Wednesday, May 3, 2017.
Prejean's Returns With Pheasant Gumbo, But No Ruby Red Shrimp. Salvation From An Attacking Bay Leaf.
One of the most popular food vendors at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival is Prejean's, a well-known restaurant just north of Lafayette, Louisiana in Carencro. The restaurant appeared at nearly exact moment in history when Chef Paul Prudhomme and his fellow down-to-earth Cajun cooks began changing the food scene. That was also the approximate time when the nouvette Creole revolution began becoming obvious in New Orleans. But in Lafaette, there was a longer distance to travel to make Cajun restaurants of the time more adventuresome. Most restaurants in Cajun country in the 1970s and 1980s were much less flashy, with very simple cooking is everyday dining rooms.
That's the story as rendered by Bob Guilbeau, who launched the new Cajun era with the help of some very ambitious chefs through its big-deal restaurant Prejean's. During all this, Prejean's took its food to the Jazz Festival in New Orleans. Instead of anything conventional, Prejean's slot served a gumbo made from pheasant, quail, and ducks.
They also attracted attention with ruby red shrimp, a species that came from much deeper waters off the Florida Gulf Coast than in the Louisiana Gulf. Those shrimp were striking to look at and delicious to eat, but they were not to live long. The way Guilbeau tells it--and his stories are always full of drama--the fishermen discovered how to electronically pick up the trail of the shrimp. Using that technology, they have been able to nearly decimate the ruby-red population.
Guilbeau was just getting started at that point, but the first hour of the program was about over. I told him that we would all show up at his Festival booth for the duration of the rest of the story. Because, after all, Guilbeau was in our studio, but I was at home. A tremendous thunderstorm system was projected for the most of the afternoon and evening, carrying flood-bearing precipitation and winds as high as 50 miles per hour.
Mary Ann and I barely avoided the storm by dining quickly at Fork and Cork. Neither of us was all that hungry, either. I had a sort of stewed version of tenderloin beef tips. MA had a bowl of gumbo, in which she found a small bay leaf. In the very earliest years of my radio show, someone called in to say that if you swallow a bay leaf, it can choke you to death. It was hard to imagine this little leaf as having anything close to that kind of stroke.
But that day, the conversation went on for hours. Finally a doctor called in and gave us the truth: "You can choke on anything," he said. "I never needed to extract a bay leaf, nor have I ever heard of any other doctor's having to do so." Mary Ann in particular breathed a sign of relief. She lived on. We made a run for our car between, it seemed, bolts of lightning.
Forks & Corks. Covington: 141 TerraBella Blvd. 985-273-3663.
