The Food of New Orleans. John DeMers
queen for the moment—at least until the next party, when another cake is served. "Let them eat cake" is not an insult from royalty here; in New Orleans it can be one of the ways of achieving royalty.
As a matter of geography and government, New Orleans is very much an American city. But to understand New Orleans properly, you have to realize that in terms of culinary innovation, as well as character and personality, it is more than just American—and more than just a city.
In many ways New Orleans is an island, with the river winding along one side, Lake Pontchartrain and its marshes on another, and the Gulf of Mexico to the south. Like an island, it tends to have a style of its own, including its own dialect and distinctive modes of celebration.
In some ways, New Orleans might even be considered to be the northernmost island of the Caribbean. As in most Caribbean spots, there is a black majority but a European heritage and white economic power.
Like the Caribbean, New Orleans also has a native music form, a tradition of Carnival celebrations, poverty alongside a wealthy social class, voodoo, and a form of cooking that is hot and spicy. See New Orleans and, in many ways, you see the New World.
See New Orleans and you're also likely to see some type of celebration, probably one reflecting different parts of the world. Festivals, in general, reign all year in New Orleans.
First and foremost, there is Mardi Gras. The most visual manifestation of the season is the parade. Less visible, but very much a part of the cultural entwining of the city, is a series of Carnival balls, debutante cotillions, and parties, many with their own royalty. Carnival can be as simple as a parade or as deep and anthropological as its pagan roots, its Christian symbolism, and social stratification.
Festivals are thrown for any number of reasons, like this one devoted to shrimp and petroleum Here, the Knights of Columbus and their wives cat shrimp aboard a shrimp boat.
The world embraces the Carnival season's last day—a movable date tailored by Christianity in order to lend some religious significance to the pagan tendency to celebrate the arrival of spring. The Catholic Church gave the celebration a spot on the calendar and a message: a blowout before the onset of fasting. Fasting, in New Orleans, is a passionate form of eating; it focuses both stomach and mind on the next noteworthy meal.
New Orleans, founded by the French, adopted Mardi Gras with enthusiasm. Ironically, as the church became more lax about its rules for Lenten sacrifice, the city began to experience the best of both worlds. The city became adept at the feasting without the fasting.
Next to Mardi Gras, the biggest celebration is the New Orleans Jazzfest, which is spread over two weekends in late April and early May. Unlike Carnival, at which celebrants prefer liquid nourishment punctuated by the simplest fried chicken or smoked sausage, Jazzfest is about cuisine. As its full name, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, implies, this gathering is devoted to anything and everything that defines a people—which in New Orleans means music, art, and plenty of food.
A highlight of any Jazzfest day is strolling through the rows of food booths serving up Creole, Cajun, soul, African, Caribbean, and just about any other cuisine that ever crossed paths with New Orleans. You can't expect all the tastes to get along perfectly in your mouth, but you can expect them to get along—a mirror of New Orleans in more ways than one.
Yet for all the flavors of Carnival and Jazzfest, sometimes it is the smaller celebrations that can be the most charming.
St. Patrick's Day is celebrated by the Irish here, as it is everywhere else the Irish have settled. The difference is that the local version has a Mardi Gras touch, including floats. And whereas on Mardi Gras trinkets are thrown from the floats, the St. Patrick's revelers throw (what else?) food. You can bring home the makings of an Irish meal—cabbages, potatoes, carrots, and onions—if an Irish meal is your idea of a good time.
Two days later, the local Sicilians celebrate St. Joseph's Day by building altars to their patron saint. The altars are laden with food, from warm and savory vegetable dishes to cookies of every stripe. Many of these altars are built as repayment for favors granted to those who prayed to St. Joseph.
In another of this city's delightful entanglements, St. Joseph is also honored by the city's African-American community. By tradition, the Mardi Gras Indians—"tribes" of African-Americans who wear glittery native American costumes on Mardi Gras—make one appearance outside of the Carnival parade. And that is on a weekend around St. Joseph's Day.
These March Gras costumes celebrate the great marriage of Louisiana's most favored hot sauce and its best-loved bivalve—the oyster.
Only in New Orleans can you get over your hangover from an Irish party by cheering your way through a Sicilian parade while rocking to the rhythms of Africans dressed as Indians. It's as if the American melting pot went ahead and melted, right here in New Orleans. Believe me: New Orleanians wouldn't have it any other way.
The New Orleans Bar
A lively historical reflection on the city's "spiritual" life
by John DeMers
Thanks to its roots in the ever-imbibing Mediterranean world and its own much-proclaimed "Mardi Gras mentality," New Orleans and drinking have sounded natural in the same sentence as long as people have been talking about us. That, of course, is a very long time.
It follows that the city has made significant contributions to the history of the American cocktail — perhaps even the word cocktail itself. According to the preferred local legend (there are other, non-New Orleans theories, but none carries any more weight), it all goes back to Antoine Peychaud.
If the man's name is now known primarily in association with Peychaud bitters, his fame strikes to the heart of America's history as a hard-drinking young nation. Peychaud, we're told, came to New Orleans from the Caribbean island of Santo Domingo in the late 1700s after a particularly violent slave uprising there. Many upper-crust planters made the crossing then, with the same save-their-skins idea in mind.
An oversized concoction known as the Hurricane, as created at Pat O'Brien's bar, dwarfs more reasonably-sized New Orleans libations.
Once settled in the Crescent City, Peychaud took to dispensing a brandy-based cure-all from his apothecary on Royal Street. He eased a new word into the English language by serving this welcome relief in the larger side of a double-ended egg cup, known in French as a coquetier.
With this city's long-appreciated penchant for mispronunciation, coquetier quickly became cock-tay and then finally cocktail According to the story, the idea of having a drink just because you felt like it spread from here to the rest of the still-young United States, and the New Orleans name cocktail went along with it.
Over the years, and into our own day, great New Orleans drinks remain the stuff of tourist excesses as well as local celebrations. Even with the evolution of public taste away from hard liquor and more toward white wine, it's hard to imagine New Orleans without Hurricanes, Sazeracs, Ramos Gin Fizzes, and a handful of other drinks either invented here or taken to a higher level so skillfully that they became "ours" nonetheless.
"When you go to New Orleans, my son," said a newspaper in the 1880s, "drink a Sazerac cocktail for me and one for yourself." Pride of place among local drinks is owned by this concoction of whiskey, sugar, bitters, and an anise-flavored cordial. The cocktail took its name from a French brandy put out by a company called Sazerac-du-Forge. The brandy was imported by John Schiller, who opened the Sazerac Coffee House in 1850 at No. 13 Exchange Alley.
When Thomas Handy took over the place in 1870, he adjusted the recipe to include just a dash of absinthe and a splash of red Peychaud bitters. Ironically, he replaced the brandy that had given the drink its name with American-made whiskey.
When