Tuesday, January 31, 2012.
Melba Toast. Light Beer. Borgne. La Petite Grocery. Vitascope.
At some point, the fire marshal is going to force us to have smaller crowds in the radio studio during our weekly round table shows. Today we had eight people. Some of this owed to guests bringing second bananas. Even though my studio has more microphones than any other in the building, it wasn't enough.
The big topic today was the least likely: melba toast. Wayne Turnbull and his daughter Katy are the fourth and fifth generation of the Turnbull Baking Company. It's a New Orleans firm founded over a century ago to make cones for ice cream. That idea had just exploded into popularity at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, and the demand was great. "We started out making machines for making cones," Jerry said. "But they were too big and expensive for most ice cream sellers. They wanted us to make the cones themselves and sell them." The bakery started in the Irish Channel on First Street near the river. After awhile, the business was so good that they opened another plant in Chattanooga.
In the 1940s, the Turnbulls started making melba toast. The thin, crisp mini-breads were named for Dame Nellie Melba, opera superstar and the dream of men around the world. One of them was the French master chef Escoffier, who perfected Melba's own toast recipe. (She ate her toast when she thought she was becoming too plump.) The Turnbulls were so good at melba toast that they made it for almost everybody in the industry, from Nabisco to Lance to Keebler's. They made New Orleans the Melba Toast Capital of the World.
They sold the cone-making business in 2002. Wayne's mother was in her late eighties, but still ran the melba toast operation hands-on. A few years later, there was an urgent need to upgrade the bakery, but she resisted. The plant wound up closing down, to her great dismay. She died at ninety-one not long after. "Without the melba toast, she lost her will to live," said Wayne.
Meanwhile, melba toast disappeared from shelves all over the country. I remember when the problem became a crisis. We were at Pizza Man in Covington when my daughter Mary Leigh rooted around in the cracker basket looking for melba toast but finding none. She asked the waitress to bring some more. "Sorry! We can't get it anymore," she said. "We took the last packet we had and framed it over there on the wall. That was months ago."
A melba toast-starved world turned to the Turnbulls for a solution. It was not easily arrived at. The family had to be pulled together, and an investment made in refurbishing the First Street bakery. But it happened, and as of a few months ago Turnbull melba toast returned to local distribution.
Wayne shared his knowledge of how the toast is made. "Imagine a long line of George Foreman grills. That's about how it's done." I will have to visit the plant to see this.
We also had a couple of high-profile chefs in the room. Brian Landry, formerly executive chef at Galatoire's for five years or so, is now running the kitchen of Borgne. That's John Besh's new, casual seafood restaurant in the Hyatt Regency complex in front of the Superdome. It opened a couple of weeks ago. Of course, the Marys went right over. They were turned away--the place was still in pre-opening mode. But they were allowed inside for a look. They declare that Borgne is super-cool.
Brian says it will have boiled, grilled, and fried seafood, plus poor boys, raw oysters, and all that kind of thing. Looking over the menu, it seems to me that it follows Besh's formula: to perform makeovers of classic local dishes. Not an illegitimate endeavor, although at times it has resulted in turning already perfect dishes into imperfect ones.
Chef Justin Devillier from La Petite Grocery was also with us. He was today's designated quiet guy, although whenever he said something it was not only informative but amusing. I learned that, despite the Cajun name he sports, he is from California originally. Ah. That explains his redfish courtbouillon. La Petite is another restaurant that is much loved by my wife, whose pleasures I am always pleased to learn. I'm especially glad of that, because I think the place is immensely enjoyable. Best pommes frites in town. Ditto on the steak tartare, mussels, escargots, and grilled fish.
Also here was Chef Frank Boerdner, who runs the new Vitascope café in the atrium of the Hyatt. It's a hamburger and snack place, but he said that all the standards were at a much higher level. The hamburgers he brought were ground on premises, and included Kobe beef in the mix. (I had one; not bad, but hard to tell how good when it's eaten cold, as this was.) They make fresh-cut fries and chips. And wings. We learned from somebody that 1.2 billion chicken wings will be eaten over Super Bowl weekend. I'm not sure I wanted to know that.
Ah, the Super Bowl. Mary Ann--who books the guests for the round table programs--insisted that we have a survey of non-craft beers today, in honor of the game. (When exactly did I lose control of my radio show?) Jerry Peters, whose company Southern Eagle distributes many of the biggest names in the world of six-packs, was there with variations on Budweiser, Michelob, and the like.
We conducted a blind tasting of these beers. It would have bored a serious beer lover to tears. The brews tasted different from but not better than one another. The most impressive part of the experiment was that Katie Turnbull--who looks to be in her twenties--correctly guessed the identities of all seven of the beers. "Is that what I sent you to an expensive college for?" her father Wayne asked.
Jerry thought that with all this beer we would need food. He picked up two mammoth trays of sandwiches from Parran's Poor Boys, including a whole muffuletta, two dozen overstuffed club sandwiches, and about three dozen mini-poor boys. The best of those were made with medium-rare prime rib, a sandwich of recent vintage at Parran's, a sponsor who runs so many commercials voiced by me that I get tired of hearing them.
I'm not tired of the sandwiches, however, and ate enough of them to obviate the need for dinner. Mary Ann called to say that she wanted me to bring home some of the sandwiches (too late: the newsroom and Mike Weldon learned about their presence) and some melba toast for Mary Leigh.
I was in the mood for a little dessert, and stopped at the Morning Call. First time in about a year. Same waiter as last time. I tried to get him to bring just two beignets, but this is apparently not possible, even if you're willing to pay the whole price. The coffee tastes exactly like the stuff I brew at home. That figures: same coffee roaster makes Morning Call's blend and Union Coffee and Chicory.
Café au lait and beignets is another one of those eating habits that is universal for people of my generation but almost entirely ignored by my children's. I wonder whether I will outlive the Morning Call. I hope not. No, wait. Gee, that's a heavy thought to take to bed.
Morning Call Coffee Stand. Metairie: 3325 Severn Ave. 504-885-4068.
