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.