INTERVIEW WITH STEPHEN ARMBRUSTER Q So please tell me your name. A My name is Steve Armbruster.Q And your birthday, and where were you born?A I was born October 29, 1949. I was born at

"the Touro," as we call it here in New Orleans. I was born in New Orleans at Touro Infirmary, which would be known as a hospital to people not in New Orleans. My mother actually had been a nurse there, and we were living only about three or four blocks from there at the time of my birth on Peniston Street, right between Camp and Chestnut.

Q And where were you raised?A Well, we stayed on Peniston Street until I was

about four or five years old. That's in Uptown New Orleans. And actually, I got my name Stephen because we were in the parish, the Catholic parish, of St. Stephen's church. New Orleans was a big Catholic town.

We moved out to Metairie because after World War II -- I was born in 1949. Well, in those ten years afterwards, there was a much greater demand for housing than there were houses. So a lot of people started moving out towards the lake -- well, on the other

side of Claiborne Avenue, out towards the lake, into Metairie, out in Gentilly, and eventually, in the '60s, out towards New Orleans East.

But we moved to Metairie, onto Hesper Avenue, near Bonnabel Boulevard and Metairie Road, when I was about four years old.

Q And then how long did you live there? A I lived there until I moved away from home

after graduating from high school in 1976. I started college at Tulane University, and I got an apartment near Tulane University in my freshman year.

Q And where were you living as an adult? You were there, and what have you done subsequently?

A Well, in the -- gosh, 1967. Now it's 2003 -- 40-something -- almost 40 years since then, I've mostly lived in New Orleans except for a brief six-year stint where I lived in the Boston area; and that was from 1988 to '94. So other than that, I've lived in the New Orleans area, various locations.

Q What is your occupation?A Well, right now I'm a lawyer. I went to law

school while I was living in the Boston area, from 1991 to 1994. But I cooked in restaurants from, oh, the late '70s, early '80s, until I started law school in 1991. And

most of that was in New Orleans.Q Right. So just a hop back to your childhood.

What is your earliest food memory?A My earliest memory was helping my mother

cook crawfish bisque one day. We were living on Hesper Avenue, and we had gotten a sack of crawfish, a 50-pound sack of, you know, live, thriving, active crawfish. And we went into the back room, which was a laundry room, and there was a big two-compartment concrete sink. And I remember my mother -- I was about five, I suppose. I thought I was really helping her a lot. I suppose now I was more in the way than anything. But I remember helping her tilt the bag of crawfish over into the sink so that all these little critters swarmed out into the basin and started climbing over each other.

And then we washed them. My mother filled the basin up with water, poured some salt into it. And that was supposed to purge them of the mud and -- see, they live in the mud. That's why they call them mudbugs.

And then she boiled them, and I helped her boil them. And she dropped them into the seasoned boiling water, seasoned with a mixture of -- a lot of salt, but also red pepper and various herbs and spices: Bay

leaves and mustard seeds and coriander seeds. And after they were boiled, which is usually

the point where you would then eat the crawfish, the actual preparation of crawfish bisque began. You would separate the tails from the heads, then you would clean out the heads. You would clean out any of the membranes, of course, that were in the heads and clean all of that out of the head. Then you would peel the tails and take the meat out from the tails.

And then later my mom would cut up onions and other seasoning vegetables and then chop up crawfish meat and then some bread crumbs and other herbs and spices and such and make stuffing and then put that back into the crawfish head. She would make a stock by taking all the shells and then simmering it in water to make a broth and then would proceed to make a thick soup, like a gumbo, and then, towards the end, would add the stuffed crawfish heads into the -- this thick soup, the bisque, and that would be served in a bowl over rice. I thought that was a great dish.

Q Fantastic. So was that a dish your family would eat on a regular basis?

A Well, actually no.Q Why?

A Because it involved so much work. It was a dish that took a lot of time and preparation.

And we would have other dishes similar to that, like, you know, crawfish etouffee, the shrimp creole. But just on rare occasions, we would have that. But I remember helping my mother make that was a lot of fun.

Q So did your mother teach you to cook; that was really where you got your love of cooking?

A I got my love of cooking from my love of eating. I actually never cooked very much as a kid.

About 20 years after helping my mom cook crawfish bisque, I was working at a club called Tipitina's. It's a music club in New Orleans. But I had decided that this club needed a restaurant. And we had a kitchen already there when we took the club over, and so I decided that I should start a restaurant in the club.

And I asked my mother about it, and she gave me a copy of a cookbook which she had been given as a gift at a wedding shower. And I'll show it to the camera. The Picayune -- which was our newspaper, The Picayune

Creole Cookbook. And she said, "Just take this. If you can read a cookbook and you like to eat, you will be able to figure out how to cook."

Q And you did. A Yeah, I did. It was like throwing me into the

pool. Q Yeah. So just to go back to your childhood,

what sort of thing did your family eat on a daily basis?A Well, there was a certain routine of eating

certain things, or types of things, on certain days. Mondays, of course -- well, to us, of course. We all know this in New Orleans -- Mondays was red beans day. And it supposedly comes from this tradition of having some long simmering dish on Mondays. Mondays were wash days, and so housewives would put big pots of water on to boil so that they could have it available for washing things that needed hot water. And so since they had stoked up the stove, and it was going to be going all day anyhow, and they were going to basically be preoccupied with these other activities, they would just put the beans on and let them simmer all day. And they were the main course.

And the beans, these are red kidney beans that had been soaked overnight, usually, and then simmered with the seasoning. In New Orleans, when people say "seasoning," they're typically referring to vegetables. And the seasonings for red beans would be

onion and some garlic -- maybe a lot of garlic depending on your taste -- celery and, you know, maybe some bell pepper, maybe some parsley. But basically onions and maybe a little celery.

So you would cut up your seasonings and you would put that in your pot. Maybe you would saute it in a little bacon fat or bacon grease left over from breakfast. And then you would put in some seasoning meat. And for the red beans, that would be some sort of pig meat or bone. It would be like ham hock, ham bone, or pickled meat. And that would be like shoulder cuts that would have been, you know, preserved with sort of a briny type preservation, kind of like corned beef is. So you throw in your pickled meat or your ham bone, your onions.

And I remember my mom said -- well, she would always use bay leaves as one of her seasonings, and maybe there would be a pinch of other herbs, like a little bit of thyme or a little sage. She told me, "Oh, well, you can tell where people are from by how they cook their red beans. If they have bay leaves in their red beans, then they're above Canal Street, but if they don't have bay leaves in their red beans, they're from below Canal Street." Maybe that's true for certain segments

that lived above or below, but I remember her saying that. I'm not sure if that's exactly accurate, but...

So anyway, we also had red beans on Monday night. We would often have meatballs and spaghetti on Wednesdays. And a lot of folks not from New Orleans may not realize that there is a very large Italian, or actually Sicilian, contingent that had come through New Orleans all through, I guess, the 1880s. And so there's a very strong significant Italian and Sicilian influence in New Orleans cooking. So you have lots of eggplant and tomato dishes.

Q And was there a reason why you would have that on Wednesday?

A Just sort of grow up as a schedule. And I had noticed in a lot of the local

restaurants, if you would go out for a working man's lunch, that Wednesday would be meatballs and spaghetti day.

Q Right. So it wasn't just your family you think that was common to --

A It caught on as the meatball and spaghetti day sometime, somehow, and my family was just, you know, wrapped up in that.

Q And what other things?

A Well, Friday was a seafood day. New Orleans was, I would say, predominantly, or at least very significantly, a Catholic town. Our family was Catholic, and most of the people I knew were Catholic, and I went to a Catholic school. And, you know, they, the Catholics, had a restriction to not eat meat on Friday. So we would not.

And that was easy to do because we had so much good seafood. And we probably would have done it -- actually, later in my life, the Catholics relaxed the prescription against eating meat. And everybody in New Orleans, at least, that I knew, including my family, didn't eat meat on Friday anyway. But when I was a kid, that was a religious restriction that was pretty closely followed.

So we would have fried oysters or shrimp creole or -- I came up at a funny time. In the mid to late '50s and into the '60s, our culture was sort of transitioning from a time when everything really came from local groceries and local sources to a mixture of that and commercially processed things.

So sometimes we would simply have fish sticks. You know those little long rectangular things with the little crescents? Actually, I thought fish sticks were

great as a kid. They just seemed so exotic. They seemed much more exotic and elegant than, you know, fried speckled trout or shrimp creole.

And it was the same with TV dinners. Every once in a while, my mom would be busy, and she would feed us a TV dinner. And it would come on a little aluminum tray. And all of the food was much shinier, for some reason. Like, the little nibblet corn was real shiny; and the gravy and the mashed potatoes had this, you know, sort of industrial sheen to it. But we thought it was great.

But we would have seafood on Fridays. And sometimes we would have liver and onions on Saturday nights -- I'm not sure why. I'm not sure other families did that, but that was sort of a tradition -- with grits. So our Saturday-night dinner would be liver and onions and grits. And we would watch the Jackie Gleason show or something --

Q So was that more of a traditional southern thing? I mean, grits obviously is. But is liver and onions? What tradition does that dish come from? Do you know?

A I'm not sure.Q Yeah. I think that -- I mean, I grew up in

England, and I think liver and onions, they have that in England a lot. You know, so it's interesting, isn't it. It's interesting cuisine.

A New Orleans does have an interesting mixture of cuisine. We're credited as having this Creole cuisine. But the population numbers indicated that there were as many or more people of Italian or Sicilian extraction, German and Irish, you know, than there were of, you know, French or Spanish.

I'm half German, half Irish. Both of my grandmothers were Irish, and both of my grandfathers were German extraction. So maybe it came through that line. Maybe it was an old Irish thing. I'm not sure.

Q Was there any other Irish influence on the food you ate?

A Well, we had cabbage a lot. Sometimes we'd have, you know, corned beef and cabbage. But more often, we'd have cabbage with pork chops or ham steaks or some other kind of dish, maybe sausage. Not corned beef so often, but we would have cabbage frequently. Cabbage was available.

Other dishes -- well, on Sundays we would often have a roast. And one thing that maybe is a little different about the way my mom and a lot of people in

New Orleans cooked roast beef is that they would put whole cloves of garlic inside. You'd put a little hole in the roast beef and then stick toes of garlic inside. So then later, when you'd slice it through, you'd get, you know, a little eye of garlic in it, and you'd taste it. So we'd have that on Sundays.

As far as other food routines, there were certain foods that you would eat at certain times of year. Black-eyed peas and cabbage, of course, is something that you always had to eat on New Year's day. You would not think of, you know, going through the day, if you were from New Orleans, without eating those things.

Q Do you know where that tradition comes from?A No. I'm not sure. You know, sometimes you

just hear these things when you're a kid, and you just, you know, accept them as, you know, the way of life and as an article of faith, and then you do it. I've not gone through a New Year's day without eating black-eyed peas and cabbage.

Q Never? You never have?A Never. No, I don't think I have.

Lately, people have started adding cornbread to that menu, saying, well, you have to eat cornbread for health. The black-eyed peas would be for good luck, and

the cabbage would be for money. I'm not sure where the tradition came from. I don't remember that we ate cornbread for health. But it goes well with those foods, so that's fine.

Now, you know, the big holiday in New Orleans is Mardi Gras. And carnival season goes from 12th night, which is the day on which the three kings were supposed to have arrived at the crib. After seeing the Christmas star and traveling 12 days across the desert, they get to the crib. And so on that night, January 6th, we mark the start of carnival season.

Now, Mardi Gras itself is a movable day. It could be in early February, it could be in early March, or any day in between, because it's relative to Easter, which is relative to the first full moon after the spring Equinox or something like that.

So carnival season would go from 12th night to Mardi Gras day. And we would -- king cakes would be an oval-shaped cake -- I always think the shape of the racetrack -- and they were covered with sugar, colored sugar. And there would be three colors of sugar -- purple, green, and gold -- because those are the colors of Mardi Gras. And we would cut those king cakes into slices, which were much simpler than they are now.

Now they have a lot of lugubrious fillings.Q I was wondering that. So they have changed in

your lifetime considerably?A They have. Now you can buy king cakes that

are filled with, you know, raspberry jelly or almond paste or cream cheese filling. But I don't recall any fillings in king cakes when I was a kid. They were just like simple coffee cakes. And you'd cut them into slices, and one of the slices would contain a little token. And it could be either a plastic baby; it could be a coin or a ring. But it generally -- it came to be that they were generally little plastic babies.

So whoever would bite into the baby would be designated the king. And so they would be crowned king, and maybe you can name a queen, and then you'd be, like, king for a week. And then the next week, there would be another king-cake party. And if you were the king or the queen, you would have to bring the next king cake. So that was a tradition over carnival time.

Now, on Mardi Gras day, people would get together with their families or somehow to celebrate Mardi Gras day, maybe by going to watch the parades. Well, my mother's older brother, (Sp?)Eddie Bock -- my mother's maiden name is Bock -- Uncle Eddie was a

mechanic at the Studebaker dealership on St. Charles Avenue down on -- I guess it's -- not Felicity but down on St. Charles Avenue near Felicity, between Felicity and Jackson Avenue, in the building that is now Al Copeland's Cheesecake Bistro. But it was a Studebaker dealership then.

Well, he was a mechanic. So we would drive our car into the back. And because -- and they had an elevator they could take cars upstairs. So we would take our car upstairs on the elevator, and we would drive out onto this, you know, big wooden-like second-level warehouse type, and we would drive it up as close to the big picture window that stretched across the front of this building as we could. And then we'd set up our little tables and then our chairs in front of that, right on the window. And then we'd unload all the food from the trunk.

And on Mardi Gras day, we'd always have baked ham and big pots of red beans and rice and fried chicken and lots of sweets and other things to eat.

Q What kind of sweets? What kind of things did you have?

A Brownies, cookies, cakes. Some pies. But mostly, you know, things that you could just pick up and

carry with you. The kids wouldn't stay up there very often or very long. We would go, you know, downstairs and out onto the street, across the street from the neutral ground, and we'd wait for the parade. And Zulu would come, Rex would come, all the trucks, and we were catching our beads and things. And then we'd run back in and stuff ourselves and then go back out and catch some more beads.

Q And that was throughout your childhood you got to do that?

A Yeah. Yeah. Until, I guess, I was in high school.

And then, of course, after Mardi Gras -- what made Mardi Gras so special is that you knew that all good things would come to an end, you know, when the sun fell on Mardi Gras day or when the clock tolled midnight, and it would turn into Ash Wednesday, and then you would undertake all the riggers and sacrifices of Lent, which was this 40-day period of fasting and, you know, preparation for Good Friday when Jesus would be crucified.

And so some people didn't eat meat at all during Lent. But generally what they did was -- what we did was not eat meat religiously on Friday. If anyone

was going to eat meat at all on Friday, they wouldn't do it during Lent. And also, you wouldn't eat it on Ash Wednesday. Some people wouldn't eat it at all during Lent except -- the Catholic Church is great, because they build -- they realize the limitations of their flock. So you're allowed exceptions. St. Joseph's day was an exception, St. Patrick's day was an exception, and I think Sundays were exceptions. So, you know, you could fortify yourself.

And so then you would get through Lent and you would have an Easter dinner. In other places, lamb would be a big staple on Easter. But lamb was never very popular or widely eaten, that I knew of, in New Orleans. It wasn't that available. So we'd have roast. Now, we would have turkeys on Christmas and Thanksgiving, and it would just be a big feast.

Now, on Holy Thursday and Good Friday, there would be -- well, on Holy Thursday, we would sometimes have what was called gumbos herbs. And gumbos herbs was a type of gumbo that had an assortment of different greens, and you would try to have seven -- five or seven or nine greens. It was always an odd number. And it might be spinach greens, turnip greens, parsley. Green onions would be

considered a green. Whatever was around. Some people would go out and collect other

kinds of greens, you know, maybe dandelions. In the spring, a lot of things are growing. And some of the older folks would pick different things from the neutral grounds or backyard, what would be called pepper grass, and they'd eat those.

But anyway, on Holy Thursday, we would sometimes have gumbos herbs.

Q Do you know why that was a tradition on Holy Thursday?

A Well, because you're about to really undergo a severe fast from the next day, which was Good Friday, which was the day Christ was crucified, through Easter. And some people wouldn't eat anything at all during that two- or three-day period, and it was thought that the gumbos herbs was particularly nourishing. So that would sustain you over that period.

Q And would your family fast during that period? A No. My family wouldn't fast, but I remember

that all entertainment or, you know, frivolous activities, including work, would cease on Good Friday. We didn't have school on Friday. My father, if he had to work at all on Friday, would only work a half day. And that was

pretty much the custom. You know, all the offices downtown would shut down at noon on Good Friday.

Most of the theaters -- you know, in those days, you went to cinemas. There were neighborhood cinemas in every different neighborhood. Everybody was within a three- or six-block walk of a neighborhood cinema. And a lot of them downtown -- we didn't have the suburban shows then, but there were a number of first-run theaters on Canal Street. All of them would shut down on Good Friday. The same with the clubs.

You wouldn't go out to see a movie. And it was a circle. They knew you wouldn't go out to see a movie, so they didn't even bother to open. And then you couldn't go see a movie because there was no place to go. That's not the case now. So -- and you would just stay home, and you'd make the Stations of the Cross and do all your religious things. And then on Easter, you'd have a big dinner.

Q What would you have? Tell me a typical menu. A Well, Easter Sunday, we would probably have a

big roast -- we'd probably have a gumbo as an opening course and maybe a turtle soup or an oyster stew; and a nice salad, because you would have fresh greens and vegetables, and you could decorate it with hard-boiled

eggs or pineapple slices; and a roast, or maybe a roast chicken and mashed potatoes and gravy. But nothing really fancy.

Our family wasn't into real fancy foods. Although, you know, other people you might talk to from New Orleans might remember much more elaborate, more gourmet-type meals. It was good food, but it wasn't...

Q What about Christmas? What foods would you eat at Christmas?

A Well, Christmas was generally just a turkey dinner. A more distinctive meal would be Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving would be a turkey dinner, but the real treat for us, the big event, was having oyster dressing. And we thought of dressing -- I learned later people in other places would call it stuffing, but we called it dressing. And it was basically big mounds of bell pepper and celery and parsley and green onions, and it was all simmered down and moistened -- you cook a lot of the vegetable liquid out, and then you would add the oyster liquor -- you'd get a half gallon, gallon, of oysters.

In the old days, you'd get a sack of oysters and shuck them. But it got to be easier to just go to a

house, oyster house, and get a half gallon of oysters, and you would pour off the water, the oyster liquid that came from -- you know, you'd pour that in with the vegetables. Then you would thicken it with bread crumbs, an egg or two, and then, at the end, the oysters. You'd salt and pepper it as you needed it and put that inside the turkey and bake it inside the turkey. And my mom would always make extra oyster dressing because we liked it so much.

Another thing she did was get an extra turkey neck, and she would roast a pan or two of turkey necks, because they would be ready -- well, we would be ready to eat before she was ready to feed us, before it was time to sit down at the table. And so my brother and I and whoever else was around would get to eat these turkey necks, which have quite a lot of meat on them. And they would have been roasted in the oven until the meat was just falling off the bone.

We'd have the turkey necks first, and then our first dish -- there would be little appetizers. Like, there would be dates stuffed with a little cream cheese and pecans, or maybe one of these little spinach dips with some type of a cream cheese and water chestnuts put on a cracker. But that was something just to fill out

the table. The first real dish of the dinner was an oyster

soup or an oyster stew, and it was basically just -- it was green onions slightly sauted in butter to which you would then add the oyster liquor, the juice from the oysters, and then a little milk, and then it would be lightly simmered, and the oysters would be added. And then that would be the first course. And then we would have the turkey dinner with the oyster stuffing.

But another great dish, side dish, was stuffed mirlitons. And mirliton is a type of squash, and people would grow them in their backyard on trellis vines. They would vine, and so we would have pieces of fencing staked up on poles so that the vines would have something to climb over. Or maybe people -- like my dad would just let them grow up over a garage, the way cutzo might grow over. So mirlitons actually, I suppose, were like cutzo of our day. They would just spread and grow.

And then you look among this green vine, and you'd see this beautiful light-green pear-shaped vegetable, and it would be the mirliton. And so we would pick the mirlitons. They were ripe then, at that time of the year, and my mom would make stuffed

mirliton. And the way you make stuffed mirliton is to

boil the mirliton until it was soft in the center but not too soft. And then you could cut it in half to begin with and boil them in halves. And then when they were soft enough to work with a spoon, you would take them out, let them cool, and you scoop out the flesh, the center of the mirliton.

And then, again, you would take your seasoning vegetables. You'd have chopped onion, celery, and whatnot, and you'd saute that in a pan, some butter, oil, and then add the chopped mirliton, you know, the flesh from the mirliton. And then you would add -- you'd thicken it with bread crumbs and a little egg. You may also add some green onions or parsley and herbs, depending on your preference.

Then you add shrimp. You add boiled shrimp. And you would boil them and then peel them and maybe chop them a bit if they were anything bigger than, you know, the small, like 25 to 30 -- there would be, like, 25 to 30 shrimp to a pound, getting towards the smaller shrimp. If they were small, you wouldn't bother to chop them; but if they were big, you'd chop them and mix them with the mirliton vegetable mix. And then you

would put them back into the shell and cover them with some bread crumbs and maybe a little Parmesan cheese or whatnot, and that would be a side dish as well.

Q And is that a traditional New Orleans side dish that other families would have as well?

A Yeah. I think if you talk to a number of New Orleans families, you'd get a high percentage of them that would say they ate mirliton on Thanksgiving.

Q And let me ask you a question about that, because you said that your family grew them. Did your family grow a lot of food as well? I mean, what did you know as a child about growing food, and what sort of things did your family grow?

A Our family grew some basics, like mirliton, which just sort of grew on their own. We had fig trees, and they just sort of grew on their own. They would be ripe in the summer. We would also have Japanese plum trees. Japanese plums might be known elsewhere as loquats.

By the way, I've seen and heard different names for mirlitons. And down in the French Caribbean, they're called christophene. But in Puerto Rico and I think some of the other Latin American countries, they may be called chayote. But we know them as mirliton.

Now Japanese plums are known elsewhere as loquats, but they're also called misbeliefs. That was the name of them. I heard someone tell me that in her Creole circle in New Orleans, they were called misbeliefs. And I think that was sort of a nickname or a French name for them.

But anyway, we would have Japanese plums, which just sort of -- now, the plums and the figs just sort of grew, and we would harvest them when they were ripe.

But we would grow tomatoes, creole tomatoes, and I would eat them in the summer just like I would eat an apple. I would pick one off the window sill. Because they usually wouldn't ripen all -- quite all the way on the vine. Maybe the top part where the stem is on the fruit would be a little green. So you would put that on the window to redden that part up. I'd just grab it off the window and eat it like an apple.

So we would grow those. And we would grow what we call shallots, but which aren't actually shallots as the French call shallots but are scallions or green onions. In New Orleans, people call shallots "scallions." So we grew scallions.

Q And what would people call what the French

called shallots? A I don't really recall people having those very

often. I imagine -- I mean, like, I saw them later; when I started working as a cook in fancy restaurants for French chefs, I would encounter them.

If I can digress, there were a number of things that I encountered later on which are now pretty common in New Orleans restaurants and New Orleans groceries, which I never saw. I remember the first time I encountered cilantro, I was probably about 24, 25 years old, and I was in Mexico City. And I went into a bar. But they served oysters, and they served the oysters in a parfait glass instead of on a half shell.

And so they would put these oysters in these like a parfait or a sundae glass, and then they would squeeze lime over it. And then they had all of these leaves that I thought was parsley. But when I tasted them, they tasted like soap. I couldn't figure out what it was. Well, now you see cilantro. But I had never seen it before.

And one time -- around then, I traveled to Europe, and I was in (sp?)Mostay. And I had this dish that sounded very exotic because it was in French. It was courgette, or cutan, and it was zucchini with cheese.

I never had a zucchini before. And now you see zucchini everywhere.

Q It wasn't available when you were growing up?A I didn't pay that much attention to the

vegetable bin when I'd go with my mom, but I don't remember seeing them.

And there are a lot of vegetables that I've eaten since then that I never really saw. I never saw parsnips or rutabagas. Although, I showed you this creole cookbook; and I was looking in it, and there are mentions of a lot of things like parsnips and rutabagas, but -- maybe they were more available in the old days.

And then we were at this period where a lot of the small local farmers and farmers markets, you know, had sort of ceased and been driven out of business by the new, somewhat new, chain stores, like the Piggly Wiggly and the Winn-Dixie and there's Schwegmann's, which was our superstore. And maybe they just didn't carry a great variety of things.

And the seafood was a little different. Like today, you can hardly go into a restaurant without seeing salmon on the menu. The only salmon you would have ever seen in New Orleans in those days was in a can, and you would have not bothered to eat that.

Q It was not a good thing? A It was not common.

We ate a lot of tuna fish in cans, but -- and I would never see a fresh tuna steak, although you see those in restaurants these days.

Now, my family didn't go to, you know, the fancy restaurants. They would never have gone to Galatoire's or Antoine's, though I heard about them.

Q Did you eat out much as a child? A We would. But when we would eat out in New

Orleans, we would typically go to a cafeteria. We would go to Wiley's Cafeteria, A & G Cafeteria, or Harold's, which was over on Jefferson Highway.

Q And how do you define a cafeteria? A A cafeteria is a place that serves food from a --

in a long line, and you pick up your tray at one end of the line and you slide it along one side of a glass case. And all of the food is on the other side of this glass case. And first you see this variety of different salads and jello, and there would be pieces of canned fruit, like canned pears or canned pineapple, sitting on lettuce with a little dollup of mayonnaise, which was a pretty popular salad, and you would get a little grated cheese in the inside.

And then you'd go to your entrées, and there

would be all of the meats and stews and dishes. And then there would be fried fish, and the vegetables and the desserts.

We would do that because, you know, kids all like different things, and we could always, each of us, find what we wanted.

Q And would the cafeteria be a part of the department store, or would they be a stand-alone?

A The cafeterias were a stand-alone place. Q Right. They were, yes.A Now, we also had a little summer house that

we would go to for some years that was what we called "across the lake," but it was actually on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

We had some cousins who had little summer houses that actually were across the lake, meaning Lake Ponchartrain. That's the big wide shallow lake on the northern edge of the city. Their houses were over in -- near Covington or Lacombe.

But our house was just on the other side of Bay St. Louis, just before you got to Pass Christian, just near the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Over there, we would go out to eat a little more often, and we would have -- we would go to places like the Confederate Inn or the

Friendship House. And our favorite dish was broiled flounder stuffed with crab meat.

Now, I said there weren't a lot of foods, seafoods, that you see in restaurants now available, but the seafoods that we had were great. We never thought we were lacking for anything. You'd get trout that would be broiled with shrimp or crab meat; or fried was very popular. But our favorite was the flounder. And that would be -- and a flounder is a flat fish, like a halibut or a sole. And they would broil -- they would cut it right down the middle and peel the flesh back a little bit and stuff it. It was basically just lump crab meat. And then broil it in butter. And that was our favorite. We liked that a lot.

Q So that would be considered eating out? A Yes. Q What about your birthday? What kind of

things -- would you your mother cook you a special meal on your birthday, or would you go out to eat on your birthday? What kind of things --

A Well, she would usually cook us a special meal. But what would usually be special about my birthday, or our birthdays, was the dessert. And I would usually ask for a coconut cake.

And among desserts, I think cake and ice

cream were really the big treats. I wasn't a big pie person. Although, on Thanksgiving, there were a couple of special pies. We would always have a pecan pie on Thanksgiving. And there would usually be a lot of pecan things in, you know, side dishes. But pecan pies were big on Thanksgiving. And then pumpkin pie.

And you were asking about what things we grew. We grew tomatoes, and we would grow green onions and maybe a few other kind of vegetables. But what was kind of unique and special about my dad was that he used to also raise animals. And my dad was raised in New Orleans, so was my mom. My father's family's house was on Laurel Street, up near Audubon Park, and they had a cow. They had a couple of cows.

Now, this was all the way through the '30s, up until the time when my dad went into the service for the second world war, they had a cow or two. And they would -- his job would be to milk the cow before he put on his suit and got on the streetcar and took the streetcar down Laurel Street to his offices downtown. And they also had chickens.

Well, by the time I was a kid and we lived out in Jefferson Parish -- I know there was a law passed against having cows on your premises in New Orleans

Parish, but whether there was a law against having a cow or not where we lived, we didn't have one. I guess it was just too much trouble. We could still sometimes get milk delivered to our house.

But we had chickens. We had chickens, oh, gosh, until I was in high school. My dad insisted, you know, that his kids should be able to have fresh eggs. Occasionally, we would have fresh chicken. And I remember the shock and surprise when once my dad caught one of the chickens, and all of a sudden he put it down on a wooden stump and, "whack," off went the head. I was kind of stunned. I was rather close with the chicken.

In fact, I remember one sort of a scene where I said I didn't even want to go to the Mardi Gras parades unless I could take my chicken with me. And then there's some photographs of my brother and I in our little costumes -- and I think we were costumes of -- in cowboys and indians -- and I'm standing there holding this big, old, fat chicken.

Q Which you later had for dinner?A I'm not sure if it was exactly that same one.

But I remember being shocked into silence. And, you know, a few hours later, I was sitting at the

table, and I saw that chicken being served, and I made a rather snap decision that it was okay, you know, it was just the natural order of things.

Q You overcame your qualms?A I decided that the chicken looked different, but

it never smelled any better than it did right then. I made my peace with that fact of life.

So we would sometimes, you know, have our food provided for us in ways other than going to the grocery. And we grew some things. We would sometimes have people give us fish. I remember going out crawfishing with my father sometimes. And he would roll up his socks, and he would have his boots, and go into the little ditches on the side of the road somewhere across the river and lay out the crawfish nets in six inches of water, baited with chicken necks or whatnot, and pick them up and take them home and boil them.

Q And how often would you do that?A Oh, I don't know. Maybe once or twice a

season. But what we would do often was crab. And

we would crab most often when we would go across the lake to the Mississippi Gulf Coast. And the place where

we would catch the most crabs would be on this 2-mile bridge that was from Bay St. Louis to Pass Christian.

We would go at night, and we would throw the crab nets over the side. And you would have a dozen or two of them. You would just walk up and down the bridge, and you'd pick up your crab net, and you'd look down as it got out of the water and see if there was a crab in it. And if there was, then you would, "Quick, pull it up. Pull it up." And then you would throw it into the hamper.

Q How big were the crabs?A Well -- of course, in those days, they were

giant. In these days, you don't really get -- but a large blue crab could be 8 inches, 8 or 10 inches, from, you know, tip to tip. And if they stretched out -- usually, they were a little bit smaller. But a good-sized one would usually be six to eight inches across.

Q And then how would you eat them? What would you do with them?

A You would drop them in seasoned boiling water. And you would salt the water, and then you would usually use a premixed bag of seasoning. And they were either by, you know, the people from Yogi, the Yogi people. That was a brand. And there was a little

picture of, like, a swampy guy on the package. Or Rex. Q It wasn't Yogi bear; it was Yogi the swamp guy? A Yeah.

And there would be about ten or twelve ingredients. There would be peppercorns, mustard seeds, coriander seed and dill seed, bay leaf, crumpled bay leaf, some pepper and garlic powder, whatnot. You would throw those in. And then you would also throw in lemon, either right at the beginning or you would boil the crab for a while and then you would turn off the water and let them soak. And sometimes you would just cut many lemons, or however, in half and throw the lemons in the pot during its soaking time. And then you would take the crabs out. Then when they cooled down enough where you could put your fingers on them, you would pull them all open.

And we used to like to eat crabs for breakfast. Even people from New Orleans thought that was really strange. But we loved crabs. And so we would eat them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We would sit outside. Of course, there would be a screened-in porch, and we would eat our crabs and crackers and a root beer.

Maybe we would pick more crab than we could eat, so we would put it on the side. And later my

mom would clean out the shells, and she would mix the crabs, again, with some seasoned vegetables and bread crumbs and put them back in the shells for stuffed crab.

So I think you understand there's a theme here: A lot of stuffed dishes. Stuffed mirliton and stuffed crab. And another very common dish was stuffed pepper, stuffed bell pepper. And bell pepper is what other people in the less-enlightened parts of the world called green peppers. But they sort of looked like a bell. So you would maybe hard-boil them a touch, or not, and then fill them with stuffing that might be a seafood, vegetable, shrimp, bread-crumb mixture, or maybe it would be ground beef and bread crumbs or ground beef and rice or something that would go inside the bell pepper, and that would be finished off in the oven.

And eggplant is another. Eggplant is another dish that was cooked a lot. And that comes from the Sicilian tradition.

Q So of all these things that you used to eat as a child, are there any things that you no longer see eaten in New Orleans, that were common when you were a child?

A Most of the things that are no longer really

common, I think, are things that had already become uncommon when I was a kid. There are things that I would hear my folks talk about. And mostly, I didn't really eat them very often then. I'm thinking of hogshead cheese. Although, hogshead cheese is actually something that you do see fairly often.

Q What's hogshead cheese?A Hogshead cheese is a dish that's made with

minced pork and various seasoning vegetables, like perhaps parsley and green onions and assorted other things. And then you would boil them -- the old way, maybe, would actually be with the head of a pig, and you would get gelatin. That would extract gelatin from the head, from the bone. And you would put the chopped meat, vegetables and other mixture, red pepper and other things, in a little bowl and then pour the gelatin over it and let it set. And then you would slice it when it was hardened.

Well, there was a similar dish which was made from veal, and it was called daube glace, d-a-u-b-e, g-l-a-c-e. I guess the "glace" comes from setting up and sort of looking like a glacier or like a little block. It would kind of shake and shimmy. And you get gelatin from the, I think, shinbone of the veal. And I had

that once or twice. But that's pretty rare. Calas is a little dessert dish which I had once

or twice and heard a lot about, but I don't know anyplace --

Q That's a Mexican dish, isn't it? A Well, this is spelled C-a-l-a-s. Q Yeah. A And I'm not sure if the Mexicans do it or not.

But it was a very -- it's like a fried rice fritter. Similar to a beignet; you know, a beignet being those little squares of dough that were dropped into the hot oil and then served with the powdered sugar. And this was just the same way, and it would be made from the leftover rice.

And rice was a staple in New Orleans cuisine. And more so in the olden days, but even when I was a kid, rice would be often on the table. There would be a lot of dishes served with rice. And I call it the old days, you know. And actually -- but you wouldn't have a dish without rice.

When I was in my 20s, I did a couple of stints working as a cook in the old field, working on supply boats. And a lot of the guys out there were Cajun guys. Now, people think, well, there's lots of Cajuns in New Orleans. But New Orleans isn't really a Cajun city. It's a

polyglot. It's a port. And there are lots of Irish Italians who aren't Cajun.

But if you go out to the west of New Orleans, Lafourche, and beyond Morgan City into New Iberia and Lafayette, those are the real Cajuns. They would not think of a meal without rice. I mean, I could cook, you know, steak and mashed potatoes or I could maybe, for a casual meal, have pizza, and they would say, "This is great pizza. Where's the rice?" You know, it's just like the air they breathe.

So rice was a common dish. And if there was leftovers, the Creole cooks and New Orleans cooks would form the rice into a little dessert. They'd mix it with a little sugar and egg and maybe a touch of flour and hold it together and then they'd deep-fry it and serve it with a syrup or powdered sugar. And you rarely see that. I think there's one restaurant in the French Quarter that I recall which might have it on its menu, and that would be Max's Coffee Pot.

Another dessert that is pretty rare these days is creole cream-cheese ice cream. Now, you mentioned desserts, and mostly I think of, like cake and ice cream or pies. One pie I did like a lot was lemon meringue pie. My mother would make a good lemon meringue pie that

was pretty spectacular. But ice cream was -- ice cream was more of

the focus of an outing. And when I was fairly young, like from four to ten, my father would frequently take me and my brother out on an outing, and it would be to get ice cream. Well, one was -- and there would be ice cream parlors, which there aren't any now. And one was off Carrollton Avenue, on Carrollton, and near the site of the present post office. And there was a Sealtest creamery. And Sealtest was a brand of ice cream. And there was a train station there.

The train would start at the Union passenger terminal, which was down near Lee Circle, and its first stop would be at this platform on Carrollton Avenue. So my dad would take us there to see the train.

And so we would stand and we would wait and we would wait, and we'd hear the rumbling, roaring, and the train would come in. The conductor would get off, and he would make his announcements. "And all aboard." And everybody would be gone, and the train would go off. And we'd go a few feet away to the Sealtest creamery and shop to get ice cream. And that would be a big outing.

And then there was another ice cream shop

over on the other side of Tulane but also off Carrollton, which is now -- called the Gold Seal Creamery. And the Gold Seal Creamery made their ice creams back there. They had a little shop in the front. The Green Project is there. It's a recycling organization now. But it was an active creamery.

And all the people from the neighborhood would walk there. We drove there, and we would go in, get the ice cream, and we'd sit outside in the warm, balmy summer night air, and we would eat our ice cream. And there were a few other places.

But there was a type of ice cream that my mom and some of my aunts and my aunt-in-laws would always like, and that was creole cream-cheese ice cream. And I guess my mom -- my -- kind of compare it to crème fraîche. Crème fraîche is sort of sour cream, like, and it tasted of a tart flavor. And the Creoles would get this type of a milk byproduct, and they would turn it into ice cream.

Sometimes we would make ice cream, by the way, and that was fun. But it was a lot of work because you would have a hand crank that was made of wood.

Q Are there any particular areas of cuisine that you would like to tell me about?

A I think New Orleans is well known for its seafood. And actually, there is a distinctive type of -- a part of New Orleans cuisine that's a big part of my cuisine experience. So I'd like to think about what unusual or distinctive seafoods we have. We mentioned crabs and boiled crabs and stuffed crabs; the soft-shelled crabs, which are famous now, but those were really kind of rare when I was a kid. We'd always eat them when we'd happen to come across them. But now they're very common.

Shrimp, though, were very ubiquitous; they were everywhere. And we would eat shrimp a lot of different ways. Boiled shrimp were the favorite. We'd get the raw shrimp, drop them in the water, boil them the same way as you would boil the crabs in water that was seasoned with the spice, herb packet and -- with some lemon, and maybe peel them and maybe dip them in a remoulade sauce or some other kind, maybe mayonnaise, mustard, ketchup, kind of a cocktail sauce. And fried shrimp were popular.

Now, I don't think we mentioned the word "poboy," which is one word in New Orleans and not two. But poboy is a type of sandwich, and it was served on french bread. And you could find a poboy anywhere.

Every New Orleans neighborhood had corner groceries that would make poboy sandwiches or any neighborhood restaurant would have a whole sandwich section.

And you could, I suppose, get bread -- get a sandwich on regular bread, but why would you want to? I mean, maybe a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich or something you'd get on regular bread. But if you were going to get an oyster poboy or an oyster loaf -- and that would be fried oysters, or a shrimp poboy would be fried shrimp, you would put it on a poboy loaf, french bread. You could also have fried fish. So we would have our oysters, our crabs, and our shrimp.

And the fish would mostly be speckled trout for -- some catfish, but speckled trout was really the king and most common of the fish. And so if you would be getting, like, a fried fish plate or a fried fish poboy, it probably would be trout.

Now, I mentioned that the flounder -- and that would be pretty common. Redfish didn't become real, real common until Paul Prudhomme made his entry onto the scene in, I guess, the late '70s with the blackened redfish, but -- we would have redfish when someone would catch it, but trout would be the most common fish.

When we were out across the lake, my brother and I would go fishing. A fish that we would frequently catch would be the croaker and also mullet.

Q The croaker?A Croaker, yeah. And croaker was a fish that got

its nickname because when it came up out of the water, it would make a croaking kind of sound. And a lot of people said they didn't like it because it would be very boney. But we did. We didn't mind the bone. And my mom would fry them, and we had that for breakfast with grits. A good breakfast, if we didn't have boiled crabs or weren't in the mood, would be fried croaker and grits. And we would often have mullet while we lived across the lake. The were very easy to catch, and we'd catch them off of little pieces of white bread.

Q Let me ask you about the breakfast thing. Would that be a breakfast you would have every day or just when you were on vacation or just on the weekends or --

A No. That was when we were on vacation. But I was talking about seafood. So, you

know, the basic seafood would be shrimp and oysters, fish and crabs. And oysters now a favorite of mine -- still a favorite of mind, and I like to eat oysters on the half

shell. I never really liked them raw when I was a kid, but I liked them fried, and they were very available. And then in the oyster stew, which we would have oyster soup, a thin milked-base oyster soup that we would have for Thanksgiving, or the oyster stuffing, the dressing.

And also, I remember that whenever we would go to weddings, we would look for oyster patties. And the oyster patties would be put -- a cream oyster dish that would be put inside these little patty shells. You know those patty shells that they serve as like a puffed pastry kind of a deal, but cup-shaped and filled with the oyster concoction. We thought that was great. So that's really how I remember oysters from when I was a kid.

And shrimp I remember mostly fried on sandwiches or boiled. And fish was pretty common. Now, I guess one of the most common accompaniments to those things would be potato in either the french-fry form -- and we almost always had french fries that my mom would fry, would cut up. And later at, you know, some of the little restaurants, you would start getting the frozen french fries. But my momma always cut the potatoes, and they were really very good. And then she also made a really good potato salad.

And I think you see potato salad a lot in New Orleans, and she --

Q Does that come from the German side or the Irish side, you think?

A I think they tossed for it. I don't know. It could come from either way.

There are varieties of potato salad in New Orleans. Potato salad's pretty common in New Orleans. Although, a lot of potato salads you might see out there are much yellower than the kind my mom would make, and it would have, like, yellow mustard in it or it might have a lot of pickle juice or something in it. My mom didn't have much of that. Hers would have mayonnaise and parsley and celery and some onions. A lot of times hard-boiled egg would be mixed in. But it's a real good dish, a common dish.

And a thing I've learned about is that some people in New Orleans would eat gumbo with potato salad and would even put the potato salad right in the center of a dish of gumbo along with or instead of rice or anything on the side. And we never did that. We used to have the rice.

I don't think we talked much about gumbo. I mentioned gumbos herbs, but that's sort of a specialty

dish which not too many people eat very often and we didn't even eat very often. Sometimes we'd have it on Holy Thursday, but I think there was more Holy Thursdays when I heard about it than when I'd actually had it. It's sort of a lost dish.

But the gumbo that we would have would typically be a seafood gumbo. And we would have it in the summer more often than the rest of the -- although, it's a great dish -- the rest of the year, you probably -- because, you know, it's a thick hearty dish. You always hear, "How do you make your gumbo?" "Well, first you make a roux." And the roux is a flour and oil mixed half and half -- maybe flour and lard or flour and oil, or flour and butter -- and you mix it together, and then you cook it very slowly until it gets brown, and that will be a thickening agent or liaison. And you add your vegetables and then your stock. And things that would go into gumbo would be chicken or sausage or ham or some seafood. You may have a chicken and seafood gumbo.

The seafood that we had have in gumbo would be shrimp and crabs, and you would have a -- whole parts of the crab. Like, you'd get your little blue crab and take the top shell off and break the other shell

into quarters and throw it in with the claw and the other appendages still attached so you'd take them out and -- I remember people from out of town looking at gumbo and, like, screaming, "What's that doing in there?" It's supposed to be in there.

So there would be -- and, of course, there'd a lot of different styles of gumbo. Some people would like a dark-roux gumbo. Some people would like a gumbo with a lot of seafood and a lot of sausage. My family generally made seafood gumbos with little or no meats. Not all-seafood gumbo, thickened with a roux that was over it. And also often made a gumbo that was primary chicken with some seafood, like chicken and shrimp.

Q And that would be an everyday dish?A Well, it was a common dish, but again, that is a

dish that takes a bit of time and preparation. And we, you know, called it -- back then, food people -- I'd say women, but that's because I would eat at home, and most of the people preparing foods were women, like my mom.

My mom had been a nurse, but she never really worked when my brother and I were growing up. And Dad was -- Mom, you know, became a housewife and she was full-time engaged at home. So she could,

you know, make our dinners. But still, gumbo took a lot of time, and so she wouldn't make gumbo every week. But every few weeks or -- fairly often, we would have gumbo.

But one reason she didn't make it, because she didn't have a food processor like we have. It would take a while to cut up all the vegetables. And that would be one of the big labors of making, you know, stuffings or gumbos and things like that. But, yeah, gumbo was an important dish.

Q I'm interested to know, of all the foods you talked about that you ate growing up, which of them survived into your present-day cooking, because I know that you cook a lot at home. And I'm interested to know which ones have stayed with you and whether you've adapted many of those recipes or just pretty much kept them true to the traditions that you grew up with.

A I do like to cook here at home, and I love to cook the things that I enjoyed eating as a kid, and that would include gumbo. I like to make gumbo.

Q And you make a good one.A Thank you.

And I make it pretty much the way my mother did; although, I'll take a few shortcuts, like use a

food processor and, you know, cut the vegetables in the food processor. And I use a trick that I learned when I was a cook in a restaurant, which was to mix the flour and the oil for the roux and then cook it in the oven.

Because you don't want to burn it. If you let -- if you cook it on the top of a stove, you have to stand over it and stir it constantly or the flour will burn. And once you get a hint of a burn in it, then you have to throw it away. You can't use it. It's ruined. So if you're not going to be able to just stand there and constantly stir it, you can put it in a medium-heat oven, and it'll cook that way. So I'll do that. But I like to make gumbo.

And when I -- when I first started cooking, I was sort of my own boss cooking in the restaurant that we had at Tipitina's. And I loved making gumbos, and I prided myself on -- on gumbos and sort of long, simmering stew-type things, like a shrimp creole. And I used to like to make stuffed dishes, stuffed peppers, and stuffed mirlitons. So I did sort of carry on with the dishes that I grew up making.

Q And had you learned those recipes as a child? Did you kind of know them, or did you -- your mother gave you the book and that's where you got those recipes from?

A I learned how to cook by following my mother's prescription. I looked over a recipe for it in this book.

This book, by the way, is a fun book to read because it won't give the same kind of scientific prescriptions that other more modern cookbooks might. It won't tell you to put a bird in or a pot in an oven at a 375 degrees. It will, you know, just tell you, you know, put in a moderate oven, whatever. And you can tell how hot it is by putting your hand in it. So things like that.

Q Yeah. A So it would describe the process and sort of ask

you to rely on your senses and -- so that's kind of what I did. I would get a sense of, you know, what the ingredients were and how they were supposed to be rendered, chopped, cut, what order they entered the dish: Do you put them in at the beginning, at the end, or saute them first. So you'd get a general idea of the process.

But then you really learned to do it by just doing it and tasting it. And with dishes like a gumbo or stuffed bell peppers, you know, a fish soup, you then taste it.

Q So you're a cook who doesn't really refer to recipes; you just do it by instinct and experience?

A Except when I'm baking something. Then I really do want to rely on the correct proportions and temperatures and other procedures. You don't really want to stray from that. If you're making, you know, a crepe or a pie, you don't want to have too much milk. You would follow a recipe more precisely for that.

But if you're making a gumbo, you tend to taste it. If you know the general idea of how it's supposed to be made and you have the experience of eating a good gumbo, you can taste it and go, well, that's not quite right. And if you have a good instinct, you may correctly guess, you know, what it needs. And if not, put it on the table, and somebody's going to tell you it's got too much salt or, you know, "Why didn't you add some garlic? You know, this is flat." And the next time you do it, you modify it.

Q So could I just ask you to briefly give me an overview of your professional cooking experience, just run things the things you've done? Just for the record, you know.

A Sure. In 1977, I helped start the music club Tipitina's. But I was not cooking at that time. I believe it was perhaps the following fall I decided -- or thereabouts, the fall of 1977, we decided that we would

take advantage of the fact that there was fully stocked kitchen in the place and open a restaurant. And I volunteered to be the person that did that. So I ran a restaurant at Tipitina's for a couple of years.

And we would just have, you know, basic New Orleans cuisine that was sort of balanced out or, you know, infused with the new ideas about health-food cooking. So we would might have red beans, but we would have brown rice. We might have meatballs and spaghetti, but we would have an alternative vegetarian spaghetti on the side. But the bulk and background of the menu was old-fashioned New Orleans cooking.

And I learned how to cook there by teaching myself, really. But when I was not quite dry, I had a lot of help. I would ask a lot of people what I should do and how to do. It I wanted to cook a dish I hadn't done before, I'd call my mother and ask her, "How do you make grits and grillades?" Or I'd call up someone like my friend (sp?) Claire Martin: "I want to make a bouillabaisse. You ever make a bouillabaisse? How do you do that? What do I have to do? How do you make a fish stock?" And so I would get help.

And after a couple of years, I went to work at a couple of hotels cooking.

Q Which ones?A Well, first I went to the Le Pavillon Hotel, which

is down on the corner of Baronne and Poydras, and I cooked there for a little while. And then I went to the Fairmont Hotel. I cooked there for about a year or less. And then --

Q Did you cook anything specific, or would you cook all sorts of things?

A At the Le Pavillon, I, you know, just helped prepare -- you know, they had luncheon buffets, so I was doing along the same kind of cooking that I did at Tipitina's, but, you know, those fancy touches that would make people staying at the hotel think that it was worth paying a whole lot more money for. And also, I got to use different ingredients that I got out of maybe more exotic countries; fish that were flown in. I think that was the first time I cooked mussels.

At the Fairmont, I mostly did what they call garde manger, which was kind of decorative, you know, trimmings for the cold salad plates. We were preparing the cold salads and cold plates for a buffet, a luncheon buffet, they had at The Blue Room, which was open then. And I would make tomato roses and radish roses and, you know, lay out platters of cold cuts on a table,

thinly sliced circulative salami and make a cut from the center to the end and form it into a cone and fill some pastry bag with some kind of exotically seasoned cream-cheese filling, put that in the center, then a curly Q, put that on -- you know, fancy -- fancy foods. I did that.

Then I got together with some folks I knew who had opened a health-food store called the Whole Food Company, and they were opening a second Whole Food store on Esplanade Avenue, and they were having a deli there. They asked me if I would operate the deli. So I did that; I operated the deli. And at the deli, there would be a variety of foods that you could eat, both on site or take home. So there would be some entrée-type things that they would take home and put in the microwave.

So I left there to work with a friend of mine who was producing a movie up in Branson, Missouri, (SP?) Avery Kraus, a friend of mine from college. And he was going to have a crew of, you know, 40 or 50 people out in the woods, and they needed somebody to cook for them and keep them from going stir crazy. So I went up there and I cooked for them.

And then, when I returned, I had a job at one

of the nice, newly opened restaurants in New Orleans featuring kind of updated, modernized New Orleans cuisine. It was a restaurant called the Upperline. And there I worked for a year and a half or so doing the saute and broiling work. And we would be doing all sorts of oyster and crabmeat dishes, and veal with asparagus and crab meat, and grilled redfish with tomatoes, (phonetic) crew leaf, toppings, bouillabaisse. All those kinds of foods that have become standard in New Orleans repertoire of fine dining now, something that was based on the traditional New Orleans ingredients and New Orleans style, but just sort of updated by taking advantage of styles and ingredients from other culinary traditions and infusing them into the original New Orleans mix.

Now, this would have been -- at the Upperline, I guess I was there from -- oh, I don't know -- '83, '85, thereabouts. And that was a time when people who were dining were becoming a little more sophisticated and aware of outside traditions. I mean, before that, people who would go out to eat would never consider ordering some fish other than trout or flounder. Pompano was a fish that was often on the finer New Orleans restaurant menus. But people open themselves

up to try new things. So I worked there for a while, and then I went

to another fine New Orleans restaurant called Christian's. Christian's was founded by and named after the owner, a man named Christian Ansel, who was from the Galatoire family and managed Galatoire's some few years before and then opened his own restaurant and brought with him the Frenchmen who had been the head chef at Galatoire's. And so Chef Milan was the chef at Christian's, and I worked there. I was the saute cook.

They're known for having concocted a -- you know, they originated thawed-out and first to cook smoked softshell crab, where they would put the softshell crab in a cold smoker so that these crabs would be infused with the hickory smoke, but the temperature inside the smoker never got above -- oh, I don't know -- maybe 80 or 90 degrees. But never that hot. So the crabs would cook. So then later you could cook crabs, and they'd be fresh and not be dried out, and precooked, but they would have the smoky flavor.

So there was a redfish with a green peppercorn cream sauce. They'd give you a beautiful filet that had -- and it was stuffed with oysters and covered with a beautiful demi-glace and --

Q And those were quite kind of new ideas at the time?

A They were new in the way that they combined classic French tradition. The demi-glace sauces and the added stocks for the bouillabaisse were done exactly the way he had learned to do them as a kid in France, Chef Milan, and the way, I guess, French chefs would do it everywhere. But he combined it to New Orleans ingredients. And so I learned, you know, fancy, classic French techniques. And it was really, really a thrill to learn alongside a guy like that.

He had a dish, for example, where he would take trout, a -- well, called "trout," not a true trout, which elsewhere we'd refer to as a rainbow trout or a freshwater brook fish, but a speckled trout. I think it was from -- it's a saltwater fish. I think it might be a Norwegian fish. I don't know. But he would take --

Q A week? A A week fish or a wade fish. But I think it's --

anyway. I'm not sure. We can look it up. It's a speckled trout. And a speckled trout is a saltwater fish, or brackish saltwater fish.

And he would take these trout and he would pulverize them in a food processor and add a little salt

and some cream, and he would make a fish mousse. And then he would lay that on another trout filet, and he would poach that in an oven, in a closed pan, until the mousse hardened to the correct degree. And the fish filet was cooked through the poaching, and then he would cover that with a crawfish natural sauce. And that's a classic French sauce. And it would be a crawfish cream sauce. So that dish would be on top of the trout.

And so I got to learn all of these great French classic ways of rendering New Orleans ingredients.

Q You often cook things like that yourself?A Rarely, because you have to be set up. And it's

not so hard to cook them if you have all the ingredients and the stocks and foundations right there. But if you're going to start from scratch at home, it's a difficult production. Like your baked Alaska, you know.

Q Yes, yes. A So I did that. Then I did a little more cooking

for a film crew. And then I moved to Boston with Cameron, my wife. We moved to Boston in 1988, and I stayed there until 1994. I cooked in a restaurant south of Boston from 1988 to 1991.

And one night when the waiters were messing up orders and we were, you know, running out of sauces

in the middle of a Saturday-night rush, I turned to this guy that I was cooking with that we called the black Archie Bunker, my friend Arnie Williams, and said, "I'm going to law school." And he laughed for a long time.

But I'd been thinking that I didn't want to continue to still be cooking when I was 60 years old, because it's a tough profession. It's long hours. It's hard on relationships because you're at your restaurant, you know, from early in the morning to late at night if you're going to do it well. And even on your off days, you go into the restaurant to do the books, order and take care of your refrigeration or whatnot, clean up. And you really have to have a passion for it. And so I decided that I didn't want to make the commitment to open a restaurant on my own.

I did a couple of other food-related things, I guess, that might be of interest. Back during the time when I was -- I guess when I was cooking at the Upperline and Christian's, I wrote a column about food for a New Orleans music magazine that they had back then. The magazine was called Wavelength. And I did -- it was a monthly magazine. I did a monthly column called "The Chomp Report." And I remember there was this Tony Jo White song about the gator got the granny,

chomp, chomp. "Polk Salad Annie."Q Yes, "Polk Salad Annie." A And so I remembered that word "chomp," and

so I called it "The Chomp Report." And I would write about where foods came from or food traditions, kind of like the things we're talking about now.

Q So it was more about culinary traditions than a restaurant review, right?

A Yes. For example, I wrote a column about gumbos herbs. I wrote a column about oysters. I wrote a column that was mostly about coming across some black ladies combing the neutral grounds across from Tipitina's looking for pepper grass, which they were going to cook and eat. Things like that.

And then I also did some work for WWOD, our community radio station, a variety -- one of things I did for WWOD radio station was help them with a fundraising event, the food and dinner auction. They solicited donations of meals and gift certificates from the various restaurants or groceries in town, and we would put them up for bid on the air.

Okay. You would call in. "In the next half hour, we are going to have a dinner for two at The Upperline Restaurant. We're going to have a dinner for

two at Katie's. We're going to have a dinner for two at Tony Angelo's." Wherever it might have been. And we would describe the restaurants, and we would talk about food. We would talk about what was on the menu, what you could get, what the dining experience was like there. And people would call in and make a bid. So I learned a lot about those restaurants because I had to learn about them to describe them on the air.

And we did a lot of music-related fill. We played, you know, music that was about food. And we also had guests on the air to talk about New Orleans cooking. (Sp?) Harold Gayshon, and I forget who all we had. Plus, we'd talk about their recollection of cooking. In fact, I might have some of those tapes.

And what else did I do? I started cooking at the Jazz Festival probably around 1984, '85, '86. Now, I did help with a booth one year. There was a fellow that I knew, Dean Maxwell. But he had a booth that served crawfish pie, filet gumbo. One year, I was a partner with him doing that booth.

But mostly what I did with the Jazz Festival with regards to food -- and that was before I signed on with the booth -- was cook food for the production crew that was out on the Fair Grounds.

I got a job with, you know, the group of guys, and some of them -- and mostly, this was guys that would put up the stages, the construction crew. Well, it turned out that for the 15 or 20 years before that -- it was 15 -- they would just make due for lunch as best they could. They would all disappear and would go out and grab sandwiches or something and bring their lunch. And, you know, and half the time, they wouldn't come back. Or you never knew what would happen: If they caught the rain or had a flat tire.

So they knew that I had experience cooking. So they said, well, look, why don't you hook us up with lunch, you know, whatever. You go get us lunch or make us lunch or just do something, whatever you want.

So at first, I would help put the stages together for a few hours, and then I, you know, would rush off and get poboys or potato chips or something. Well, then they found the barbecue pit. They said, why don't you just -- you know, instead of helping us build the stage -- we'll do that -- you get the barbecue pit going. Go to Schwegmann's -- that's the big supermarket -- get some chicken or whatever and, you know, get the barbecue pit going.

So one thing led to another, and before I

knew it -- and they didn't have a kitchen at their disposal, but I lived on Bayou St. John, which was in the neighborhood, and I had an old Volkswagen. I would go to my house and I would cook dishes there. I'd cook a pot of black-eyed peas. I'd cook a pot of shrimp creole. I'd make a big salad. And I would remove the front seat from my Volkswagen, and I would take the back seat out of my Volkswagen, so I could lean, you know, the back rest of the back seat down and, you know, create a platform that way. And I would throw three or four great big pots in the back of the car.

And I wouldn't even, you know, be on the job site until, you know, noon. But all of a sudden, they'd see my little Volkswagen coming around the racetrack. And everybody would throw down their hammers and try to figure out where we were going to eat that day. Because some days we'd eat under one oak tree, and some days we'd eat over by the barbecue pit or whatnot. So I did that. So I did that for about four years.

And then the succeeding year, somebody had a little trailer on the Fair Grounds where they were living -- they were working as part of the production crew. And I would use the little kitchen in their trailer, and I'd, you know, try to clean the pots with a hose. It

wasn't Board of Health-approved, but, you know, I wasn't going to argue.

Finally, I think the last year I was there, the Fair Grounds people -- we'd always get treated at the Jazz Fest as an unwanted stepchild -- let us use their Fair Grounds kitchen. And so I would prepare meals out there during the last week, when we really had a lot of people, when suddenly the production crew swelled. There were lots of folks on the grounds who were organizing, you know, the garbage pickup or organizing the electrical lines, the plumbing, all sorts of musical-related things, putting up the tents.

And so then -- that was about when I went to Boston. But that same year, the festival producers decided that they wanted to have a tent where people could talk about food. It was going to be called the Food Heritage stage. And the plan was to have a succession of people who would speak about food and demonstrate it. It was, like, you know, a food show or a cooking tent. And they still have it. But they asked me if I would produce it, if I would moderate it. And I did. I did that for two years.

The idea at first was that the men and women who had moved out on the Fair Grounds and served

these distinctive Louisiana dishes could come for a half-hour or one-hour period and talk about their stuffed mirliton, their crawfish spread. So the idea at the Food Heritage tent at the Jazz Festival was to have the food vendors come from their booths and talk about their foods.

As it turned out, a lot of them, who paid, you know, good money and had many more dollars invested in their product, didn't want to leave their booth because, you know, they'd be real busy or whatnot. And so I did a lot of the demonstrations myself that year because people would show up. So I would tell them, you know, about making gumbo or red beans and rice. So I had a little experience talking about food.

Now all of these slots at the Food Heritage area are filled and are much in demand by well-known chefs because they like to promote themselves and talk about food. People do like to talk about food, and people like to listen. So I had that as a bit of experience as well.

That's about it. Any other questions? Q I don't have any more questions, but I guess

I'm interested to know where you might imagine New Orleans culinary traditions to go next. You know, there

seem to be a lot of -- more Asian influence on food. I just want to see if you care to comment on that, if you've got anything to say about it.

I mean, I guess -- I guess what I'm saying, I mean, you know, you've lived here all of your life pretty much, and you've been in culinary traditions. Some stay the same; some change a little. What do you imagine might happen next?

A In a way, it's going to be more homogenized through diversity. There are a lot more outside influences that are being noticed and picked up on. And people in Louisiana are more sophisticated about other types of food and, I think, are more willing to try other dishes, other ingredients. Transportation is better, so, you know, it's easy to get lobster, mussels, salmon or, you know, seafood. It's easy to get lamb from New Zealand and vegetables from, you know, all over the world. People are trying things that weren't part of their repertoire.

So, in a way, it's better because it's making people more savvy, more demanding. But I think that the bedrock of New Orleans cuisine will remain firm and won't really change. There's always going to be well-seasoned things. There's always going to be

gumbo, red beans and rice, and etouffees, and crawfish dishes. And you can always go to a corner store and get sacks of boiled crawfish. I don't think that part of it's really going to change.

One thing I worry about, though, is the source of some of our prized ingredients, like, you know, shrimp and oysters, because the wetlands are really under siege, and we're losing all of our wetlands. And it's going to be hard to maintain a supplier of those things. That could affect how we eat. We may not be able to eat what we like and as often, and that could be a problem.

But people are always going to enjoy being a -- I think a lot more here than in other cities -- being a cultural glue and its performance. People eat for sport, for fun, for family, for friends. And so that's going to keep eating, you know, paramount in terms of how people approach it and regard it. And that will keep it pretty interesting.

Q Okay. Well, that's it. Anything else you've got to say?

A Can't think of anything. Q Well, thank you very much.