Rescuing cuisine of New Orleans

As the residents of New Orleans began rebuilding their lives after Hurricane Katrina left much of their city in ruins, many sought comfort in the kitchen of wherever they happened to find refuge.

Nothing could soothe the pain like a pot of red beans and rice or bowl of gumbo that tasted of home.

But what of all those dishes that could not be re-created from memory? The ones clipped from newspapers or scribbled on notecards that were buried in a heap of rubble?

In the 3 1/2 years since Katrina, several local food writers have helped their fellow survivors reclaim these priceless pieces of their heritage. And recently, three praiseworthy cookbooks emerged —- each doing its part to salvage the city’s renowned culinary legacy.

“Cooking Up a Storm: Recipes Lost and Found From the Times-Picayune of New Orleans” (Chronicle Books, $24.95) has received the most attention.

It’s a collection of the newspaper’s most requested dishes and the stories of their origins and contributors, compiled by the Times-Picayune’s food editor, Judy Walker, and veteran creole cookbook author Marcelle Bienvenu. Many recipes came from the paper’s archives, while others were contributed by readers whose recipe boxes had remained intact.

“This book is about our paper’s community of readers, and this is what they asked for,” said Walker, who was deluged with phone calls and e-mails from displaced residents desperate to replace favorite recipes that had washed away.

Among the most popular recipes she was able to resurrect were the mirliton casserole a woman had made for Thanksgiving that “tasted like Grandma’s,” and the ever-popular spaghetti and meatballs from Schwegmann Brothers’ Stores, which are New Orleans institutions. And then there was an old-fashioned Butterscotch Rice Pudding sought by a reader who discovered it missing from the waterlogged recipes that had been hung on a clothesline to dry.

“I never set out to do a recovery project, but it turned into that,” said Walker. “People were so happy to be able to get back any piece of life they had lost. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve met at signings who get so emotional, and I end up tearing up, too.”

Even before Katrina, Walker’s predecessor at the Times-Picayune, Dale Curry, was already on a mission to preserve her city’s best recipes. For the last five years she’s been writing a column for New Orleans magazine born out of concern that these dishes might not survive a younger generation too busy to cook with the gusto their elders did. The hurricane’s aftermath added urgency to her project.

“I heard from people who had lost all their cookbooks, and felt they would never be able to replace their mother’s or father’s special recipes,” she said. “For them it was like losing family photos.”

Curry compiled the recipes she thought best captured the essence of the region in “New Orleans Home Cooking” (Pelican Press, $19.95).

She includes her favorite seafood gumbo; the empanadalike Natchitoches meat pies, a jazz fest staple; and Pasta Milanese, a Lenten specialty often served on March 19 when New Orleanians of Sicilian descent observe St. Joseph’s Day, a tribute to the patron saint who they believed saved their ancestors from famine.

“Basically, it’s home cooking,” she said. “It’s not just the things we like to eat in restaurants.”

Elsa Hahne, a Swedish-born journalist who came to New Orleans in 2002 to study the city’s French heritage, also wanted to capture the heart and soul of the city by documenting the way people ate at home. Using a tape recorder and a camera, she visited its most distinctive neighborhoods, shot photos, sampled dishes and recorded oral histories. She assembled the stories and photos into a traveling exhibit and showed it in libraries and markets. It was at Tulane University when it was destroyed by Katrina.

Fortunately, much of that material was still in her computer, so rather than let it die, she decided to expand her project into a cookbook. She went to more homes, and collected more recipes —- almost none of which had ever been written down, she said. It was up to her to work out the measurements in her kitchen at home.

The result is “You Are Where You Eat: Stories and Recipes From the Neighborhoods of New Orleans” (University Press of Mississippi, $35). It features 33 first-person stories and 85 recipes that produce a big, spicy gumbo of cultural diversity that goes far beyond the creole classics.

African-American, Honduran, Greek, Chinese, Vietnamese, Croatian and Hungarian are among the ethnicities represented in short biographies that include the subject’s neighborhood, occupation and interesting tidbits, such as the thing Avery Bassich of the university area carries in her purse (Tabasco!).

Besides the creole staples such as pecan pralines and crawfish etouffee, Hahne’s book features original home creations such as peanut butter soup with hen and habanero, and the classic Greek Garlic Bread Dip Skordalia, that uses leftover English muffins and pecans in place of almonds.

“It’s like the melting pot vs. the salad bowl,” said Hahne, who works as the art director for Offbeat magazine. “In New York, all the different cultures are tossed, but they don’t really mix. Like a salad. But New Orleans is more like an actual gumbo, where the flavors of the okra and the seafood and the spices all blend together.”

Each of these books offers a different perspective on one of the world’s greatest food cities. But they also go beyond that, revealing the strength of its communities and determination of its people to ensure its most beloved traditions remain alive and well at the dinner table, even in the face of adversity.