Monday, January 26, 2009. Why We Are What We Are.
A couple of years ago, I read my ex-friend Alan Richman's GQ article. This is the guy who came to New Orleans ten months after Hurricane Katrina, and wanted to know why our restaurants weren't up to speed.
This morning I remembered what I was doing at the time. Other than fuming, I mean. I was sitting at the kitchen counter, drinking a cup of café au lait, made the way I make it every morning. That's too powerful for even regular drinkers of chicory coffee to drink straight. But I cut it with an equal amount of hot milk. The way they serve it in the French Market. The way many New Orleanians--and only New Orleanians, in all of America--like their coffee.
All that came to mind this morning as I was setting up the coffeemaker to make some more of the stuff. I remembered some other things. Specifically, a tour of a farm in Napa I took some twenty years ago with a bunch of chefs, food writers, and sommeliers. We were in a field of Belgian endives being harvested after their first stage of growth. (The second stage, which makes the little heads of that fine bitter lettuce, we were to see later.) "The roots of this stuff is what we call chicory in New Orleans," I said to nobody in particular.
"Yeah, chicory," said somebody. Not one of the chefs. I would have remembered which one, but I don't. "That stuff you ruin coffee with in New Orleans."
"Try it, you'll like it," I said.
"I don't think so," he said.
The country was in the early stages of its gourmet coffee era then. No longer could a claim that New Orleans had the best coffee in America (I still think we do) go unchallenged. Even Commander's Palace, which steadfastly continues to serve French Market coffee and chicory as its house blend, finds its out-of-town customers grimacing and complaining about the coffee.
Their problem--and that of the guy on the farm in Napa--was that they assumed that the rules of taste in the rest of the country apply with equal force in New Orleans.
They do not.
They don't, any more than American standards of taste apply in Italy, China, Japan, France, or Argentina. In all of those places, the people developed their own raw foodstuffs, methods of cooking, and flavors. They enjoy them as much--and probably more--than Americans enjoy the food they eat. Their tastes and their food grew up together, and now are an integral part of their culture.
When you travel to any of those places, if you really enjoy yourself it's probably because you allow yourself to be edified by the differences between their cultures and ours. Not because you're relieved to find the samenesses.
All of that can be said about New Orleans and its food. Creole and Cajun are not just minor variations on American food. They're full-blown ethnic cuisines. Many cookbooks, going back to well over a century, have been filled with dishes you can't find anywhere but here. New York and Los Angeles restaurants cook and serve things we don't. Why should we?
It's the same thing that the wine buffs call terroir. That's the flavor that owes to the place where the wine came from. A wine that shows the characteristic of terroir is praised mightily for it.
New Orleans food shows Creole-Cajun terroir big-time. I keep making this point in the guidebooks I write for people coming here from other places. It's what I told Alan Richman when I responded to his article. If you don't come here looking for the flavors that make our food unique, you will miss everything.
All this spilled out of me just now because the editor of my new book asked me to expand on the point, which I make in passing in the first draft. She also thinks I should increase the chapter on the Katrina aftermath. And she doesn't like the chapter about my bicycle trip to Chicago in 1986, even though it ended with a great date with a woman I hardly knew in one of the best restaurants in the Windy City. But maybe I was just bragging. This is what editors are for.
I did the radio show at home, and didn't leave the ranch all day. Work, work, work.
