Wednesday, February 22, 2012.
A Century Of Mama. Tujague's.
Three years ago my sisters and their families joined me and mine to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of our father. We held it in approximately the same spot in the same building where he worked for many years in his final job. Irene's Cuisine is there now. A delicious way to remember Daddy.
That was so enjoyable that we planned to honor our mother similarly. We loved Daddy, but Mama was overwhelmingly the dominant parental presence. We brushed aside a small deterrent: Mama's centennial birthday fell on Ash Wednesday, with the city still in semi-consciousness after Mardi Gras.
The best celebration would have been home cooking in the house where we all lived our early lives, on the corner of Ursulines and Marais in Treme. My sister Lynn has actually been inside that old shotgun double in recent times. But persuading total strangers to allow us to come into their rented home to have a party was a project nobody volunteered to take on. Even if we invited them to join us for Mama's red beans, gumbo, and bread pudding.
I offered Tujague's as the perfect place. It was fifty years old when my mother was born, and already famous. It serves all the dishes Mama loved: gumbo, shrimp remoulade, boiled beef brisket (and the vegetable soup made with the stock), bread pudding, and the like.
The best dish at Tujague's is chicken bonne femme, an uncoated fried half chicken topped with fried potatoes, garlic, and parsley. Not only was this Mama's kind of eating (she wasn't big on fancy food), but the name of the dish resonated. "Bonne femme" not only means "good woman," but carries the connotation of a woman who works hard to do her best in trying times. That's Mama, all right.
Tujague's owner Steve Latter gave us one of the private rooms--the exact space, in fact, where Madame Begue's restaurant dining room became famous in the 1880s. (Tujague's took it over after Madame Begue retired.) It's old and worn and a little musty, but that seemed right somehow.
My big sister Judy brought the biggest branch of Mama's tree, representing three generations. With her was her husband Walter Howat, their daughter Holly, son Scott, his wife and two kids. Scott was a surprise: he lives in San Diego. His foursome was in town for Mardi Gras. Lynn and both of my Marys rounded out our table of eleven. The only major absentee was my middle sister Karen, who lives in Lafayette and had a conflict.
The menu had to work around Ash Wednesday abstinence for some of us. Steve Latter had a solution: serve a bunch of family-style platters with a good deal of seafood along with the brisket and chicken, and let each person figure it out.
We began with shrimp remoulade. I'd forgotten how good the sauce is at Tujague's--and how close to the one I make to my taste at home. It's the red style, sharp with Creole mustard but with some tomato, too.
Next came more crab and corn bisques than gumbos, which was just as well. This was a Creole gumbo--with seafood, sausage, chicken and okra, in a light roux. I didn't hear anybody say it, so I will: it wasn't nearly as good as either of Mama's two gumbos. But she was hard to beat in the gumbo category, among others.
Tujague's famous boiled beef brisket came next, with its sauce combining ketchup, horseradish, and Creole mustard. And now the main platter: a fillet of drumfish with beurre blanc, the chicken bonne femme, and a small filet mignon bordelaise.
So there I was, one day after having my alleged farewell-to-beef steak, eating another steak. But it reminded me of how good Tujague's steak with its very garlicky butter sauce is.
Bread pudding, of course, and coffee served in old-fashioned glasses instead of cups, as Tujague's has for as long as I can remember. A vibe came down from my mother's heaven that she didn't approve of a lot of money spent on food she could make just as well or better herself. Steve Latter must have felt it, too, because he cut us a surprisingly generous deal on the check.
The talk at the table inevitably got around to what the world outside Tujague's doors was like when Mama was born in 1912. Few cars; lots of horses. Much French spoken, but even more Italian. The French Market across the street full of round-the-clock sellers of fish, meat, vegetables, and fruit. Behind it, steamships at the dock unloading all kinds of stuff, to be hauled off by steam locomotives. Many gaslit rooms in nearby buildings occupied by not-so-bonne femmes servicing the sailors. In the middle of all that, Tujague's serving more or less the same food in the same dining rooms to the streams of people who converged there.
Hard to believe that the lifetime of just one person connects me with all of that.
Tujague's. French Quarter: 823 Decatur. 504-525-8676.
