Red Beans and Rice: Memories of a Creole Love Affair
The cookbook lost its cover countless years ago. It’s spattered with roux (that baseline sauce of many a Creole recipe) and other unidentified marks from meals long gone by. The spiral binding has been a little derailed, but still holds the pages together. And part of the index was unintentionally ripped out of its original place somewhere along the way and is now a bookmark.
“La Bouche Creole” is like a bible for some people utterly smitten with New Orleans cuisine. And its author sure has one snobby attitude. Leon E. Soniat Jr. prefaced his recipe for red beans and rice: “If you insist on cooking sausage with your red beans, try this recipe.”
Insist, indeed! And I do.
This uppity remark is in keeping with the book’s original owner, my husband David, who referred to himself as a museum-quality Creole, because his family goes way, way back in Louisiana and Alabama. David was horrified, some years ago, when he thought I’d added water to his red beans, which had been thickening as they simmered for hours on the stove.
I rolled my eyes. “No, Michael did that.”
“Oh,” David sighed in relief. “Then it’s okay.”
I just had to laugh. Michael was one of his besties, Michael Francis, a fine New Orleans cook himself, who was visiting us in New York. As someone from Upstate New York, I wasn’t fit to cook anything Creole. Why question his delusion? I loved his food and was happy to let him have at it.
Years later, when David was dying from Stage 4 cancer, Michael flew up from New Orleans with his serene wife Ulrika and dirtied every pot in our Harlem apartment to make David something that was like love on their Creole tongues: smoked duck gumbo. Didn’t matter that the firemen in a station down the street were likely to pay a house call if they saw all the smoke billowing from our tiny grill on the balcony. (They’d done that before.) Nor did it matter that it was the dead of winter.
Michael flew all that way North just before the world closed down due to COVID to see his friend one more time, and to give David a taste from home.
“La Bouche” has been propped up in my kitchen recently because I cooked red beans and rice in remembrance of David, one year after his passing. When I thought about the best way to honor him, there seemed no better way than simmering the mélange of creamy beans married with smoky ham and (dare I say) andouille sausage brought up from the Big Easy. It involves that Creole holy trinity: celery, onions, and bell peppers — along with a few seasonings like bay leaves and thyme.
Anyone who knows David would understand why I would mark the occasion with food. Especially if they had dropped in on one of our New Year’s Day parties, which invariably featured gumbo z’herbes, black-eyed peas and collard greens (that would be David) along with a decadent desert (from me).
It’s little wonder that some of my favorite prose and films feature food, given its importance in my own psyche. Among them is Isak Dinesen’s “Babette’s Feast” — originally a short story, then a film — about a mysterious French woman, Babette, who works for two devout spinsters who usually dine on extremely bland and austere food. After winning the lottery, Babette makes a meal so costly, and artistically transcendent, that the sisters’ bickering dinner guests bask in an unexpected sense of harmony, all their finger-pointing forgotten.
Then there’s “Big Night,” a film about a temperamental, incredibly gifted Italian chef (played by Tony Shalhoub) who clashes with his brother (Stanley Tucci) during a time when their restaurant is on the verge of closing its doors.
Most recently, I fell in love with Amor Towles’ latest novel “The Lincoln Highway.” While the story contains lots of different twists and turns unrelated to food, a restaurant in East Harlem is a distant, fond memory for one of the main characters. The restaurant serves a culinary treasure called Fettucine Mio Amore, which isn’t on the menu — because if you don’t know enough to order it, you don’t deserve to taste it. In one of the book’s happiest, most magical moments, the dish is served at a dinner party. Towles included a recipe for the dish on his site.
The home chefs in my own novel “The Juice” tend to go with simple fare: like my mother’s apple crisp, my sister’s deep, rich chocolate pie, and David’s fried catfish, which is so light and crispy. In the sci-fi storyline, I wanted to humanize people in a futuristic version of New York. The food helps warm it.
I thought about David, Michael and other beloved cooks in my life as I stirred my red beans, studying that old, spattered cookbook to make sure I got the recipe right. Some people might say that because the book is so worn, I should just buy a new one. But as the aroma of beans filled my nostrils, and the kitchen started to smell like home again, I knew that I could never, ever do that.
