Food is Family

by

Nicki Leone

 

Like most people who like to cook, I have a collection of favorite cookbooks that get opened and used and abused and eventually replaced with clean copies. Also, like most people who cook, I have a collection of accumulated recipes from family, friends, neighbors and other accidental sources that don’t reside in any cookbook, but as a miscellanea of recipe cards, letters, scribbled notes on envelopes, printed emails and clipped newspaper or magazine articles. As a rule in my kitchen, if I am trying something new it is usually a recipe to be found in one of the cookbooks. But if I am making something familiar, it is usually from the casual stack of collected recipes on the back counter that have been accumulating, slowly, all my life.

They live in not very organized fashion in a couple of small wooden recipe boxes stuffed to overflowing, and if I have had them out recently, then fixed to my refrigerator with a couple of chipped magnets. Right now, the fridge sports a couple of paintings done by my nephews, the menu page ripped from the phone book of the closest Chinese restaurant that will deliver,  the scribbled directions for making apple cake, and a stained envelope with a long list of ingredients and sketchy instructions for my mother’s meatloaf. Some of these recipes I know so well that I only need glance at the ingredients to remind myself how to make the dish (like the family recipe for chicken-fried steak, which in our house was called “Salero Special”). Others I use only seasonally, like mom’s Pfeffernusse cookies at Christmas, or for special occasions like the “Chicken Romano” that remains, to this day, my very favorite chicken dish. Paper-clipped together nearby are a couple of recipes for pizelle that came courtesy Grandma Riga (my childhood best friend’s grandmother) and a recipe for challah from a Jewish friend’s grandmother that I have never been able to successfully reproduce because the liquid ingredients are measured in “glasses”; half a glass of oil, a quarter glass of honey, 2 glasses of water. Unfortunately, no one knows the size of the all-important original “glass” and the people we might have asked have long since departed this earth. I keep trying, though. Periodically taking out the recipe and making a guess at the amounts, then asking my friend to taste the more successful results. “Is this it?” I’ll say, handing her a couple rich slices. “No, not quite,” is her sad, but inevitable answer.

This haphazardly-collected history of my family’s favorite meals was very much on my mind when I recently attended a presentation panel of food writers called “Talking Across the Table: Food Writing in the New South.” It wasn’t as stuffy and academic as the name makes it sound. It was really just a gathering of people who loved food, loved tradition, and loved to explore the place where those two things intersected. I’m pretty sure everyone in the audience—even me—was there because we each secretly dreamed of creating our own “family cookbook” and wanted tell the panelists all about it. I’ve seen people at author readings who only want to tell the poor writer about the manuscript they have stashed in their desk drawer at home. The people in this group were all just itching to tell the panelists about their own favorite family recipe for barbecue and biscuits. Luckily, unlike the hapless writer of novels, the people on this panel were willing and even eager to listen. So for several hours we all traded recipe stories, because Southern food, as one woman put it, “is food that you talk about.”

It was an event tinged with both melancholy and hope. Melancholy, because we live in a culture that feels increasingly homogenized, where every restaurant is franchised, every meal designed to be cooked in a microwave and served through a drive-through window. The country highways in my state are lined with old diners and barbecue joints long since shut down. No one takes the time to eat, because no one has the time to cook. And hope, because there are signs that times are changing, that we are changing. We can see it in the growing popularity of farmer’s markets and “buy local” movements, in the popularity of local cooking classes, and the desire for community cookbooks. Nowhere is this change in attitude better illustrated than in what happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina decimated the city on August 29, 2005.

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

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

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

Cooking Up a Storm: Recipes Lost and Found from The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, by Marcelle Bienvenu and Judy Walker is the newspaper’s attempt to bring the best of the recipes and the best of the stories into one place—not, perhaps, for the people of New Orleans; they have already been on this journey of rediscovery. I think, instead, the book is for everybody else; for the people like those of us sitting in the audience at that panel, who are just rediscovering how to cook and how to eat. Who are only just now beginning to realize that food is family.

I realized I had better get my act together and safeguard my collection of family recipes because they are as precious as any old photograph, any piece of handed down jewelry. An insurance adjuster tallying the items of value in my house would probably put a hefty price on the extensive cookbook collection, while no doubt passing right over the piles of index cards on the counter without comment. But it is the index cards that are really valuable. Cookbooks can be replaced. On the other hand, my gathered notes and memories of a hundred meals with friends and family are a unique occurrence in the history of the universe, never to be truly reproduced—something made quite clear to me every time I try to recreate a friend’s family recipe for challah and fail.

Books mentioned in this column:
Cooking Up a Storm: Recipes Lost and Found from The Times-Picayune of New Orleans by Marcelle Bienvenu and Judy Walker (Chronicle Books, 2008)
River Road Recipes by the Junior League of Baton Rouge (Junior League of Baton Rouge, LA, 1959)
Big Mama’s Old Black Pot by Ethel Dixon (Stoke Gabriel, Incorporated, 1987)
The Picayune’s Creole Cookbook by the New Orleans Times-Picayune (Dover, 2002)


Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.