Tuesday, October 16, 2012.
Wine From Offbeat Fruit. The Vietnamese Cooking Culture. Emeril's Gluten-Intolerant Daughters. Manale's Meatballs.
I'm beginning to believe that the less likely a group of radio round-table guests seems, the better the show will be. Today's show was a case in point. No common thread could be found, except perhaps that we had more young women in the room than usual.
Emeril has two daughters by a marriage early in his career. They are now in their twenties. At different times, both Jilly and Jessie learned that they both are gluten-intolerant, and had to alter their diets to remove all traces of wheat. Having been surrounded by test-kitchen activity throughout their lives, it was inevitable that they'd explore their diet from a taste perspective.
The cookbook just came out. "The Gluten-Free Table" is exactly what it sounds like, with perhaps a heavier emphasis on New Orleans flavors than a nationally-distributed cookbook (as this one is) might be expected to include. But then both girls live in New Orleans.
The first question, then, had to be "How do you make a roux without flour?" With rice flour and potato starch and other substitutes, all of which have a problem: they don't get dark brown. Otherwise, they word for gumbo and everything else with a roux as the starting point.
They brought an assortment of baked goods, none of which I would have guessed were made without flour. And I waited until the end of the show before I asked them the obvious question: "So, what's Emeril really like?" They love him, of course, but why wouldn't they? And it must be nice to have a dad like that when you need a foreword for one's book. I did for my first cookbook, and Emeril gladly helped me out.
Also with us was Suzanne Pfefferle, who just produced a new documentary on Channel 12 about the food culture of the Vietnamese community in New Orleans. And as I write those words, it occurs to me that it's a mistake to call them a "community," as if they're apart from the rest of the city's population. If anything, the Vietnamese have contributed more than the average person to our town.
Suzanne is twenty-eight, which I mention to just to pigeonhole her with the rest of our guests, but because from a distance she looks as if she's still in high school. Lucky lady. Her work, however, is thoroughly mature. She showed up with some show-and tell--a few banh mi sandwiches and spring rolls. All great eats, of course.
"Vietnamese Cuisine in New Orleans" will, I'm sure, be easily viewable on WYES-TV for a long time. I haven't seen it yet, but I watch only about ten hours of television a year. I'll get to it, though.
The contrast among our guests was provided by Don Becnel. I jumped to conclusions when Mary Ann invited him, and she may have, as well. I thought we'd be talking about the orange and satsuma crop in Plaquemines Parish, the season for which is now. The name "Becnel" is synonymous with farming down there, after all.
In fact, Don lives well upriver in Vacherie. That's a town with the distinction of having the smallest turnover of population during the last fifty years of any community in America. People who live there stay there. Indeed, Don has spent most of his years in St. James Parish.
He doesn't raise oranges, but he does work with fruit. He has a line of wines made from some of the most unexpected raw materials imaginable. Sugar cane, for example. Blackberries. Black currants (the raw material of cassis liqueur). Red raspberries. Immediately, I had an image of the berries that grow in the woods and weeds around here, but he set me straight on that, too. He brings in most of his juice in frozen blocks from Washington State.
Don was a fun guy to talk with, with a droll way about him, as if he doesn't take this project very seriously. But he's messed around with berry wine since he was a teenager. And some of these were not bad. The raspberry wine was my favorite. The blackberry was a little too tart, but I kept thinking it would be highly useful as a cocktail ingredient. As for sugar cane wine. . . well, not all experiments succeed.
After I got the studio cleaned up, I was off to dinner with Mary Leigh and The Boy. I thought they would enjoy Pascal's Manale, even though Mary Leigh doesn't much care for old restaurants. I brought her her on another night, however, and it passed muster. But I didn't mention that Manale's will turn 100 next year until all the food was on the table.
I should pay closer attention to the orders of others, even though ML doesn't want my advice about what to get. The two young folks got one course each. I had my usual three, so they had to watch me eat a trio of scallops held together with a slice of bacon, and a cup oyster-artichoke soup.
The entree course was heavy enough to make the table groan. Mine was the oyster combination pan roast, a truly unique dish here that I've always loved. Even though an entree of it is a bit much. The girl and guy ate more simply: spaghetti and red sauce on both plates, with two meatballs for the young gentleman and a filet mignon for MA. Maybe he didn't want to spend a lot of my money, although I recommended the steaks. (Manale's does them better than is generally believed.) ML doesn't have that reluctance.
The important issue to ML was: how would The Boy and I get along? Famously, she said later. I'm glad this is going well, although I don't know what's going on, really.
Pascal's Manale. Uptown: 1838 Napoleon Ave. 504-895-4877.
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