altar becomes part of the family identity, or collective identity. Many of the family members quoted in the booklet remark on this sense of community and collective identity.

I like visiting with my family at the altar. Alan Famiglio

Why come to the altar? Because it’s good Italian food and it doesn’t get much better than that. Sharon Veazey

I like the St. Joseph’s altar because I get to see a lot of my friends and family I usually don’t get to see. Christian Devereux

I thank God for the altar, the time with my family and all the wonderful people I have gotten to know and work with through it. Ite Ad Joseph! Catherine Famiglio Tanguis

St. Joseph is about family. Being with and working with my family is one reason the altar is so special to me. Joseph Famiglio, Jr.

36 “Ite Ad Joseph”. 2007. 155 I like the altar because it is a great chance for me to bond with my grandpa, cousins, aunts and uncles. Joseph Devereux

I like eating the delicious food and spending time with my family. Patrick Byrd

St. Joseph’s Day is a special day in the year because our family comes together to not only aid local charities, but to also share our culture and our faith with the community. Beau Michael Veazey

The altar always looks very pretty. It’s nice to work on it together as a family. Debbie Famiglio

I feel that it has truly been a blessing that my family has been able to have the St. Joseph’s altar each year and have kept the tradition going for so long. I feel that it is a great way for us to honor St. Joseph, especially since he has been there for us so many times. Mary Tanguis37

Evident in many of the reflections above, is the role of family in the altars, as well as the role of food. The altars serve as a site for family communion. Certainly in the busy lives of today’s families, rituals such as St. Joseph’s Day Altars create a space for family. This is a time that family members come together to construct the altar, cook and bake and share in the ritual practice. These domestic rituals, such as the altar, provide continuity and stability through personal health issues as well as after events such as Hurricane

Katrina. As I have theorized, domestic rituals such as the St. Joseph’s Day Altar provide continuity despite catastrophic events such as Hurricane Katrina. This continuity is present in the fact that the altars continued after Hurricane Katrina. This sense of familiarity is a part of the recovery narrative. Additionally, the gathering of family and community as well as the preparation of foods and the altar is part of the recovery narrative. This is made evident in the requests for altar recipes as well as the stories of the altars and food in the two books examined earlier in this chapter.

37 “Ite Ad Joseph”. 2007. 156 When I attended the 2007 altar, recipes from that year’s feast were tucked into the booklet. The altar recipes included: Altar Caesar Dressing, Altar Tomato Sauce, Altar

Lasagna and Jewish Challah. This was the meal that was served to the guests along with the traditional Italian cookies. The recipes were created for the large group of people they were serving. I include this recipe so that one can see how large the portions were made and the work that went into this process to serve the community. Hahne writes about the New Orleans style of “big cooking” in the introduction to her book. “New

Orleans cooking is big cooking. Even home cooks who live alone and mainly cook for themselves cannot prepare a pot of food for fewer than ten people” (xiv).

Altar Lasagna –This is one batch. Use 1 ½ batches for 10 half pans of lasagna

15 lbs. mozzarella plus more for top 4-5 cups parmesan cheese 2 quarts ricotta 18 eggs 4 cups heavy whipping cream 1 cup dried parsley

Mix in large bowl.

Layer: Sauce (from above recipe) Noodles (short fat lasagna noodles, 3 per layer) Cheese mix Sauce Noodles Cheese mix Sauce Noodles Sauce Mozzarella

Bake uncovered.38

38 “Ite Ad Joseph”. 2007. 157 This recipe demonstrates both the time and energy that goes into the preparation of the altar food. This recipe also presumes that the reader has some knowledge of cooking, as the temperature and time are not included in the directions.

Kay Turner and Suzanne Seriff offer an ethnographic study of second and third generation Sicilian-American women in a central Texas town who create a St. Joseph

Day Altar each year. According to Turner and Seriff, “This folk religious-altar tradition provides a splendid case in point for understanding family-centered folklore practice and performance from a feminist orientation” (89). Turner and Seriff suggest that rituals, particularly those with religious traditions, should be examined through the experiences of the women who live them.

We therefore maintain that an analysis of the St. Joseph’s tradition must derive not from externally imposed preconceptions of religious meaning but from the strategic way in which the participants themselves organize and recognize the meaning of this festival according to what they consider to be valuable. What emerges from this reexamination of the St. Joseph’s Day feast is an image of the feast – not as a symbolic or material expression of women’s subordination to men – but rather as a kind of communitywide expression of the power of women’s work both within the context of the St. Joseph’s story and the social practice of everyday life. (92-93)

Turner and Seriff suggest that an analysis of St. Joseph’s Day Altars must be examined through a broader framework and not solely through a religious framework. Important in the above passage is the notion that the feasts should be analyzed through relationships with Saint Joseph and the meaning making associated with the festival and altar that is how the women make meaning.

Central to the Saint Joseph’s Day Altars is the preparation and consumption of food.

Turner and Seriff write, “As a religious feast, St. Joseph’s Day is structured through symbolic exaggeration, and food is the key symbol. In the sacred calendar of this

158 Sicilian-American community no other feast day or holy day emphasizes the ritual display and consumption of food quite like St. Joseph’s Day” (104). Turner and Seriff continue with a passage that is particularly relevant to my research.

Food—as a symbol of life and the labor of women—is the binding element in the St. Joseph’s Day feast. Food performs multivalent symbolic functions in the feast, some of them obvious, others not. In an obvious way, food—a conventional gift to the gods—is ritually presented as a gift to the saints. But we also suggest that food can be seen as a key symbol for indicating women’s power to forward values of relationship, interconnection, nurturance, sustenance, and growth. Because food is so symbolically central to the meaning of the feast, we want to attend to the particular ways in which the women in the community instill symbolic significance into its production and consumption. (104-105)

Key to Turner and Seriff’s analysis of food are the ways in which women use the preparation and consumption of food to nurture their relationships with others. Turner and Seriff suggest that the food affords women power to further their values within the family and the community. Collaborative bonds occur between women while doing this type of intensive domestic ritual. Turner and Seriff write, “The work that women do in connection with the St. Joseph’s feast is made possible through the extended and extensive networks of female kin and friends that have evolved intergenerationally and across households over time” (109). These networks facilitate the circulation of ritual practice such as the altars.

Through cookbooks published after Hurricane Katrina, recounting narratives and recipes, and through domestic ritual practices such as the St. Joseph’s Day Altars, foodways played an integral role in the recovery of New Orleans. These traditions provided continuity after Katrina facilitating recovery and rebuilding.

Sesame Cookies for St. Joseph

159

Makes about 200 cookies

2 pounds unbleached flour ¼ teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons baking powder ¾ pound vegetable shortening 3 large eggs 2 cups sugar ½ cup milk 2 tablespoons vanilla 2 cups brown sesame seeds

Mix flour, salt, and baking powder in a large bowl. Add shortening, spreading and massaging it into the dry at first and then working out smaller lumps with hands as if you were washing them in flour. In a separate bowl, lightly whisk eggs together with sugar, milk, and vanilla. Add egg mixture to flour mixture, forming dough. Wrap dough in plastic foil and let rest for about 15 minutes. Pour sesame seeds into a strainer and rinse with water. Shake the water out. Divide dough into several equal parts about the size of your fist. Then form long, thin rolls with hands and roll these into plenty of sesame seeds, coating well. Cut the roll straight across or diagonally every 2 inches, forming cookies. Gently tamp cookie ends into sesame seeds and place 1 inch apart on cookie sheets. Bake at 375 degrees for about 20 minutes until golden on top and golden (but not brown) on the bottom. –Estella Mantia (Hahne 186)

160

A Conclusion

New Orleans is my home. I don’t know when I will live there again, and for the moment I am physically separated, and the living in a different place creates a kind of psychic undertow, like flesh healing from a wound, whether you want it to or not. The contrast between the normal life being lived by everyone around us and our own experience creates a variety of psychic and emotional disassociation that I will be living with and exploring for the rest of my life. (Piazza 139)

As we approach the ten-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, it is important to consider the ways that intangible culture can be integral in the recovery of communities after disasters such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Projects such as this one highlight the ways in which intangible culture can help to preserve and rebuild community. Through my project, a contribution to the growing scholarship on Hurricane Katrina, I have set out to demonstrate the ways recipes and cookbooks were part of the recovery process in New

Orleans and surrounding communities.

I maintain that through recovering recipes, communities and networks were in fact helping to recover the culture and heritage of New Orleans. This was done through the actual recipe archive as well as the cookbooks published after Katrina. While utilizing

Bower’s framework of plot in cookbooks, I suggested a fifth plot, the recovery plot. I am hopeful that future scholars examining cookbooks will perhaps utilize this plot or even suggest their own additions to this framework used to critically analyze cookbooks.

While examining the recipes and cookbooks for this project, I noticed many discourses of recovery including ritual, tradition and gratitude. All of these discourses were part of the

161 recovery process in New Orleans and evident in the recipe narratives I examined for this project. I also suggested that the recipe archive and the cookbooks published after

Katrina created a gendered space marked by recovery, creativity, invention, community, networking and nostalgia.

I continue to be interested in the ways that recipes and food traditions circulate through time and across communities. Just as residents of New Orleans left, never to return permanently, new communities also came to New Orleans and surrounding areas.

One of the fastest growing communities was and continues to be the Latino population.

New Orleans has a long history with Central American immigrants, particularly communities with Honduran heritage. After Katrina, the Latino population saw an increase in growth primarily due to the increased demand for labor and the need for it to be fulfilled. Prior to Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans had the lowest number of Latino residents of any major city in the nation. From 2004 to 2006, Orleans and Jefferson

Parishes saw the growth of the Latino population, with at least 10,000 new residents calling these parishes home. That growth continued with Kenner, a suburb of New

Orleans where the Louis Armstrong International Airport is located. Latinos made up 22 percent of Kenner’s population in 2011, up from 14 percent a decade earlier (Sparacello and Krupa). As with any new community, food and cultural traditions follow new populations. As a result, New Orleans began to see Latino cooks in the kitchens adding their own touches as mentioned in Chapter 1, as well as taco trucks and food stands popping up in parking lots and at gas stations. Initially, the community of Kenner passed very strict limitations and ordinances that often made it difficult for the taco truck owners to run their businesses effectively. Throughout the years, taco trucks have become

162 welcomed in the area and many of these businesses were so successful that they opened brick and mortar restaurants. This topic is certainly worthy of its own scholarly study and I hope to consider this topic in a future research project.

Another topic of future study is that of the New Orleans Katrina diaspora. I am particularly interested in how this diaspora might affect foodways throughout the country where substantial communities of New Orleanians put down roots. Andrei Codrescu writes about this diaspora and the possible implications stating, “There will be a little bit of New Orleans everywhere when our refugees move into your communities. Here are some of the changes: Your food will get better. In the past ten years, thanks to Asian and Latin flavors brought in by immigrants, American food improved. Now it will reach sublimity” (271). From my research on the recipe archive, it is evident that those who were living in other states were still cooking their New Orleans-style food and also sharing it with their new neighbors. This network circulates the New Orleans food traditions through new areas and new communities.

I am also interested in a broad ethnographic study of the St. Joseph’s Day Altars in

New Orleans. I am intrigued by the gendered labor divisions in this ritual tradition as well as the gendered networks. I am also very drawn to the ways that food is represented as part of this ritual practice through the altars.

Finally, it is my hope that this type of project furthers the dialogue of the importance of intangible culture. UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural

Organization, has long realized the important role intangible culture plays in the preservation of heritage. Folklore, particularly public folklore, has the capacity to create

163 these dialogues among communities. Nick Spitzer has spent a large portion of his career as a folklorist creating and maintaining spaces for public dialogue. He writes:

I believe folklorists are at their best in work that creates such public dialogues about traditional culture within and often beyond a community. Our work— whether supported by public or academic-sector employ—is public by nature, historically and culturally situated, and necessarily responsible to those communities from whom we obtain our information. Acknowledging this will ultimately allow us to produce more conscious, better-realized representations of folklore. (80-81)

Through engaging the community in dialogues, folklorists learn the best ways in which to assist the community toward furthering their own goals. I believe that folklore has the unique opportunity to provide insight and approaches for ways to preserve cultures and heritages. It is my hope that my project can contribute, in some small way, to the understanding of how intangible culture impacts communities particularly those that have experienced a large-scale tragedy or catastrophic event.

Finally, it is my hope that New Orleans will continue the often-difficult recovery process. Dorothy Noyes writes, ““Many folklore scholars feel an obligation to the communities among whom they have lived, from whom they sometimes hail, and to whom they owe their professional advancement” (30). For me, this is true. New Orleans has formed me in many ways. Though I left the area many years ago, it is still very present in my values and attitudes. New Orleans has left an imprint on me. It has given me a sense of community and a sense of the importance of celebration in the everyday.

As New Orleans continues to recover, ten years after Hurricane Katrina, it is my hope that this project as well as others like it, provide something to help in that recovery.

164

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