INTRODUCTION

I’ve spent hours and hours and days and days making gumbo. Plain old flour and oil in a hot skillet and then whisking, whisking, whisking till my arm aches. The oil and flour becomes a deep, dark roux, shiny and beautiful like smooth velvet, almost the color of the ancient cast-iron skillet I make it in. It’s hard to describe the transformation that occurs with such simple ingredients and even harder to understand—it’s just another of life’s many mysteries, like a magic spell passed down from cook to cook, a spell that turns shrimp and crab into tender, weightless, sweet bits of meat and the holy trinity of onions, celery, and peppers into soft morsels in a savory stew that will melt in your mouth like chocolate.

The magic roux is a little bit of a diva—if you rush her, she will rebel, and you’ll end up back where you started. She wants to take her time getting ready, and she wants to see just how far you’re willing to go to witness her magic. I adjust the heat, keeping the roux just this side of burning, letting the color deepen without scorching. I patiently coax it from light brown to the copper color of a penny and then finally to a deep, dark brown that’s almost black. All of a sudden, the roux releases the smell of roasting nuts—she’s full of herself now, finally stepping into the room and ready to start the show—and though I’m tempted to pull it off the heat, I let it go just a tad longer, the voice in my head, my lifelong anthem, daring me, Take it to the edge, sister!

When one more second will be too long, I sprinkle in the onions and nudge them gently around the pot with my wooden spoon. The onions steam and sizzle. Hot roux spits on my hand and arm. Like I said, she’s no easy lady! I stir on. Time for the celery and then the bell pepper. The roux calms down, deigning now to settle in and do her magic, taking every humble ingredient I toss into her mysterious velvety embrace and making it the star of the show.

I beat the odds a lot of times and a lot of ways in my life, and how I cook is how I tell time and how I tell my story. Every passage of my life has been marked by food. Every twist and turn in my personal story has been a leg of my culinary journey. My childhood was a time of Sunday dinners at my grandmothers’ homes in Mississippi. Raised in her mother’s boardinghouse, my Buffett grandmother would put out a massive spread of fried chicken and roast beef, mashed potatoes, rice and gravy, green beans, stewed squash, speckled butter beans, potato salad, and sliced tomatoes; a sideboard covered in desserts like pound cake with strawberries and dewberry pie; and watermelon iced down in a galvanized tub. Children sat at the children’s table, and the men gathered in the garage with the “hidden” bottle of rum. And on Fridays, being a good Catholic, my grandmother made enough seafood gumbo to feed the whole family and even have leftovers to go with Sunday dinner; the smell would wind its way out of the kitchen and down the driveway to greet us in a welcoming cloud that led us right back to her kitchen. She used to say, “You are always underfoot, LuLu. If I can’t find you, I know to look in the kitchen.” And that’s still where you’ll find me.

My Peets grandmother was the “dietitian” at a girls’ finishing school in Long Beach, Mississippi. That meant she ran the kitchen, planned the menus, and managed the staff. She taught us scrawny and wild Gulf Coast kids about finer fare. At least one Sunday a month, we had to forgo our usual playtime in the red-clay gullies around our modest neighborhood of identical postwar redbrick houses and travel the coast highway to Gulf Park College. It was a beautiful campus with the majestic Friendship Oak overlooking the vast Mississippi Sound. My brother would have to wear a collared shirt and skinny tie, and my sister and I wore white gloves and Mary Janes to the dining hall. A man in a tall white hat carved rounds of beef served with au jus and horseradish sauce, and there were fancy sides like crabmeat au gratin. They even had petits fours for dessert. It was country-club food, even though we were far from country-club people!

Both of these Sunday traditions were authentic Gulf Coast experiences, and my personal cooking and entertaining reflect them both: my cooking, my style, even my home are a little bit rustic, a little bit refined.

A very young wife and mother, I found myself all alone in the kitchen with no help and no experience. My mother, wonderful in so many ways, was cooking “challenged,” and my grandmothers were just far enough away that I didn’t have their guidance. I did my best with a Junior League cookbook, and I found out for the first time that I actually liked to cook. It wasn’t long, though, before no amount of Divine Casserole could keep my young marriage afloat. So with a hundred bucks in my pocket, I put my two girls in my Ford Mustang and a brand-new fifty-dollar vacuum cleaner in the trunk and we headed to Key West. As I crossed the Seven Mile Bridge over those turquoise waters, I figured if it all went south, as my dad would say, I could hock the vacuum for just enough money to get me and my girls back home!

IN Key West we moved in with my brother, Jimmy, who lived in an apartment right next to Louie’s Backyard, one of Key West’s best and most iconic restaurants. Almost the day after I arrived, Jimmy and his friends, including Tom McGuane, who would later become our brother-in-law, took me to a French restaurant, Le Mistral, on Duval Street. I’d had fish stew before, but Chef Renee’s bouillabaisse was something completely different. It was thoroughly French, like he was. On the rare payday occasions that we went out to eat growing up, it was Morrison’s Cafeteria, Roussos Seafood Restaurant, Constantine’s Restaurant, or one of the dives out on the causeway for fried crab claws. This, however, was exotic. The fine wine, the fancy croutons, and the rouille he put on top of the bouillabaisse—it was my first WOW moment in food. I don’t learn by reading. I’ve got to get in there with all my senses and then do it myself. This tasting experience awakened something in me—I wanted to try that… I wanted to do that!

And another thing that made the experience at Le Mistral so alluring was the juxtaposition of this sophisticated, finely crafted food being served in an extraordinarily casual environment. We were eating fancy food wearing cutoffs and flip-flops! The dynamic was similar to the contrast between the cooking cultures of my two grandmothers, and it was on its way to becoming a lifelong theme for me. I just fell in love with the freeing lifestyle of Key West and all its small, personal neighborhood restaurants. I immersed myself in the food, with its focus on seafood—lobster, stone crab, yellowtail snapper, hogfish, grouper, conch.

Key West was a place where enjoying life, expressing yourself, and making and savoring good food and drinks were all one and the same. I’ve carried this point of view with me ever since, and made creating food that captures this spirit my passion and career. Having been barefoot children and then Key West hippies together, Jimmy captures in his music the same attitude I celebrate in my food—songs about friends, about being barefoot and fancy-free, about the adventures and mysteries of life on the water, and, of course, cheeseburgers, margaritas, boat drinks, pitchers of beer, and shrimp beginning to boil.

Life happens. Circumstances took me from Key West back to Alabama and on to New Orleans with another husband who couldn’t settle my gypsy soul. So I was off again, cruising on a yacht cooking for Harrison Ford in Belize. When that job finished, instead of going home, I stayed on the yacht, which took me to New York City for several years, catering weddings and Fortune 500 dinner parties, until I eventually made my way to Los Angeles, where I tried my hand at writing screenplays while I catered on the weekends. I quickly got in step with the alfresco cuisine of the West Coast, with its focus on fresh ingredients and simplicity over complicated techniques.