CHAPTER FIVE
All Food, All the Time
A BREAK AND A BOOM
During the time spanned by my enrichment program with Dick, Marcelle, and Emeril, it became clear that it was time for me to shift all my career eggs into one basket. It was a conscious, considered plan, but outside forces pushed in that direction, too. My daily talk show came to an end in 1983, when the station changed formats from talk to rock. After Figaro went bust during my editorship of it, I decided to give up on a generalized career in the media and specialize in covering food and wine exclusively.
I thought this had a good chance of working, even though freelancing can keep one awake at night worrying about where the next check is coming from. But the timing couldn’t have been better. A restaurant boom was under way. The gourmet Creole bistros were sprouting across the city. Many new major hotels and restaurants were opening, to take advantage of the tourism expected from the 1984 New Orleans World’s Fair.
And there was one other new attraction: world cuisines. New Orleans, like many other places with a strong regional cooking style, has always been suspicious of ethnic cooking. We had a few Chinese and Mexican places (most of them mediocre), and that was about it. French and Italian hardly counted as ethnic, since most of those had been around long enough to hybridize with Creole cooking. But restaurants were the new rock and roll for a lot of boomers. They dined out much more frequently than their parents did and were far more likely to try new food. When a critical mass of diners appeared, many would-be ethnic restaurateurs were waiting for the chance.
In about five years, the number of noteworthy eateries in New Orleans doubled. I know this because I was publishing my restaurant guide every year or two. In 1981, it was possible to cover the essence of the dining scene in a hundred reviews without leaving out any important establishments. By 1986, this could not be done with fewer than two hundred.
Even with their increased numbers, the restaurants were busier than they had been when just half their number were around. The New Orleans food culture was spreading to parts of the population that had previously ignored restaurants above the sandwich-shop level. Meanwhile, we continued to love our red beans, gumbo, poor boys, and fried seafood. In fact, eating in restaurants was such a strong interest among New Orleanians that another radio station hired me to give daily reviews shortly after I lost the previous gig. With the exception of the two months following Katrina, I haven’t been off the air since.
INTO THE KITCHEN
My loose schedule gave me the chance to build my skills as a cook. In doing so, I discovered a principle I’ve preached to my listeners and readers ever since: Really, basic cooking is not difficult. What most people lack—the lack of which scares them away from cooking—is the knowledge of what tastes good. Having a clear idea of how a finished dish should look, smell, and taste does more for one’s cooking than any technique or ingredient. I already knew what I wanted to taste in a large number of dishes; I’d learned that from the hundreds of restaurant reviews I’d written.
The first ambitious dish I undertook to re-create in my kitchen was oysters Rockefeller, in the style of Antoine’s, the originator of the dish. The recipe is such a secret that Roy Guste, Jr., didn’t include it when he wrote the otherwise comprehensive Antoine’s Restaurant Cookbook. And he’s the great-great-grandson of Antoine Alciatore! However, I knew exactly what Antoine’s oysters Rockefeller tasted like. I was determined to puzzle out how those flavors were arrived at.
The sleuthing was fun. I knew the recipe contained no spinach, but what were those greens? A cook at Antoine’s gave me a hint: Most of the ingredients for the sauce appeared in the restaurant’s peculiar, cubist Bayard salad. So, chopped celery, parsley, green onions, and anchovies. In the finished dish, it was easy to detect a blond roux and bread crumbs. Another cook, at Brennan’s, told me he thought there was a touch of tomato in there—maybe even ketchup. Where did the anise flavor come from? It occurred to me that Peychaud’s Bitters—an essential ingredient in a Sazerac cocktail, originally made in a pharmacy around the corner from Antoine’s—might provide that.
I tried all these ideas, tweaking the recipe as I got closer to the flavor and texture of the original. I wound up throwing out the Peychaud’s. When I replaced some of the celery with fennel, the recipe took a big leap forward. The anchovies were a good addition, too. I quit after the fiftieth effort. It tasted right to me by then, even though the color was more brown than green. (I later learned this was because Antoine’s used green food coloring in its sauce.)
Considering the complexity and secrecy of the recipe, it really wasn’t so hard. If that’s all there is to cooking, I thought, then I can cook. So, using the same techniques, I worked up the recipes for a bunch of other dishes I liked—most of them from restaurants, a few from family. It became my first cookbook, a minimal tome called The Ten Best New Orleans Recipes, and a Hundred More. It was as much a lavish description of those top restaurant dishes as it was a cookbook. A lot of people bought it as a dining guide. Once again, I found that more people like to eat than like to cook.
Next, someone at the radio station saw the booklet and asked me to begin a new daily recipe program. As suddenly as I became a restaurant critic—and with no more formal training—I was now a recipe developer. A few months later, the ABC television station in town recruited me to cover both eating and cooking in a single weekly piece for the local TV news. I’d go to a restaurant with a cameraperson; we’d shoot around the place while I gave a fast review of the food; then we’d head to the kitchen, where the chef would demonstrate a dish. When I took what I knew of the dish home, I then fooled around with it until it tasted right and wrote it down; oftentimes this was the first time the recipe had been put down on paper in language a nonprofessional cook could use. We mailed out the recipes to anyone who asked, and I also ran them in The New Orleans Menu.
Producing that show gave me a lot of kitchen practice. It also revealed to me what people liked to cook and eat. The most-requested recipes were familiar local dishes—the kind I would have guessed everyone already knew. Now and then, a clever new dish from a gourmet Creole bistro would grab the viewers. But far more popular were gumbo, barbecue shrimp, crawfish étouffée, and other Creole standards. So maybe all this new cuisine from Emeril and the bistro chefs wasn’t penetrating as deeply into the local cooking culture as we all had assumed.
In 1985, chef Andrea Apuzzo and his cousins Roberto and Costantino De Angelis—scions of a family that operates hotels and restaurants in Capri—had opened the most ambitious Italian restaurant New Orleans had ever seen. Unlike its competitors, most of which served what could only be called Creole Italian food, Andrea’s emphasized Northern Italian cookery. One day as I was lunching at the restaurant, I asked Chef Andrea for the recipe for veal Tanet, one of his signature dishes. “Let’s just go back into the kitchen and I’ll show you,” he said. I watched and got it all down. We brought the finished dish back to the table and ate it. Andrea—never one to pass up an opportunity to expand his coverage—asked if I’d be interested in helping him write a cookbook.
For more than a year, Chef Andrea and I spent two or three mornings a week in his kitchen, preparing more than 300 dishes. I propped the original laptop computer (yes, a Radio Shack Model 100) on the stove and wrote the recipes as he cooked them. We measured everything carefully—something he’d never done before for most of his recipes. When he did something that mystified me, I asked him why. Sometimes it was just a tic. But in most cases he held forth on why certain procedures were important to a dish.
I learned more about the fine points of cooking from that year of recipe testing than the sum of what I already knew. Andrea’s food was very different from the Creole food I was accustomed to cooking and eating. He didn’t use roux in anything, for example. He disdained deep-frying. He used much less salt and pepper than was common in New Orleans dishes. Still, I found that much of what I picked up from Andrea could be applied to Creole and various other styles of cooking. It added a new dimension to my abilities at the stove. I discovered more than a few tools I’d never used before, too. Even so, my earlier principle remained solid. Since I knew what Andrea’s food tasted like before I started cooking it, I avoided many mistakes.
La Cucina di Andrea’s was a fine cookbook, full of color photos
One of the great paradoxes of New Orleans cooking is that while it’s easy to recognize by taste, it’s almost impossible to define. We see this most maddeningly in gumbo. If a hundred New Orleans cooks (native or naturalized) were asked to make gumbo, the result would be a hundred different soups, all of which would be recognizable as gumbo. But it’s also possible that someone using all the standard ingredients and techniques for gumbo can wind up with something nongumbo that tastes as if it had come from Ponca City, Oklahoma. I am not the first to draw a parallel between this effect and Louis Armstrong’s famous answer when asked to define jazz: “If you have to ask, you’ll never know.”
But we do know that roux is the cornerstone of a very large number of Creole and Cajun dishes. Not all of them, mind you. But if you can’t make a roux, you won’t get far as a Louisiana cook. Roux is nothing more than flour mixed with oil (or butter or some other fat) and browned. The practice comes straight out of orthodox French cooking. French chefs for the most part have left roux behind—although knowing how to make it is still considered an essential skill. But roux lives on in Louisiana, where the making of it has quasi-religious aspects. There are two universal precepts for making a roux:
1. Never stop stirring the roux while cooking it. Otherwise it will burn, and then you have to throw it away and start over.
2. While stirring, never let roux splash onto your hand or arm. Hot roux burns all the way to the bone (or feels that way). This is why most roux is made in a saucepan instead of a skillet.
Then there’s this commandment, for which there are dispensations:
3. Have the onions, celery, and bell peppers (aka “the Holy Trinity”) all chopped up and ready to go into the roux once it’s reached the right color. The vegetables will caramelize in the lavalike roux and cool it down at the same time.
The Louisiana style of making roux is to brown the flour in the fat itself. (In France, the flour is usually browned on its own, in a dry pan on the stove or in the oven.) How brown you let the roux become depends on the recipe. A blond roux is a pale tan. The darkest roux is such a dark brown that it’s almost black. Somewhere in between is what Creole cooks call a red roux—one the color of a no-longer-shiny penny. The best tool for stirring is a “roux stick”—a wooden spoon with a flat outer edge.
Every Creole and Cajun cook has his or her own roux rituals and will say that these are critically important. Here are mine. (See list below.)
To those who don’t make it, the whole idea of roux sounds less than appetizing and like a lot of work. Why add more fat and carbohydrates to extend, color, or thicken a soup or a sauce? Well . . . if you have to ask, you’ll never know. and great recipes, if I do say so myself. Twenty years later, it doesn’t seem dated. It’s still one of the books I refer to most often, and I only hear good things from people who buy it.
After writing La Cucina di Andrea’s, my own recipe work seemed vastly easier. And my newfound facility at the stove made the radio show I would soon begin much better than the all-eating, no-cooking show I did before.
A NEW GAME, A BROKEN RECIPE
My freelance gamble was a winner. The flexibility it gave me allowed me to take on projects like Andrea’s cookbook and to travel much more widely—first to the major food and wine cities of America, then to Europe. I loved what I was doing and believed I was getting very good at it.
My home life was nothing to write home about, however. When you have lunch and dinner in restaurants seven days a week, home becomes a bedroom and a bathroom. That didn’t bother me, but it did seem to matter to the women I dated. We were all in our thirties now, and they were becoming more frank about permanent nesting. I felt no such urgency.
My wife says that were it not for her, I would still live that way. I shoot the same charge back at her: She was in her thirties when we met, and she was still living with her parents. But we did meet, and the meeting changed our lives. She hired me for a new daily radio show. Seven months later we were married. It happened as quickly as I’m making it sound.
Mary Ann Connell managed the programming at WSMB, an old AM talk station, whose new owner wanted to clean house and start fresh. (That owner was Marc Winston, yet another diner at our New Orleans magazine Christmas dinner in 1975. One of my 500 People!) Mary Ann only knew me a little, and the impression I had made on her was not good. But a friend she trusted urged her to contact me anyway about hosting a food talk show.
I had to think long and hard about her request. On the one hand, it would mean strapping myself to a fixed daily schedule for the first time in years. On the other, my urge to be on the air remained undiminished. Plus, the money they offered me was very serious. I decided to give it a shot. I could always quit, right?
That was July 1988. I still hold that job. But something even bigger came of it. Watching Mary Ann walk around the station pushed my romance button. Unfortunately, she felt no similar warmth at the time. That didn’t stop me from tricking her into going out with me. (That’s the way she describes it.) We had a pair of comical dates, during which she refused to admit that we were even on a date.
As the second nondate played out, though, we both knew that marriage was inevitable. I had never been in love like that before. And to a woman who thought that gourmet food was just so much hydrogen sulfide waiting to happen! Give her the simple stuff, she said (and still says).
When Mary Ann was fired from the radio station after a few more weeks, we kept our mutual gig going. We were married in February 1989. As soon as possible thereafter we were parents of a son, Jude. Three years later came a girl, Mary Leigh. Mary Ann was a natural mother, and she happily forgot about her career so she could enjoy the experience to the fullest. She mothered brilliantly, and we have two great kids to prove it.
For my part, nothing could surpass the pleasure I got from being a dad. My son gave me a second boyhood, one I relished, as he enjoyed his first. I felt the same kind of joy gazing at my daughter’s cute little face at birth, or at the beautiful young woman she’d become during one of the daddy-daughter dinner dates we started having early on.
Jude made his first visit to a restaurant when he was just three weeks old, when Mary Ann and I had a romantic dinner at Brennan’s. Baby Jude slept through the meal in a little carrier on the table, next to a basket holding the 1967 Chateau Cos d’Estournel. (Few such dinners went that well.) Until they were preteens, our children were always with us. Mary Ann didn’t like leaving the kids with sitters—not even her numerous siblings. On the few occasions when we did, she couldn’t keep her mind off what might be happening, and couldn’t enjoy the evening.
She did want to be included in dinners at really fabulous places, especially those with the cachet of celebrity. The preopening dinner at Emeril’s, for example. It was filled with Emeril Lagasse’s many friends in the restaurant business. He wasn’t yet famous, but his seven years at Commander’s Palace made him the most important chef in New Orleans. It was quite a party.
Among the attendees at Emeril’s premiere was Jude, now nine months old. He sat in his high chair among the top princes and patrons of the New Orleans restaurant world, as they partied, drank, and feasted. It was utterly absurd. When I recall the moment, I smile and shake my head at the same time, with fond memory and embarrassment eclipsing the real significance of that opening. It wasn’t the first or last time my attempt to be a restaurant critic and daddy at the same time ended up with my not being either one very well.
But what could be done? I didn’t want to—and couldn’t—give up either role. So we just tolerated the inevitable and frequent contretemps. I’d stay out eating at Commander’s Palace with Dick and Marcelle until midnight, then wake up at six o’clock the next morning to drive the kids to school. I’d test-cook my original gourmet dishes during the week, then grill hot dogs over a wood fire in the middle of nowhere for Jude and the other Boy Scouts on weekends. I decried the depredations of chain restaurants on the local food culture, but took the kids to Shoney’s, with its offensive but highly kid-friendly breakfast buffet, every Saturday. I had to be unambiguously either critic or daddy at any given moment—and being daddy required willing suspension of taste. It could get a little schizoid at times.
It was the right thing to do, though. As wonderful a life as my pursuit of the culinary heights has given me, nothing could compare with the fifteen years of Saturday morning breakfasts my children and I shared. It was an anchor of our lives, until puberty dislodged it, first for Jude, then Mary Leigh. But those breakfasts left a golden glow in my heart that will last until the day I die (which will probably be from eating all that bacon and all those trans fat–loaded biscuits).
THE EAT CLUB
If I’m remembered for anything after I’m gone, I hope it will be for the New Orleans Eat Club. Launched in the early 1990s, the Eat Club is a series of weekly wine dinners I host in restaurants around town. They’re attended by my radio listeners and readers—anybody who wants to come.
My original motivation for the Eat Club was to enhance my coverage of the restaurant scene by borrowing the appetites, time, and money of other diners. All of those resources were in shorter supply after I became a family man with a growing waistline. Meanwhile, the number of restaurants was increasing, and so were changes to the menus in the existing ones. Through the Eat Club, I could sample a wider range of dishes and wines in a single meal than I could have otherwise, with less stress on my no-expense-account budget.
My wife thought the idea of dining out with radio listeners was crazy. During her years as a talk show host, she had a few stalkers emerge from her audience. It’s a common experience among radio people; the plot of the movie Play Misty for Me is not exaggerated. But I have always enjoyed an audience of unusual quality; selecting for gourmets and cooks selects against weirdos. I go months between crank calls on the air; hosts of other types of programs typically get them hourly.
Eight very pleasant people showed up for the first dinner, hosted by chef Horst Pfeifer at Bella Luna, his stunning eatery in the French Market. The restaurant had great food and a magnificent view of the Mississippi River. (Sadly, it was ruined by Hurricane Katrina and never reopened.) We had five courses, beginning with house-made fettuccine, garnished at the table with grated white truffles. From there, the diners ordered from the menu, each getting something different. I brought eight bottles of wine. We stole this dinner at forty dollars, all-inclusive.
At this table of complete strangers (to one another as well as to me), the conversation came as easily as if we were all family. We talked strictly about food. This food we were eating, the food we loved the last time we were there, the food we loved the last time we were somewhere else, the food we might discover tomorrow. Then how lucky we were to live in a place with such superb, eminently local eats. How naturally the enjoyment came, and how the passion united us!
We even talked about the way we talk about food all the time. I told a story about a radio ad executive who came to town from the Northeast. Right before he left in frustration a year later, he revealed to me that he couldn’t get conversations going when he took clients out to lunch. “I try to talk business, sports, politics, real estate, and—nothing!” he said, shaking his head. “The only thing on their minds is food!” The Eat Club table found that hilarious.
After a few more iterations, the dinners began to grow uncontrollably. When they sold out, listeners got mad at me for not accepting a few more diners. They wanted to sign up for future meals before they were even planned. Chefs loved doing the dinners, even though they generally lost money on them, because of all the on-air talk that came out of them.
I tried to keep a lid on the demand by adding a surcharge, which I turned over to the Second Harvest Food Bank. That only increased the demand. Before the year was out, we were selling out dinners to thirty or forty people every week. The whole-menu format had to be shifted to a set-menu one. And instead of spending the evening at one table, I moved around from table to table, having a course at each one.
We still sell out Eat Club dinners every week. The record for attendance was set at an oyster and lobster dinner at Drago’s, the city’s leading casual seafood house: 258 people. Drago’s had gas grills for the oysters and washtubs for boiling lobsters in the parking lot. I was so busy visiting tables that I didn’t get a chance to eat.
Our smallest dinner (after the first few trial runs) hosted sixteen people at a single oval table of sleek polished wood, in the wine cellar of the Windsor Court Grill Room. The chef dictated that number, because he wanted to serve a complex dinner with rare wines. It was scheduled for September 13, 2001. Although restaurants all over America were empty that night, all sixteen Eat Clubbers showed up. It was one evening when we did not talk mostly about food (even though what we were being served was extraordinary).
I recall that the sea scallops were the size of filets mignon and outstanding. Even that night, with the recent news riveting our attention, we didn’t forget completely about the comforting pleasures of food. We never do here in New Orleans. In a way, that night was a precursor of how we’d handle another tragedy four years later.
RECIPE
My Oysters Rockefeller
The most surprising request for a recipe I ever received came from Bernard Guste, the fifth-generation proprietor of Antoine’s. He wanted to use my recipe for oysters Rockefeller. Antoine’s invented the dish in 1899 and has kept the recipe a secret ever since. But they needed something to give the many people who ask for it. Guste told me that my recipe is “embarrassingly close” to the real thing. I’m flattered. And if I do say so myself, he’s right. It took me about fifty tries to create a match for the flavor of Antoine’s great specialty.
Which does not and never did include either spinach or Mornay sauce, as most recipes call for. Oysters Rockefeller has always been among my favorite Creole-French dishes and one that creates its own special occasion when you make it.
2 cups celery, chopped
1½ cups green onion tops, chopped
2 cups parsley, chopped with stems removed
1 cup fresh fennel, chopped
1 cup watercress, chopped
½ tsp. fresh garlic, chopped
3 anchovy fillets
Liquer from four dozen oysters plus enough water to make two cups
1 tsp. sugar
¼ cup ketchup
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. white pepper
½ tsp. cayenne
1 Tbs. Worcestershire sauce
2 dashes Peychaud’s Bitters
2 drops green food coloring (optional, but authentic)
2 sticks butter
1 cup flour
1½ cups very fine fresh bread crumbs
Four dozen oysters
Preheat oven to 450 degrees.
1. Combine the vegetables and the anchovies in small batches, and chop to a near-puree in a food processor, using just enough of the oyster water to help things along.
2. Combine this green slurry and the rest of the water in a saucepan, and cook over low heat, stirring every now and then, until the excess water is gone but the greens remain very moist. Add sugar, ketchup, salt, white pepper, cayenne, Worcestershire, bitters, and food coloring.
3. Make a blond roux with the butter and flour. Blend well into the greens, until the sauce takes on a different, lighter texture. Then mix in the bread crumbs.
4. Place large, fresh oysters into oyster shells, small ovenproof ramekins, or small au gratin dishes. Top each oyster with a generous tablespoon of sauce (or more, if you like). Bake fifteen minutes, or until the top of the sauce has barely begun to brown. Serve immediately.
Note: If you bake oysters using oyster shells, serve on a bed of rock salt or a napkin to keep the shells from rocking.
SERVES EIGHT.
RECIPE
Red Snapper Basilico
This is one of the most popular fish dishes at Andrea’s, and one of the best, too. The sauce is light but complex, with understated herbal flavors. My favorite match for the basilico sauce is red snapper, but it works with almost any white fish. The recipe comes from La Cucina di Andrea’s, the cookbook I wrote with chef Andrea Apuzzo in the 1980s.
Fish Marinade
¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil
¼ cup dry white wine
1 Tbs. lemon juice
½ tsp. Worcestershire sauce
Dash Tabasco
Fish
4 red snapper fillets, 8 to 10 oz. each
Salt and pepper
Trace flour
¼ cup vegetable oil
3 Tbs. extra-virgin olive oil
3 Tbs. onion, chopped
2 tsp. garlic, chopped
½ cup fresh tomatoes, peeled, seeds removed, and cut into small cubes
¼ cup dry white wine
½ cup fish stock
1 Tbs. small capers
1 tsp. lemon juice
¼ tsp. Worcestershire sauce
¼ cup fresh mushrooms, sliced
4 Tbs. fresh basil leaves, chopped
1 Tbs. Italian parsley, chopped
1. Wash the fish under cold water, and pat dry. Mix all marinade ingredients together. Marinate the fish for a minute or two on each side. Sprinkle the fillets lightly with salt, pepper, and flour.
2. Heat the vegetable oil in a large sauté pan over medium heat. Put two fillets of snapper at a time into the pan, and cook three to five minutes per side, until the exterior of the fish is crusty. Remove the fish from the pan, and keep warm.
3. Pour out the remaining vegetable oil, but don’t clean the pan. Add and heat the extra-virgin olive oil over medium heat. Sauté the onion and garlic until lightly browned around the edges.
4. Stir in the tomatoes, heat through, and then add the white wine. Bring to a boil, then add the fish stock, capers, lemon juice, and Worcestershire. Return to a boil and reduce by about half, over low heat.
5. Add mushrooms and heat through. Add basil and parsley. Add salt and pepper to taste. Nap the hot sauce over the fish, and serve immediately.
SERVES FOUR.
RECIPE
Ragout of Mushrooms with Grits
Prepared in a ragout, mushrooms achieve a much more intense flavor than they would if simply sautéed in butter. As for the mushrooms, standard white ones are fine, but it’s better to mix in some wild species.
Grits
2 cups half-and-half
½ tsp. salt
¾ cup grits, preferably Anson Mills stone-ground white grits
2 Tbs. butter
Ragout
1 stick butter
6 Tbs. flour
2 Tbs. onions, chopped
½ square (½ oz.) Baker’s dark chocolate
¾ cup half-and-half
½ cup warm, strong beef stock or broth
½ cup port, Madeira, or Marsala wine
16 oz. assorted mushrooms, cleaned and sliced into pieces the size of garlic cloves
¼ tsp. marjoram
1 tsp. Worcestershire sauce
½ tsp. salt
3 dashes Tabasco chipotle-pepper sauce
Salt and pepper
1. Make the grits first by bringing the half-and-half and the salt to a light boil. Stir in the grits, and lower the heat to the lowest temperature. Cook, stirring now and then, until a furrow you make drawing a spoon across the surface remains for a few seconds. Remove from the heat. Let the butter melt on top of the hot grits, and tilt the pan around to coat the surface with butter (don’t stir it in). Keep the grits warm, covered, in an oven at the lowest setting.
2. For the ragout, melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat, and add the flour. Make a light brown roux, stirring constantly until the mixture reaches the color of a brown paper bag. Add the onions and the chocolate, and remove from the heat. Continue to stir until the chocolate fully melts.
3. Whisk in the half-and-half until the mixture takes on the texture of mashed potatoes. Whisk in the beef stock and the wine until well blended. Add the remaining ingredients, and lower the heat to the lowest temperature. Cover and cook for about fifteen minutes, stirring every now and then, until the mixture is very thick and the mushrooms are very soft. Adjust salt and pepper to taste.
4. Stir in that butter on top of the grits, and spoon onto plates. Surround or top the grits (at your discretion) with the mushroom ragout. Serve with steak, roast beef, roast pork, or lamb leg.
SERVES SIX TO EIGHT.
