“Jambalaya and a crawfish pie and filé gumbo; cause tonight I’m gonna see my ma cher amio…” Hank Williams

I recently made the perfect jambalaya! Why was it perfect? Because it tasted just like the jambalaya I have been served so many times in New Orleans at large family gatherings, often during Carnival but also year round, including even the Marriott-managed cafeteria at Loyola University. The special trick behind the perfectness of this jambalaya – precisely following Tom Fitzmorris’ recipe, including using Uncle Ben’s parboiled rice.

I have traditionally used Mahatma long-grain rice in making jambalaya. I am not generally a fan of Uncle Ben’s, but I have had such good luck in reproducing versions of other New Orleans classics using Tom’s recipes that I decided to follow his advice. The results in this case were, well, perfect, at least to my taste buds, with the rice demonstrating a slightly al dente firms that nonetheless took on the characteristics of the seasoned red broth in which it steamed.

My first memory of eating jambalaya was during an event at Loyola for admitted students in 1987. I was vaguely aware of the dish, and had possibly tasted it before, but that first bite was a revelation. It was dense, a little chewy and had the perfect amount of spicy kick. I was 18 years old, and on the verge of starting college meaning I was, in a word, nervous. I was grateful for that magical bowl of red tinted rice studded with chicken and piquant sausage. As it turned out, that first taste of jambalaya offered a preview of the exotic life ahead of me as a college student living and studying in the Creole metropolis.

In hindsight, it’s interesting that I grew up on the Mississippi Gulf Coast eating gumbo and fried seafood and poboys but have no prior recollection of jambalaya. It’s a food unique to New Orleans and its Louisiana environs, at least in my mind, and it’s a food best served at parties (say during Carnival season) or to large groups like soon-to-be college students. There are essentially two styles of jambalaya – Creole featuring some form of tomato product and Cajun with no tomatoes and a color and consistency not unlike a traditional dirty rice recipe. The Fitzmorris recipe can go either way, and I added a 16-ounce can of crushed tomatoes to give it the color and consistency of that first jambalaya at Loyola. For my money, Donald Link’s jambalaya recipe represents the best of the Cajun variety.

To demonstrate my affinity for jambalaya of all varieties, one of my favorite exercises is to conduct a taste test of the respective varieties served at the annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. I look forward with great anticipation to the day when I can yet again conduct that test, maybe, the vaccine gods willing, this fall when the rescheduled Fest takes place.

As part of my ongoing effort to cook foods of the African diaspora and to pay homage to the roots of this favorite dish, I also recently tried my hand at the classic West African dish, Jollof Rice. Much has been written regarding the lineage of Jollof and Savannah Red Rice and their connection to jambalaya. For a full-length study of these connections between the food of Africa and the staples of Southern cuisine, I highly recommend Jessica B. Harris’ “High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America.”

I looked at several recipes from Marcus Samuelson, but ultimately opted for this less demanding recipe from The New York Times. I took another shortcut by using a pre-made Jollof Rice seasoning, which I acquired along with some other Caribbean foodie finds (jerk seasoning, curry powder from Trinidad and finely ground Aleppo and Scotch Bonnet pepper) at the local Caribbean Spice market on 42nd Street. If you live around Portland, it’s worth the trip.

The Jollof Rice, made with Thai jasmine rice, was spicy and delicious with a sharp ginger bite that distinguished it from my beloved jambalaya. Like jambalaya, Jollof Rice is party food, meant to be served to a large group of people. I will definitely try it again. Maybe, when things are more normalized, I will invite folks over for a jambalaya/Jollof taste test, not unlike my own Jazz Fest experiments.

During the decade plus I lived in New Orleans, I was a regular at an annual outdoor party hosted by my high school friend Will’s family near the north edge of Audubon Park. The party was always held on the Sunday morning prior to Mardi Gras day; that’s today by the way. The hosts always brought in kegs of beer and huge tin trays of traditional Creole jambalaya. In my memory, those parties were sunbathed affairs where people danced to the Radiators’ “Law of the Fish” album and enjoyed the jambalaya and the beer and the company of fellow revelers, all in anticipation of the three solid days of fun to come. These memories shine bright for me, even to this day.

Speaking of Mardi Gras, I am hoping to squeeze in another post before Tuesday about my love of the ultimate Carnival season treat, king cake, a food easy to ridicule but deeply beloved by many Gulf Coast natives, myself included. This week I am donating $50 to the Emeril Lagasse Foundation. Thank you for spending a little time with me.

An Episcopalian priest friend of mine once described a brief conversation he had with a monk.

Priest: What do you do at the monastery?

Monk: We fall down, and then we get up. Then we fall down again, and we get up again.

That’s the story of this blog for me. I posted a handful of items during the fall months, my best run yet. But after the election and its immediate aftermath, I became paralyzed by fear over the swirl of historic events including the post-election lies from you-know-who and the continued and ferocious spread of COVID-19. I also wallowed in a bit of self-pity, missing the familiarity of holiday traditions and absent family members, particularly my son Emmet.

During this same period, I’ve cooked a lot of food, almost exclusively food of the African diaspora. You still gotta eat! As I have said elsewhere on this blog, the act of cooking (chopping, stirring, tasting, seasoning, waiting) represents a comfortable ritual for me, a way to lower my anxiety and focus on the tangible and concrete actions necessary to produce something nourishing and hopefully pleasurable. But I haven’t done many of the other things I hoped to do during this season, including posting to this blog, reading former President Barack Obama’s book “A Promised Land” or otherwise finding ways to pay my position of privilege forward in ways that are meaningful. 

I have fallen down, and I have been sitting still for a while. It’s now time to get up, again. I need to keep writing and to keep seeking ways to connect the dots between my personal gifts and the world’s needs. 

Despite my inaction, several cookbooks and culinary scholars have been providing important sources of inspiration this winter. The books include several of Marcus Samuelsson’s books, most prominently his newest, “The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food,” which Abby gave me as a Christmas present. Another important cookbook, also new to my collection, has been “Soul Food Love,” by the mother/daughter team of novelist Alice Randall and poet Caroline Randall Williams. 

I cooked a series of dishes from these books including the short ribs Marcus served to President Obama, a Jamaican curry pie that may now be one of my favorite foods ever, doro wat, several different curries, meatballs, mac and greens, steamed chicken with broccoli and basil and peanut chicken stew. My goal during the coming weeks is to write a series of posts about these books, these dishes, their creators and what they may mean for us more broadly as humans living in a complex and ever-changing world. Long-term, I want to focus my writing on the connections between food, justice, equity and sustainability. I realize these are lofty aspirations, but there’s nothing wrong with aiming high, right?

During the holidays, I also watched more than my fair share of TV and movies, and way too much news. I can’t recommend highly enough the Small Axe series of films created by director Steve McQueen (most well known for the award-winning film “12 Years A Slave”). My good friend Henry, who teaches screenwriting at the University of New Orleans, says the second film in the series “Lovers Rock” (a dreamlike meditation on the connection between music and spiritual freedom) was the best movie of 2020. Who am I to argue with Henry?!

To celebrate Martin Luther King Day, I made my signature red beans and Spanish rice, Marcus’ pulled pork on a bun (slow braised in the oven for eight hours and seasoned with an East-meets-West combination of flavors) and traditional vinegar-based slaw. I will write more about these dishes as part of my aforementioned aspirations for this blog.  

Along with continuing to contribute to this blog, I plan to focus on getting back on my spiritual feet, which mainly means just doing some basic footwork. One of my favorite passages from a favorite book, “A Joseph Campbell Companion” reminds me of an important truth: “If what you are following is your own true adventure, if it is something appropriate to your deep spiritual need or readiness, then magical guides will appear to help you…If you are ready for it, then doors will open where there were no doors before, and where there would not be doors for anyone else. And you must have courage. It’s the call to adventure, which means there is no security, no rules.”

That’s heady stuff, but each step forward represents progress along this hero’s journey of life. As they say in the rooms where people are saved from despair daily, “More will be revealed.” Given that I am tardy in posting here, I am donating $50 to City Harvest and $50 to the Oregon Food Bank this week. Thank you for spending a little time with me.

“One can only face in others what one can face in oneself.”
James Baldwin, “Nobody Knows My Name”

My paternal grandmother was uninterested in food. She mostly lived on meal-replacement drinks, coffee and cigarettes. She was well-educated and well-read, an exemplary member of the Greatest Generation. Her husband and brothers served in both theaters of World War II, and her oldest brother gave his life when his plane was shot down over Mussolini’s Italy. Despite her extensive travels and years living in urbane Miami, she was Southern to her core both in her embrace of the region’s rich literary, cultural and political history and in her unfortunate views on race. 

One of the few foods regularly found in my grandmother’s refrigerator was a container of store-bought pimento cheese, a culinary nod to her Southern roots. My grandmother was also fond of the golf champion Bobby Jones, a true superstar of the pre-War era, and the golf tournament he founded in his native Georgia, the Masters. Her golf pro husband, my grandfather Buck White, competed in the Masters twice during his tournament-playing career, and they returned on several other occasions as spectators. Pimento cheese sandwiches are a signature concession item at the Masters, revered to the point that a change in sandwich vendors sparked a minor controversy a few years ago.

The 2020 Masters, which concluded this past Sunday, was played off season because of the coronavirus pandemic. The tournament traditionally takes place in April. The 2020 Masters also marked a moment of transition for the tournament host, the exclusive Augusta National Country Club in Augusta, Georgia. In the lead-up to the tournament, the club announced that it will honor Lee Elder, the first black player to compete in the Masters, as an honorary starter at next year’s tournament along with Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player. The club also announced financial support for Paine College, a historically black college located in Augusta, Georgia.

As I have done for many years now, I made pimento cheese for my Master’s viewing pleasure. Fortunately, I recently found the perfect pimento cheese recipe from the cookbook “Soul,” by celebrated Atlanta-based chef Todd Richards, who champions black food culture and fellow chefs, particularly during this most challenging period for restaurants. To learn more about Richards’ journey from his native Memphis to Atlanta and from obscurity to fame, check out this Southern Fork podcast interview. I have tried many different pimento cheese recipes, and Richards’ version is by far the best. 

 I paired the pimento cheese with another recipe from that same book, Atlanta biscuit maven Erika Council’s Black Pepper-Thyme Cornmeal Biscuits, along with Rose City Pepperheads pepper jelly, French salted butter, local honey and smoked ham from the Portland salumi purveyor Olympia Provisions. Council is another Southern food luminary, whose tantalizing Instagram feed at bombbiscuitatl is well worth adding to your feed. Listen to this illuminating interview with her on the excellent Southbound podcast with Tommy Tomlinson.

The combination of Richards’s pimento cheese and Council’s cornmeal biscuits were a perfect representation of the modern, soulful South, a place where the tropes of the Old South get reimagined through a vision of the diverse voices representing the region’s present and future.

Georgia has certainly been on my mind in more ways than one of late with the Peach State breaking blue, going for President-Elect Biden earlier this month, plus the two upcoming Senate runoffs that will potentially change the balance of power in our national government. Given my overall despondency with the current politics of the South, I am heartened by what’s happening in Georgia, particularly in the Atlanta area. This progress is a byproduct of the hard work of many people, including high-profile voting rights activist Stacy Abrams, who has focused like a laser on restoring integrity to the election system both in Georgia and around the nation. Abrams spent her early years living in the same town where I grew up, Gulfport, Mississippi, but given the de facto segregation of the era, it is unlikely our paths would have ever crossed.

The events of this year, including the nationwide response to the death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer, have raised my consciousness about the corrosive role racism continues to play in undermining our country’s ability to live into its promise and potential. I’ve been hitting the books, reading or re-reading writers like James Baldwin, Ibram X. Kendi, Bryan Stevenson and others. I’ve also been reflecting on the way being white and privileged have played into my opportunities and blinded me to the full impact of racism. I have been long focused on issues of race, civil rights and Southern history. I wrote an undergraduate thesis on the Mississippi novelist William Faulkner’s deconstruction of the myth of the Old South, influenced, in part, by my grandmother’s much earlier scholarship on Faulkner during her years at Vassar. My thesis applied postmodern literary analysis to illuminate racial ironies embedded both in Faulkner’s narratives and the historical myths he was challenging.

Faulkner’s literary achievement was monumental, and his vision of race and race relations was imbued with insight. But his writing, obsessed with aesthetic and historical analysis, ultimately lacked the moral force required to push for real change. By the end of his career, fellow writers like Baldwin were holding him accountable for these failings. In pushing back against Faulkner’s call for more time to let justice prevail, Baldwin in “Nobody Knows My Name” concludes: “There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment, the time is always now.” I fear that I may have fallen into a similar, if more pedestrian, passive state, interested in important matters, but waiting for the right time to act and, until then, content to stand on the sidelines watching and analyzing.

I loved my grandmother, who passed away in 2000, and remain deeply grateful for the gifts she provided to me, including financial assistance with my formal education and encouraging my interest in history, politics and literature. At the same time, I anguish over her views on race, which were consistent with her time and background yet nonetheless an affront to decency. I also regret my own silence about those views. Had I shared my disagreement, maybe she would have been willing to reconsider her outlook on such matters. That would have been a victory, however small, indeed.

Is the Masters’ reconsideration of its own racial past a victory worth celebrating or simply the triumph of symbol over substance? I can’t really say, but as my sense of social consciousness growns, even at this advanced age, my enthusiasm for the Masters and other symbols of elitism wanes.

I still love certain aspects of my native South, its food, literature, music and hospitality. But I abhor much of the South’s embrace of Trumpism and the backlash against the election of President Obama and marriage equality and LGBTQ rights. To that end, my interest in Southern food and culture continues to point me toward an appreciation of the role that black writers, artists, musicians and chefs have played in shaping this culture, while holding in equipoise the truth of enduring racism and the cultural, economic, spiritual and political damage that racism has done to the beloved community.

An Episcopal priest friend once told me that God’s will for us can be found at the intersection of our talents and the world’s needs. My talents are scant and don’t extend far beyond the interests and skills on display right here. The world’s needs, particularly when it comes to justice and love, are immense. How do I bring my abiding interests together into an action plan that will allow me to step out of what Baldwin describes at the “lukewarm bath” of my own illusions about myself and my community so as to claim some small victory for justice and make some modest but meaningful difference in this world?

These are good questions, and immensely important to me. Until my action plan comes into sharper focus, I suppose I will just keep scribbling my notes here about food and fear and future challenges, using what Faulkner described in his soaring Nobel Speech as man’s puny inexhaustible voice still talking long after the last ding dong of doom has clanged and faded.

This week I made two separate $25 donations, one to City Harvest NYC and the other to Stacy Abrams’s Fair Fight. Thank you for spending a little time with me.

There is a place in America for diversity of views and opinions. I may cook my gumbo differently from you, but that does not make mine better. I may just use different ingredients. Politics has gotten so spicy, and we need to cool it down some. We may find that your recipe for gumbo is just as good.
Donna Brazile

Talk about being nervous!

Like the rest of the country, I have had a number of sleepless nights and been feeling intensely anxious in the run up to and aftermath of Tuesday’s presidential election. I learned the good news yesterday via texts from friends and a phone call with my son Emmet, who was able to share the screams of elation coming from his Brooklyn neighbors.

To assure myself the news was true, I tuned my TV to the conservative Fox News network. Sure enough, they were also calling the election for now President-Elect Biden and downplaying the merits of litigation challenging the results. It was a fortunate decision on my part because I watched, in real-time, a heartfelt expression of gratitude for the election of Vice-President-Elect Kamala Harris by Fox contributor and former Democratic National Committee head Donna Brazile.

Brazile, a black woman from New Orleans, said she was going to celebrate the Biden-Harris victory by making a gumbo. I took this as a sign that I should do the same!

Gumbo sits atop my food pantheon, resting comfortably at the right hand of red beans and rice. I have so much to say about gumbo so this will not be the last word from me on the subject. In fact, I continue to fantasize about writing a book exploring the meaning of gumbo, including all the metaphorical and tangible ramifications of gumbo as they relate to politics, race relations, culture and even religion. 

Over the past four years, and particularly in 2020, I have come to believe that the ghosts of America’s racist past continue to haunt our present and, as Joe Biden has so eloquently said, corrupt the soul of our nation. Gumbo, the official food of both Creoles and Cajuns, connects those who enjoy the dish today with the deep African and Caribbean roots of American cuisine. So celebrating what we can only hope is the beginning of the end of Trumpism (i.e. the last gasp of the 20th Century Majority) with a bowl of spicy gumbo seemed more than fitting.

Frankly, there are probably hundreds of ways to make gumbo. The first gumbo I made, in 1992, a chicken and sausage gumbo, was based on a handwritten recipe supplied by a New Orleans native who had grown up in the Irish Channel, the mother of a friend of mine. I also closely studied the recipe for “Chicken and Andouille Smoked Sausage Gumbo” and the pictorial descriptions of how to make a roux in the late Paul Prudhomme’s “Louisiana Kitchen,” which remains a towering classic of Louisiana cuisine. Sadly, Prudhomme’s flagship restaurant K-Paul’s did not survive the pandemic of 2020.

In more recent years, the national food media has rightly appointed the late Leah Chase of the famous Treme eatery Dooky Chase as the grand empress of gumbo. Versions of her gumbo recipes about on the Internet  Here‘s a good one. You can even find the newest generation of foodies at Bon Appetit trying to recreate her recipe from a blind taste test. I tried her gumbo once; it was magnificent!

In his Time Magazine remembrance, fellow New Orleanian Walter Isaacson quotes Chase, who was renowned for feeding the giants of the Civil Rights Movement, as saying: “Food builds bridges.”

My appreciation for gumbo long predates these early efforts to make my own. My best food memories take me back to early childhood and meals at the Log House restaurant on the Biloxi-side of Debuys Road, where they served a classic Gulf Coast seafood gumbo and these really tasty, almost tangy biscuits. That combination might well be my pre-electric-chair meal. The Log House is long gone, but I look forward to sampling that same style of gumbo whenever I go home, whether at Mary Mahoney’s or the Beau Rivage Buffet or even the hot bar (if it still exists) at Rouse’s grocery store outlets along the Gulf Coast. 

My own approach to gumbo continues to evolve as the years go by; sometimes I use tomato product or okra or file or shrimp. Other times it’s just a straightforward dark brown roux with the trinity (onions, peppers, celery) and maybe some garlic, along with chicken and sausage and some Creole seasoning and hot sauce. I have also dabbled with seafood gumbo and gumbo z’herbes (a meatless gumbo made with greens). I serve gumbo over rice. I have tried serving it Cajun-style with potato salad. It’s an interesting flavor combination, but violates the comfort food expectations I have for gumbo. 

For yesterday’s celebratory gumbo, I used a can of crushed Italian tomatoes, added garlic, pre-cooked chicken and some good, locally made Andouille sausage, but no okra or file. I don’t really have a recipe. I just wing it. The two recipe links I posted above represent good starting places. The beauty of gumbo is that once you have the basics down, you can improvise. In making my celebratory gumbo, which turned out beautifully, I focused on making the best roux I could produce in my 30-plus-year-old Maganalite pot, a favorite of Cajun cooks. I also braised collard greens in a black iron dutch oven, and roasted and buttered a sweet potato, all accented by a bottle of sparkling apple cider.

As for our country, here’s hoping that we can find a creative, improvisational way forward, despite our deep differences. I believe we can do it, but only if we are honest about who we have been and how that has affected who we are today. Like making a good gumbo, we have to go back to the basics, to the ideals of real equality expressed in our principal charter. Reconciliation must be predicated upon truth in the same way that you can’t make a good gumbo if you burn the roux. 

Appropriately, this week’s $25 donation goes to the Emeril Lagasse Foundation. Thank you for spending a little time with me. 

I’ve not yet dined at Chez Panisse (it’s on my bucket list), nor Michael’s in Santa Monica. Abby and I missed the final days of Jeremiah Tower’s Stars when we visited San Francisco in the late 90s (we wouldn’t have had a clue at the time). We were lucky enough to have dinner at both the original Spago on Sunset Blvd. and the subsequent flagship restaurant in Beverly Hills.  I met Wolfgang Puck personally at the latter. Abby and I also took our lunch regularly at the Border Grill in Santa Monica, established by co-chefs Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken. The abiding connection between all these restaurants is their respective roles in defining the New American Cuisine, a.k.a. California Cuisine, one of America’s two great original food traditions, the other being Southern food, of course.

Abby and I moved from New Orleans to Los Angeles (Sherman Oaks to be exact) in the summer of 1998. Neither of us had spent any time in LA prior to our arrival, and we showed up with an image of the city, including its food scene, based solely on watching movies and television. No kidding, we were expecting to be overwhelmed by vegetarian restaurants serving bean sprouts and healthy salads, all located next door to yoga studios.

What we found instead was a rich and diverse culinary landscape that offered the kind of healthy fare we envisioned along with a universe of ethnic cuisine, trendsetting fast food (can you say In-n-Out, Fatburger, Baja Fresh, Koo Koo Roo, Zankou Chicken, etc.) and increasingly commercialized versions of the aforementioned California Cuisine, which had already evolved from cutting edge to mainstream.

During our years in Southern California we ate many meals at the various outposts of the Wolfgang Puck Cafe and California Pizza Kitchen and, the inspiration for this post, Encino-based Chin Chin, with its signature Chinese Chicken Salad (a similar Chinois Salad was also on the Puck menu). We loved the Chin Chin Chinese Chicken Salad so much that I recently set out to recreate it in our home kitchen. Our contemporary version with fresh greens and a pungent, pickled ginger laced dressing was reminiscently delicious!

What I did not know about the salad, at least until I went looking for the recipe – see here – is that its origin story connects this dish to the source of the California Cuisine movement at the renowned Ma Maison, where Puck and others got their start working for Patrick Terrail. For more background on the development of California Cuisine, I highly recommend Andrew Friedman’s “Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll: How Food Lovers, Free Spirits, Misfits and Wanderers Created a New American Profession.”

Los Angeles provided a bounty of culinary discoveries. How I would love to go back and re-explore the LA of the late 90s, knowing what I do today. Last year, pre-pandemic, Abby, Zoe and I were back there for a college visit. We hit a number of our favorites, or least those still remaining, including the Wolfgang Puck restaurant in Irvine and the Il Fornaio Italian eatery in Pasadena. I will save my love for this latter spot and my increasing passion for Italian food during those years for another post. 

All of this represented another level of sophistication that I had been seeking my whole life, stemming all the way back to my younger years in Mississippi poring over New Yorker magazines at my grandmother’s home, fascinated with the advertisements and cartoons representing a studied and worldly posture that could only be possible in places like New York or Los Angeles or San Francisco or Miami. By the late 90s, gourmet food had become as much a part of this worldview for me as wearing the right clothes, reading interesting books or demonstrating a nuanced view of global politics.

Living in Southern California also exposed me to a much wider range of ethnic cuisine, particularly food from the countries of Asia. Prior to moving there, I had sampled American Chinese food and Vietnamese fare (the latter because of significant Vietnamese immigration to my native Gulf Coast region). Thai food, Koean barbecue and Indian curries were all new to me, despite being almost 30 by the time we arrived in Lotus Land.

These discoveries prompted me to try my own hand at making Asian food. While browsing a used bookstore in North Hollywood, I stumbled upon a copy of Jennifer Brennan’s “The Cuisines of Asia: Nine Great Oriental Cuisines by Technique” originally published by St. Martin’s Press in 1984.

As I set out to cook my way through this fascinating book, I acquired a Joyce Chen wok at the Bristol Farms grocery store in South Pasadena (one of my favorite places to shop for supplies). I also began amassing a spice cabinet filled with newly discovered concoctions – cloves, five spice, garam masala, mace, turmeric, etc. – and a pantry filled with bags of Japanese and Thai rice and packages of wonton wrappers.  We spent hours in our apartment’s galley kitchen in Sherman Oaks attempting to stir fry, steam, bake and fry our way into Asian cuisine proficiency, with a respectable amount of success. We were also on a quest during this period to master the perfect lemon drop martini so sometimes the quality of our food took a back seat to our cocktail mixing practice sessions, if you know what I mean.

Recently, around the same time I went searching the Internet for the Chin Chin salad recipe, already deep in the throes of 90s California nostalgia, I ran across another Joyce Chen wok, on a sale table at Crate & Barrel. My old one died a few years back so this seemed like fate. I purchased the wok, dusted off my Jennifer Brennan book and whipped up a delicious Balinese pork curry, which duly impressed my 17-year-old daughter Zoe, who loves Asian food of all varieties. I also cracked open another Asian cookbook, a more recent acquisition, “The Chinese Cookbook” by Craig Claiborn and Virginia Lee, and tried a new recipe, one that became an instant classic in our household, Lion’s Head.

Lion’s Head is a dish of spicy pork meatballs served over cabbage (we used savoy). It was love at first bite. It’s simple and satisfying, yet also sophisticated, reminiscent of those years of culinary discovery when Abby and I were still relatively young, cooking new dishes and eating out often, prior to the responsibilities and joys of parenting.

Thinking about those years and connecting the dots to my present day kitchen adventures – reviving old classics and discovering new ones – encapsulates the modest goal of this present project. This week’s donation of $25 went to the Lee Initiative. Thank you for spending a little time with me.

On a recent gloomy day, one of many to come as the seasons change, I made chili, a classic comfort food perfect for such circumstances. In keeping with my last blog entry looking back to the cuisine trends of the 80s and 90s, I tried the chili recipe from “The Silver Palate Cookbook.” New to me, although referred to by the Silver Palate authors as a favorite, this recipe produces a light, fresh-tasting version of the southwest stew, brightened by lemon juice, fresh herbs and a dash of dijon mustard. We really enjoyed this chili, and will definitely make it again soon. 

The recipe can be found here, and for what it’s worth the current issue of Saveur celebrates the original Silver Palate New York City store as “The Tiny NYC Shop That Inspired Big Ideas.”

My first experience with chili is indicative of much of my childhood eating because it came from a can produced by the Campbell Soup Company. The Chunky version of beef chili with beans was a personal favorite, and my only real reference point to chili for a long time. 

My Texas-born maternal grandmother Toni Purnell once served me her version of chili (with Fritos), which perplexed me because there were no beans and it could be eaten with a fork instead of a spoon. I would come to learn, years later, that her chili con carne was an authentic take on Texas chili, often served in the Lone Star State alongside queso, enchiladas or even a juicy steak. See Texas food guru Robb Walsh’s classic chili con carne recipe here.

By contrast, I now think of the Silver Palate Chili as big city chili (remember those silly commercials making fun of salsa from New York City), given its upper West Side roots. Unlike most of my efforts at making chili, which are generally free form in their approach, I closely followed this recipe. The results were well worth the disciplined effort.

In addition to those long-ago cans of Campbell’s Chunky chili with beef and beans, and faint memories of my Grandmother Purnell’s Texas chili, here’s a greatest hits list of my own chili tasting experiences:

• Testing various versions of the spicy stews offered by the Texas Chili Parlor in Austin, Texas, with a particularly fond memory of dining there with my Uncle George and late Aunt Diane.
• Sampling what I can only think of as the California Cuisine version of chili, some of them alarmingly hot, at the Encino-based Chili My Soul (the inspiration for the title of this post), when Abby and I were living in the San Fernando Valley in the late 90s.
• Devouring the chili with pasta at Abby’s beloved Chili Mac in Chicago (now defunct), which she enjoyed as an affordable and comforting dinner on those cold Midwestern nights when she was working her first job out of college, living in the Lincoln Park neighborhood.
• Soaking up a night of hard drinking during my college years with a 2 a.m. Chili Cheese Omelette at the Camellia Grill’s iconic Uptown New Orleans all-night diner.
• Sharing my own version of Texas chili with family and friends at the one and only Super Bowl Party I ever hosted, which magically ended in a win by my hometown team, the New Orleans Saints. The chili was pretty good, and I still get goosebumps thinking about the final moments of the game when it became evident that the long-suffering Saints would win. Never fear, we served homemade gumbo at that party too.
• Replicating on many occasions a version of so-called Dump Chili, first demonstrated to us by a Midwestern friend, that involves browning ground meat (beef, bison, turkey, etc.) and topping it with canned chili beans, quality salsa or pico de gallo, shredded cheese, diced onion, sour cream and corn chips. It’s super easy and can be, depending upon the quality of ingredients, delicious.

Nearly everyone seems to both love chili and have a special version of their own. I am not wedded to any specific style or recipe. I enjoy them each in their own way. I also appreciate, particularly during the ongoing pandemic, that part of the appeal of chili (and having a signature recipe) relates to its communal dynamics. You make chili for special occasions and share and compare your version with friends and family.

Here’s looking forward to making this Silver Palate chili, or some other version, for a Super Bowl Party or other gathering of family and friends when we can safely gather again. This week’s $25 donation went to the Oregon Food Bank. Thank you for spending a little time with me.

A well-cooked chicken dish represents a great accomplishment for almost any cook. My experience cooking chicken is that it’s a lot tougher (pun intended) than it looks. This week I made two classic chicken dishes, both from cookbooks published in the 1980s and both exemplifying that era’s embrace of a more casual, Mediterranean approach to gourmet cooking. They are the iconic Chicken Marbella from “The Silver Palate Cookbook,” authored by Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins, and a lesser-known personal favorite, Mistral’s Chicken from “Bistro Cooking” by Patricia Wells. Both cookbooks were published by the Workman house known for its popular recipe guides.

I was not a “foodie” in the 1980s, at least not in the way we understand that term today, but I had already recognized that food meant something to me that it did not to my family. Savoring Biloxi-style seafood gumbo at the Log House, or discovering Italian food at Angelo’s in Gulfport were seminal experiences that transported me into a world apart from the food-as-sustenance worldview of most of my loved ones.

My early relationship with food, in the pre-teen years, revolved around using food as a source of comfort in the face of family strife and the unpredictable volatility of my dad’s moods. As a result, I gained weight in elementary and early middle school, and was subject to resulting ridicule, completing the vicious circle of emotional pain. During my late middle school and high school years, I largely suppressed these urges, subjugating them to the more compelling need to look and act normal and fit in with others. Ultimately, drinking became an alternative antidote to my inner turmoil. That worked for a long time until, as they say, it didn’t work. That’s another story.

As the years progressed, even as I submerged my interests in food, other experiences solidified my conviction that well-prepared food and taking a serious approach to cooking were meaningful and reflective of something larger than either pleasure or meeting basic needs. These experiences included eating at famous New Orleans restaurants like Commander’s Palace (thanks to my now-wife Abby’s family), enjoying those Thanksgiving brunches at Tujague’s I wrote about last week and even pooling cash with friends to check out trendy but casual places like the Louisiana Pizza Kitchen (which I now realize was a local take on Wolfgang Puck’s emerging casual gourmet empire out West).

By the time the 90s rolled around I had begun acquiring the beginnings of my cookbook library, mostly with my employee discount at B. Dalton’s Books on Canal Street. Books have long been my escape portal, and cookbooks offered me entry to a world of sophistication, taste, technique, and style, all areas of fascination since my childhood days of perusing my grandmother’s New Yorker magazines.

When Abby and I combined our households in 1995, we each had our fair share of cookbooks, including the descendants of “The Silver Palate Cookbook” — Julee Rosso’s “Great Good Food” and Sheila Lukin’s “Around the World Cookbook.” We were just beginning our journey of food obsession, and fortunately our combined salaries gave us an opportunity to buy quality ingredients and cookware. For our wedding, we excitedly registered at the newly opened Williams Sonoma store in the Canal Place mall, and as we began to earn more we also explored finer dining around town, taking mental notes of our meals and trying to replicate those professional efforts in our apartment kitchen.

We learned to make pesto and gnocchi and braised lamb shanks and polenta and risotto and skirt steak and chimichurri and garlic mashed potatoes, all hangover influences from the 80s food revolution of fresh, gourmet fare set in motion by cooks and authors like Rossso, Lukins and Wells. Abby and I met Patricia Wells at the Hollywood Farmers’ Market in Los Angeles, where we moved in 1998, and she gave us one of the great food tips of our lives, a restaurant recommendation for our 1999 trip to Provence – more about that later when I get around to writing about my greatest restaurant meals.

Making Chicken Marbella and Mistral’s Chicken provided another time traveling opportunity for me, back to those early days of learning the finer things of cooking and eating and devouring cookbooks and luxuriating on the weekend in watching the early shows on the Food Network (not the vapid reality TV the network now features).

Both recipes are pretty straightforward so I will spare folks the details, other than to note that I used bone-in thighs for the Chicken Marbella and boneless breast (for expediency and based on what was available at my local market) for Mistral’s Chicken. The recipe for Chicken Marbella is available here, and the recipe for Mistral’s Chicken is available here. “New Times Cookbook” author Amanda Hesser jokes that after “The Silver Palate Cookbook” was published every cook in America served Chicken Marbella at dinner parties until everyone was sick of it. While less well known, Mistral’s Chicken has been a mainstay for us since we met Patricia Wells because it’s both delicious and foolproof. We served our chicken with a side of sliced potatoes cooked in walnut oil and topped with gremolata, another recipe from “Bistro Cooking,” which was so good I wanted to make it again the next day.

I am so grateful I discovered cooking in my 20s as a way of transforming one of our basic needs into a creative act. Cooking remains to this day a great solace to me in this mad, crazy world.

This week’s $25 donation went to the Emeril Lagasse Foundation. Thank you for spending a little time with me.

My favorite Thanksgivings were not spent lingering at a family table groaning under the load of traditional dishes. Instead, I think fondly of Thanksgiving meals served from two New Orleans commercial kitchens at opposite ends of town – the FairGrounds horse track in Gentilly and the renowned Creole eatery Tujaque’s in the French Quarter.

Our Turkey Day meals at the FairGrounds’ opening day celebrations are memorable more as a unique family tradition than for the quality of the food. Food, however, takes center stage in my reveries about Tujague’s, particularly an unassuming side dish not usually associated with Thanksgiving, the boiled brisket appetizer served with a spicy, horseradish-laced sauce.

After many years of traditional Thanksgivings served at our Gulfport home or at my great aunt’s house, my mom decided that she wanted to dispense with tradition and go out for Thanksgiving. She had read positive reviews of Tujague’s Thanksgiving service, and made a reservation for the two of us. Dad was rarely around for Thanksgiving.

The five-course meal at Tujague’s was elegant and delicious, and we wandered the streets of the French Quarter after, warding off sleepiness and enjoying the sites and sounds of the historic district on an unseasonably warm afternoon. This became a new tradition for mom and me and later others including her second husband Nick and my wife Abby.

There is no small amount of irony that my mother, who took a dim view of the Quarter milieu, created a holiday tradition at Tujague’s, particularly given the fact that the restaurant’s historic, tile-floored bar served as a regular gathering place for my dad and the colorful cronies who populated his very separate, French Quarter life. I made a few of my own memories at Tujague’s including dinners with personal friends and my own nuclear family on subsequent visits to New Orleans, and even a rockin’ good party on the second floor of the restaurant the night I graduated from Loyola University. Earlier this year, Tujague’s was forced to move to a new, nearby location. They have surely struggled like so many other restaurants in New Orleans and elsewhere during the ongoing pandemic, but I am hopeful they will be around for another generation of patrons making their own memories.

In the years we celebrated there, Tujague’s Thanksgiving pre fixe menu included a plate of turkey and dressing and some form of yams preceded by a salad or gumbo and a small plate of the restaurant’s boiled brisket, a recipe for which can be found here.

I cook and write about food here on this blog as a way of retracing my steps and expressing my tastes in the broadest sense of that word, including my appreciation for certain styles of cooking, eating, writing, living. Tujague’s beef brisket represents a mainstay in my food memory bank. So it seemed obvious to try to recreate the experience in my own home kitchen. The results were both disappointing and reassuring.

This is not my first effort at brisket. I have attempted to prepare brisket several different ways, including boiling and smoking, mostly with mediocre or worse results. Despite closely following the Tujague’s recipe, the expensive cut of meat was still a bit tough and lacked flavor. Not unlike my prior adventures with ribs, the sauce was the star of the show. At Tujague’s the brisket is tender, juicy, flavorful, and the sauce provides a tangy accent. In my case, the sauce saved the meat from being almost completely without flavor.

Another star of our brisket meal was the salad course, a baked goat cheese salad based on a signature dish at Alice Water’s renowned Chez Panisse restaurant, which revolutionized the food world with its introduction of California cuisine (a food style at the polar opposite of the Creole cookery at Tujague’s). We used a wonderful mix of fresh greens including watercress, frisee and romaine, topped with pre-marinated goat cheese, which we breaded and briefly heated in the broiler, and a homemade vinaigrette. The salad was exquisite! We will definitely make it again.

This may be my last effort at homemade brisket. Given the mediocre stovetop results, not to mention even worse outcomes on the smoker, it leaves me feeling defeated. My cooking life is too short for such negative feedback. I am perversely glad that something as delicious and timeless as Tujague’s beef brisket, ostensibly simple to prepare, is, in fact, difficult to produce, even when following the restaurant’s seemingly straightforward recipe.

The challenge of making Tujague’s brisket demonstrates a risk of trying to fuse food memories with present creations; sometimes one doesn’t live up to the other. My efforts to make brisket and ribs, both personal family favorites from the past, have faltered, while my adventures making Mississippi Delta hot tamales and Craig Claiborne’s Chicken Spaghetti have been successful in providing new ways to connect with my interest in cooking with my Southern roots. Fortunately, a good sauce can save almost any dish, no matter how mediocre.

So I will leave the mysteries of brisket to those with more patience, or some secret knowledge that eludes me, while I move on to making dishes that boost my culinary ego and give me pleasure at the table. Hopefully, Tujague’s and its luscious brisket will still be there whenever I am able to make it back to New Orleans.

This week’s donation of $25 went to the Oregon Food Bank. Thanks for spending a little time with me.

“Food always tries to have it both ways. It is always about the past, and it is always about presence, at least when we’re doing what we’re supposed to be doing when we eat, that is enjoying ourselves, using our senses and our spirit…But if food is about presence, food and its traditions are also about memory. What meal can we cook that is not an attempt either to recreate or to avoid recreating our mother’s table? Presence and absence are inextricable, a woven braid. Memory is about absence, things no longer in our lives, and the effort to bring them into presence. Presence is about the here and now, ignoring, or seeming to ignore, past and future.” Randy Fertel

The night before we buried my dad in Memphis, I sat down for a dinner of his favorite barbecue ribs at Silky O’Sullivan’s with one of his many longtime golf buddies and partners in crime. Silky’s may not have the best ribs in Memphis (they are not mentioned in the guidebooks I have consulted), but dad liked them because he liked Silky and, more importantly, he believed that Silkie liked him. Silky’s ribs, like those at the more famous Charlie Vergo’s Rendezvous, are coated with a spicy, dry rub and served with sauce on the side. 

Dad was adamant in his belief that this was the proper way to serve ribs, no sauce or, if you must, some sauce on the side. So adamant, in fact, that he once made a horrible scene in front of me and my young son Emmet at a restaurant in Pittsburgh, Penn., over a plate of ribs that were served bathed in sauce. While not his worst performance (not even close), it was still a wrenching experience, seeing my son get a taste of dad’s sometimes toxic combination of unwarranted anger and public spectacle. We left the restaurant and stood in the parking lot waiting for dad’s temperature to decrease. 

The three of us were visiting Pittsburgh to attend the 2007 U.S. Open at Oakmont Country Club. Dad had last been to Oakmont CC in 1953, when he was 12 years old, to watch his dad and my son’s namesake, Emmett O’Neil “Buck” White, compete in the same tournament. My grandfather, a Memphis native, was a journeyman pro golfer who won three professional tournaments and finished a respectable sixth in the 1949 U.S. Open after finishing the third round one shot out of the lead. Grandaddy Buck, as I called him, played in more than a dozen U.S. Opens, two Masters and multiple other major golf tournaments.

Personally, I love barbecue, and barbecue sauce, in their many manifestations, but I don’t love ribs as much as dad. When it comes to barbecue, I prefer smoked pork shoulder, pork sausage, and beef brisket, all served with a range of sauces (a topic that merits its own post someday). I have also had only limited success in making ribs at home, indoors or out.

My preference aside, I thought it appropriate for viewing last week’s U.S. Open, played at Winged Foot just outside New York City, to make ribs in honor of dad, along with some stir-fried collard greens and the classic White family appetizer of cheese and crackers. Traditionally staged over Father’s Day weekend, the U.S. Open is an important event in my family’s annual calendar. This year’s tournament was rescheduled as a result of the pandemic.

I opted to make the ribs in the oven, as opposed to smoking them in the Big Green Egg, because I wanted no part of anything approaching smoke after being locked in the house for two weeks because of smoky, hazardous air caused by nearby wildfires. The recipe I chose, another Craig Claiborne special, calls for cooking the ribs in the oven and serving them covered in a vinegary, Memphis-style barbecue sauce.

The sparerib recipe suggests cooking the ribs for approximately two hours at 400 degrees, basting them halfway through the process with a homemade sauce. The ribs were tasty enough, but the consistency was a bit off, fall-off-the-bone tender in some spots and tough in others. I would cook them longer, at a lower temperature, to get a more consistent texture, if I were to repeat this recipe. Fortunately, the tomato-based barbecue sauce was perfect. The sauce incorporates soy and brown sugar and has a sharp vinegar kick, reminiscent of other Memphis-style sauces I have tasted. The full recipe can be found here.

We also stir-fried collard greens, with garlic and pinch of sugar and a splash of Vietnamese fish sauce as a substitute for oyster sauce. This recipe was created by a prominent culinary family from Mississippi, the Chows. The original version can be found here.

Our pre-meal appetizers included toasted bread slices with heirloom tomatoes and buffalo burrata and a brie-style cheese with Raintree crisps, an upscale version of the cheddar cheese and saltines we ate at my grandparents’ home while watching golf tournaments and football games during my childhood. 

The quote above, taken from a charming essay written by Randy Fertel about his colorful, larger-than-life mother Ruth Fertel, founder of the Ruth’s Chris Steak House chain, expresses well the tension between past and present (or presence). In that same essay, Fertel argues that his mother’s success lay in part in her ability to create sacred spaces where people could come together to break bread and find release from the traumas of their past and the anxiety over their future. For what it’s worth, one of the most pleasant evenings I ever spent with dad was a dinner with him and my wife Abby at the original Ruth’s Chris in New Orleans in the mid-90s.

Watching this year’s U.S. Open felt bittersweet. I was grateful to be watching the tournament, given earlier concerns that the pandemic might cause all golf to be canceled this year. But the experience of watching a tournament with no live spectators and the evolution of what was once a shotmaker’s challenge into the bomb and gouge fest that was this year’s championship left me feeling a bit empty and out of touch. Fortunately, we had ribs, even if they were slathered in sauce, and other good food and the prospects for attending future U.S. Opens, along with the memories of my father and his father and all those Sunday afternoons spent watching golf so long ago swirling through my consciousness like the smoke blotting our skies of late.

This week’s donation of $25 went to the Oregon Food Bank. Thanks for spending a little time with me.

Before there was Julia Child, there was Craig Claiborne, who looms large in the culinary consciousness of Americans. A native son of the Mississippi Delta, Claiborne learned the love of food in the kitchen of his mother’s boarding house and followed that passion to become a world-traveling gourmand who headed up the New York Times food section for decades and authored the influential “New York Times Cookbook,” published in 1961, among more than two dozen books about cooking and dining.

Claiborne famously won his New York Times post by bonding with then-managing editor Turner Catledge over their Mississippi roots, and fellow food critic James Villas has been quoted as saying: “There has never been any question in my mind (that it) was Craig Claiborne, not James Beard or Julia Child, who first introduced Americans to the glories of great cooking and fine dining.”

If you want to dig into the discussion of Claiborne’s legacy, I recommend John T. Edge’s loving appreciation in the forward to the 2007 University of Georgia re-release of Claiborne’s “Southern Cooking,” originally published in 1987. You can also check out this informative New School panel discussion entitled “Craig Claiborne and the Invention of Food Journalism.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4694&v=qfjySjSKHGs&feature=emb_logo

Claiborne is also singularly responsible for elevating the previously humble Low Country breakfast dish, shrimp and grits, to wide acclaim when he published the recipe in the pages of the New York Times after sampling Bill Neal’s version at the legendary Crook’s Corner restaurant in Chapel Hill, N.C.

On a recent Saturday, one in which I found myself trapped at home because of smoke-filled skies and hazardous air quality caused by nearby forest fires, I embarked on making Claiborne’s famous chicken spaghetti, a recipe from his own mother’s kitchen that was reportedly celebrated across the Delta. The chicken spaghetti dish is a layered, baked pasta that incorporates two classic sauces, a Ragu and a white sauce along with mushrooms, poached chicken and grated cheddar cheese.

I’ve been aware of Claiborne since a young age because my dad’s first cousin is married to his nephew, and because his Mississippi roots were a source of pride to folks in my family, particularly my grandmother, who admired his literary achievement as much as his culinary knowledge. His indispensable “Craig Claiborne’s Kitchen Primer” was the first acquisition of my cookbook library, purchased with my employee discount at B. Dalton Book’s in New Orleans, a few short months after I graduated from college. I still consult that book, 30 years later, to remind myself of many basics, including the section title “How To Make The Best Hamburgers.”

To get a sense of Claiborne the newspaperman, check out the “Craig Claiborne’s Favorites,” a multi-volume collection of New York Times columns from the 1970s. These columns find Claiborne at his most urbane and sophisticated, writing from the perspective of the royal “we” and bringing readers along for his culinary adventures, whether that be preparing delicate meals with his regular co-author Pierre Franey, roaming the ethnic markets of Manhattan’s 9th Avenue or enjoying paella prepared by the former first lady of Panama in her posh Miami home.

The allure of the Chicken Spaghetti is consistent with my affinity for baked pasta dishes. Lasagna was the first multi-step recipe I ever tackled after ordering it at a restaurant as a kid. To her credit, my mom found a recipe, purchased the ingredients and turned the kitchen over to me. Who knows if that first lasagna was any good, but I was hooked on cooking, on the process of chopping, mixing, stirring, simmering, sauteing, assembling, baking, roasting, etc. To me, it’s magic!

Many families have signature spaghetti recipes. My wife’s grandmother was famous for her Dot’s Baked Spaghetti dinners. My great aunt, also from the Mississippi Delta, served her own version of Chicken Spaghetti that involves spreading cooked spaghetti over a mixture of cooked chicken and vegetables and warm stock and letting it sit for half an hour (see “Bayou Cuisine, Its Tradition and Transition,” pg. 211, published by St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Indianola, Miss.), and my paternal grandmother’s family members celebrate their unique Garrard Spaghetti, also a layered, baked spaghetti with tomato-based meat sauce and cheddar cheese. Finally, my good friend John Lazzara taught me yet another iconic spaghetti recipe called Johnny Marzetti; his version combines ground chicken, pork and beef with cheese, button mushrooms and black olives. I have great taste memories of each of these proprietary pastas!

Claiborne’s Chicken Spaghetti recipe can be found here, https://www.food.com/recipe/craig-claibornes-chicken-spaghetti-388233

Heeding a tip from the maestro’s nephew, I took a few shortcuts. “Simplify, simplify, simplify,” he told me. Accordingly, I used pre-cooked, pulled chicken, pre-chopped vegetables and high-end, pre-made chicken stock for the white sauce. I also failed to heed the admonition to let the assembled dish sit for four hours before baking.

Even removing those steps, the recipe still involves a good bit of work, making the multiple sauces, combining them, layering the sauce, chicken and cooked spaghetti and then baking the whole thing. The result is worth the effort, a surprisingly light pasta dish, given the rich ingredients. Plus, it saved well, and tasted better the next day, probably because it finally got that recommended resting time.

Claiborne’s life and work are a source of great fascination for me, one that I hope may blossom into something more elaborate than this blog post, maybe a longer article or even a book. Until then I have my “Kitchen Primer” and, when I am so inclined, his mother’s Chicken Spaghetti recipe.

This week’s donations of $25 each are going to the Oregon Food Bank and the Lee Initiative. Thank you for spending a little time with me.