Culinary Concierge Winter 2013
44
-
Upload
angela-blake -
Category
Documents
-
view
217 -
download
2
description
Celebrating 13 years of serving up the culinary current in and around the New Orlean's area
Transcript of Culinary Concierge Winter 2013
Making turtle soup at home has to be a labor oflove. The most stalwart home cook oftenhesitates to whip up a tureen of it for family andfriends, possibly because finding fresh turtlemeat is no snap, or possibly because doing itright can take enough pots and pans to challengeany dishwasher’s fortitude. Some settle for mockturtle soup, made with veal, beef or oxtail. Butnone of those imparts that subtle, butrecognizable, presence of the sea taste that turtlemeat delivers.
More than 50 turtle and terrapin species inhabitthe watery parts of the globe. Along the coastlineof south Louisiana, the Gulf of Mexico and thetangle of inlets and swamps amount to a virtualparadise for green and snapping turtles, the twospecies that provide most of what ends up asturtle soup on dining-room tables. A smallerpercentage of the creatures find their way to adark-red, peppery sauce piquante, a longtimefavorite of the population along the bayous ofsouthwest Louisiana’s Cajun country.
Like most warhorses of the Creole stable, aturtle soup rarely turns out well in the hands ofa cook who puts experimentation above respectfor tradition. No innovator, at least, has come upwith a better list of spices, seasonings, garnishesand techniques than the ones that emerged overalmost two centuries of New Orleans
gastronomy. On the textbook roster of flavorenhancers are onions, scallions, tomato, lemon,bay leaf, thyme and clove. At the table, add adash or two of sherry and a crumble of hard-cooked egg and revel in a deep reddish-brownliquid that thickly coats the spoon and lavishesthe palate with as many good flavors as the lawallows.
Among the traits that make this soup a paradigmof the true Creole kitchen is that it’s as much athome on a white damask tablecloth as it is on thebare-wood tabletop of a fishing camp.
The same holds for restaurant categories. Theturtle soup served at Commander’s Palace,occupying a corner in the heart of the toneyGarden District since the nineteenth century,has been one of its hallmark dishes for decades.
From the pantry and spice rack come theseasonings for any turtle soup recipe-- onions,scallions, and tomato paste for color, garlic,sweet pepper, bay leaf, thyme and a few cloves.Before it leaves the kitchen, the cupful is lacedwith fresh lemon juice and sherry.
The consumer who chooses to add a squirt ortwo more of sherry to his soup may be surprisedto learn he’s following the lead of a member ofthe English nobility.
The Soup with Snap
| CULINARY CONCIERGE | NEW ORLEANS20
A Tale of Turtle Soup by Gene Bourg
Gumbo will always be the archetypal dish in the hierarchy of traditional Creolesoups and stews. But in the hearts and minds of most lovers of south-Louisianacooking, a thick and spicy turtle soup is many a gumbo’s closest rival.
Maybe turtle soup’s mystique stems as much from its relative scarcity as itdoes from its powerful, yet elegant, flavor. When it is found on the daily menuof a New Orleans restaurant, the establishment usually has been around for acouple of generations or more, a sign that this dish sits staunchly in thecategory of “classic,” or maybe “old-fashioned.”
For many a newcomer to New Orleans,deciphering its quirky culture means firstdispensing with American-style logic andthen learning a new vocabulary.
Where else does crossing a river meanheading south to reach the East Bank?
Where else does the term "neutral ground"refer, not to a emilitarized zone, but ratherto the median dividing a street. And whereelse would the baking of a traditional breadcalled "French" be left exclusively toGermans and Italians?
In the Yellow Pages of a 1940s New Orleanstelephone directory is a list of more than200 small neighborhood bread bakeries,most of them identified by the owner'sfamily name. Finding an obvious Frenchname among them--like Bourgeois, Villereor Livaudais-- is next to impossible. About90 percent of the list is filled with suchmonikers as Bacher, Ruffino, Franz, Brocato,Costanza and Klotz. But, it's a safe bet that
the great majority of the ovens in theseGerman and Italian stores turned out thesort of bread that New Orleanians havealways known as "French."
Fewer than a handful of old-line bakeriesproducing French bread in the city are stillaround. To find them in the phone book, goto Leidenheimer, Gendusa and Binder.
Mention this trivia to somebody scarfingdown a sandwich in any of the city's legion ofpoor-boy ( po-boy ) shops, or a breadpudding in a fancy Creole dining place, andyou'll probably get a blank stare. What reallymatters is that New Orleans' classic NewOrleans-style French bread is still with us,and it's not an endangered species.
New Orleans' French-style bread enjoys amystique shared only by a few of the city'sculinary classics. One possible reason is thatthe city of its birth is the only place inAmerica you'll find it--thin-crusted, cottony,and sliced only minutes beore it is eaten.
Our Daily Bread Pudding
| CULINARY CONCIERGE | NEW ORLEANS26
TRENDSETTING THE TABLE
French Bread Foreword by Gene Bourg Bread Pudding Background by Kendall Gensler
