Adoxography

New Orleans

PEOPLE here despise FEMA, insurance companies and anyone who has anything to do with levees.

But in a city with postal service so spotty that delivery of a magazine is cause for a party, a magazine writer from New York has moved to the top of the New Orleans hate list.

For eight pages in the November issue of GQ, Alan Richman, a veteran food writer, talked trash about New Orleans and its food. He did not just take a few jabs at some subpar gumbo. The man essentially called New Orleanians fat, lazy and too hung over to recognize good food. Mr. Richman suggested that before Hurricane Katrina, many of the big-name Creole restaurants — and here he may have a point — had the stodgy stink of 1950s French hotel food and might not be worth saving.

But what provoked the most vitriol was his assertion that there is no such thing as a Creole.

“I have never met one and suspect they are a faerie folk, like leprechauns, rather than an indigenous race,” he wrote. He added that “the idea that you might today eat an authentic Creole dish is a fantasy.”

That claim had the unifying force of an invitation to a seafood boil. An agitated city attacked.

“I’d like to throw him in the back room at Tipitina’s with all the Neville brothers and see if he still thinks Creoles don’t exist,” said Poppy Tooker, a cooking teacher who was raised in New Orleans.

Like some others involved with New Orleans food, she offers a vulgar gesture when Mr. Richman is mentioned. That’s because to say Creoles don’t exist is to deny the very culture that makes New Orleans different from every other city in the United States.

“You cannot live in New Orleans and not know what it means to be Creole,” said Greg Osborn, a New Orleans Public Library archivist and historian who is Creole. “There’s a connection among all Creoles that goes beyond the color of your skin.”

But when you try to get people to agree on just what a Creole is, you start to think Mr. Richman might be right. Ask six Louisianans to define it and you’ll get 12 answers.

“It’s the name everyone wants to be called but no one can tell you what it is,” said Dickie Breaux, owner of the Café des Amis in Breaux Bridge, a Cajun restaurant and music spot a couple hours’ drive west of New Orleans.

Louisiana Creole scholars use a textbook definition that transcends race and ethnicity. They say anyone whose ancestors were born in Louisiana during colonial times is a Creole. But Creole also means a genetic mix of colonial settlers, indigenous people and slaves, so it has a racial connotation. In Acadiana, the Cajun homeland in southwest Louisiana, Creole can be code for anyone who is not white. In New Orleans, some use the word to denote people of color with some white ancestry, but it is also claimed by white descendants of the French settlers.

The word has a larger meaning to people who live here. It takes in everything they are most proud of. It encompasses architecture, in the form of Creole cottages, and music, both zydeco and early jazz. And, of course, there is Creole food.

Not that any of that mattered much to Mr. Richman, who never liked New Orleans, although he came here on his honeymoon several years ago. (He is recently divorced, but insists he doesn’t blame the city.)

He says he was simply trying to write the first unsentimental piece about New Orleans food in a world in which having a contrarian opinion is no longer valued. “You have to be behind everything these days,” he said. “You have to be behind the president, you have to be behind New Orleans.”

After his article appeared, Mr. Richman was pilloried by bloggers. An e-mail petition called for his firing, based on “racist invective.” A spitting mad Brett Anderson, the food writer for The Times-Picayune, took him on in print, writing that “Richman’s story is a weakling’s idea of what it means to be tough.”

Despite the public pummeling, Mr. Richman is unrepentant.

“If people want to call themselves Creoles, fine,” he said. “I am now calling myself a tight end for the New York Giants.”

Leah Chase, 83, the city’s most revered Creole cook, hadn’t read the magazine. She is preoccupied with trying to reopen Dooky Chase’s, her restaurant, which was soaked in five feet of water. But she had heard plenty about it.

Last week, standing in front of her Federal Emergency Management Agency trailer, across from her restaurant in the Tremé neighborhood, she pointed out that she happened to be a real live Creole and that she cooked like one, too. But she was too polite to criticize Mr. Richman outright.

“You can never understand what is in a man’s heart,” she said.

One way to understand Creole food is to compare it with Cajun food. Creole is fancy and urban; Cajun is simple and country. Creole gumbo has tomatoes; Cajun does not. Creole dishes rely on butter; Cajun on pork fat.

The most important measure, though, is to remember that what ends up on the Creole plate is determined by who one’s grandmother was. The Creole kitchen has been touched by countries including Senegal, Gambia, Cameroon, Haiti, Spain, Cuba, Germany and Italy. The common denominators are the raw ingredients that grow in southern Louisiana and a cultural dip in French haute cuisine.

“It’s a better cuisine than any of them individually,” said Marcelle Bienvenu, one of Louisiana’s longtime culinary authorities.

Of course, like any culture’s menu, Creole cooking has expanded and contracted with every change that has rolled through town. Sometimes it has been for the better, as when the Italians brought artichokes and red gravy or when Cajun and Creole food met in Paul Prudhomme’s kitchen. Sometimes it has been for the worse, as when the lure of the tourist dollar turned some classic restaurants into Creole Disney.

After Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in late summer and early fall of 2005, home cooks and progressive restaurant chefs found that classic flavors like shrimp rémoulade and Creole cream cheese were as important to the city’s recovery as a good contractor, and easier to find. That added extra sting to Mr. Richman’s article. He attacked Creole culture exactly when people in New Orleans had become serious about preserving it.

One positive post-storm development has been the revival of old recipes. This year Ms. Bienvenu reissued her Cajun/Creole book, “Who’s Your Mama, Are You Catholic, and Can You Make a Roux?” (Acadian House Publishing). It has helped rebuild many cookbook libraries lost to the hurricanes.

She is also helping The Times-Picayune pull together a new cookbook. Less than two months after Katrina hit the city, the newspaper’s food editor, Judy Walker, began asking readers which recipes they had lost, and engaged more fortunate readers to fill the requests. She prints them in a reoccurring column, rebuilding the recipe files of the flood victims and turning young generations of cooks on to dishes they hadn’t heard of.

One dish that will be in the book is beef daube glace, which speaks to the fancier aspirations of Creole food. A proper Creole table in the 18th and 19th centuries was often set with slices of the daube, which traditionally requires a daunting day’s work boiling calves’ or pigs’ feet to make the gelatin that binds a mixture of boiled beef and chopped vegetables.

It appeared regularly at the réveillon, the meal served after midnight Mass on Christmas Eve and on New Year’s Eve. In the 1980s several restaurants tried to reignite the tradition by offering réveillon menus in December.

A more modern version of beef daube glace was developed in the early 1990s in the kitchen of Mr. B’s Bistro, a French Quarter restaurant that is still being renovated post-Katrina.

Gerard Maras, then the executive chef, dug through old cookbooks and talked to people who had eaten it for years before developing a dish that had the same flavor and texture but a more modern approach. Ms. Bienvenu will include it in the new book.

Barbara Trevigne doesn’t know much about beef daube glace, but she does know about the Creole link sausage called chaurice. A social worker, preservationist and performing artist, Ms. Trevigne calls herself a displaced Creole of color. She is living in a FEMA trailer while her soaked home is being rebuilt in the Seventh Ward, which is considered the most Creole of the city’s neighborhoods and which took on several feet of water.

She is waiting for a chance to fry some local chaurice, which takes its name from the Spanish chorizo and the French saucission. Ms. Trevigne used to buy hers from a local sausagemaker who lost his business to the flood.

“I miss all the food in the Seventh Ward, but I really miss that sausage,” she said.

Chaurice is highly seasoned with a slightly loose texture. Traditionally made with a mix of beef and pork, all-beef or all-pork versions are more common now. Its bite comes from black and red pepper, its depth from garlic and green onion tops, and its color from a handful of paprika.

Vance Vaucresson is from a Creole family that has been making chaurice for more than 100 years. Katrina took out the family sausage operation on St. Bernard Avenue, but a competitor from a nearby suburb of Metairie has allowed Mr. Vaucresson to make chaurice there while he rebuilds.

Mr. Vaucresson can talk about Creoles and sausage for days, but he was more excited last week when he watched rice fritters called calas boil in a pan of hot oil.

The cala (pronounced cah-LAH) has roots in Ghana. In 18th century New Orleans, Creole women of color who had the day off from their domestic jobs sold them out of baskets, shouting, “Calas, belles, calas tout chauds!” (Beautiful calas, very hot!)

Save for a few Creole grandmothers, who made them for special events like First Communion and Mardi Gras, calas had almost faded away.

Since Katrina, they have reappeared in some restaurants, as a dessert or in the form of savory fritters made with wild rice and smoked catfish or with duck confit.

Ms. Tooker, who is not a Creole, became an unlikely savior of the cala. She has been making it for years at festivals and in cooking classes, and has used her position in the national Slow Food organization to raise the fritter’s profile. She makes the batter with baking powder, which traditionalists argue is all wrong. Some people think yeast gives the modern cala the flavor they remember from childhood. Other purists suggest no leavening at all, with a batch simply mixed the night before and allowed to gather natural bacteria and ferment in a warm place overnight.

For modern-day Creoles like Mr. Vaucresson, the leavening doesn’t matter a bit. What’s important is that one more piece of Creole history is being pulled back from the edge of extinction.

He stood in Ms. Tooker’s kitchen last week, eating calas as fast as she could pull them out of the hot oil.

“Whether it’s a good cala or bad cala doesn’t matter,” he said. “Any cala is a good cala because someone is still cooking them.”

He only wished Alan Richman had been in the kitchen to try one.

Along with millions of other holidays bakers this time of year, I inevitably end up cranking out a few dozen gingerbread cookies. They bake alongside a handful of tiny gingerbread stars and gingerbread candy canes made from the dough scraps. I have strong opinions when it comes to gingerbread men, and up until this point I haven’t messed with my approach or recipe much. It worked just fine every year and the cookies were tasty, classic, spice-flecked and a rich shade of brown - exactly what they were supposed to be.

I decided to shake things up this time around by overhauling my recipe from the ground up to include white whole wheat flour, more assertive spices, and less refined sweeteners.

As I’ve said before this is not the time for ooey-gooey or flaky cookies. Gingerbread men need to stand crisp and tall. Being sturdy is important too, particularly if you are a tall gingerbread man. If you are too chewy your posture becomes compromised, particularly if you are standing on the lawn of a gingerbread garden.

Gingerbread cookies should have a nice spicy kick to them. As they are baking people should flock to the oven from the far recesses of a house to have a peek at the source of those wonderful smells. You can’t be shy with the spices.

I like to decorate my gingerbread men simply. Nothing over the top. I did some of these with a sheen of big sugar, others I do with a dot or two of royal icing for buttons (I’ll add some notes on how to make royal icing without raw eggs below). I also put a bunch of them on sticks. This way if you take them to a party you can fill a small flower pot (or container) with sugar and arrange them in a bouquet of sorts. So they are standing upright. Gingerbread men don’t show very well stacked up, flat on their backs on platters.

Happy holidays, I hope you enjoy!

HS notes: Whatever you do, don’t over bake these guys - they will dry right out. If anything under bake them just a shade (they will continue to bake for another couple of minutes once you pull them from the oven). Big cookies take longer to cook than tiny ones, keep that in mind as well.

People often like to use bright white royal icing to decorate gingerbread cookies. It doesn’t smear once it sets, and it can bind the seams of a gingerbread house like concrete. Many recipes for royal icing call for raw egg whites - this make a lot of people including myself nervous and unfortunately pasteurized egg whites don’t whip up the way pasteurized egg whites do. Another option is to use meringue powder, a powdery blend made of dried egg whites and other ingredients (gums?)…here’s a brief on royal icing in case you are interested, there is also an evolving discussion here on eGullet. I’ll also add, don’t bother using organic powdered sugar in your royal icing, it tends to mix up a very unappetizing shade of light gray.

4 cups white whole wheat flour
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
4 teaspoons ground ginger
1 teaspoon ground cloves
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon finely ground black pepper

11 tablespoons unsalted butter, room temperature
2/3 cup dark natural cane sugar (i.e. muscavado), or alternately use a dark brown sugar, packed

3 large eggs
2/3 cup organic unsulfured molasses (blackstrap)
large grain sugar (turbinado) for decoration

popsicle sticks (optional)

In a medium bowl, sift together flour, baking soda, salt and spices. Set aside.

In a large bowl by hand (or with an electric mixer) cream the butter until it is light and fluffy. Add the sugar and mix again until light and creamy. Blend in the eggs one at a time and then the molasses. Add the flour mixture in two additions either by hand or on low speed. Divide the dough into two pieces, wrap each in plastic and chill for an hour or so.

Heat oven to 350 degrees, racks in the middle, and line a couple baking sheets with parchment paper or Silpats. Set aside.

Roll the dough out onto a lightly floured countertop roughly 1/8-inch thick and cut into gingerbread men (or other desired shapes). Transfer to baking sheets and arrange a popsicle stick underneath each (if desired), no need to press the stick aggressively into the dough, gently is fine – the cookies will bake right onto the sticks. Sprinkle with sugar (optional) and bake for 7 –10 minutes (for 3 – 4-inch cookies), less for smaller cookies, more for larger.

Makes about 3 dozen four-inch gingerbread men.