George Graham - Fresh from Louisiana: The Soul of Cajun and Creole Home Cooking

I plan to show you the places I know and introduce you to the people Ive met that make Louisianas culinary culture so colorful. If you read my first book, Acadiana Table, then rest assured that this next one will take a deeper dive as I crisscross the state in pursuit of the stories behind the recipes.

Ive had a lifelong love affair with the food culture of Louisiana. I love the recipes living inside this cookbook for the history that calls me back to the table and for the ties that bind me to memories of food and family. I love the way a spicy crawfish pie weaves its lyrical melody and sings to me with a Doug Kershaw accent, how a pork and pork-and-apple-stuffed duck is only a vessel for the sweet, duck fatroasted onions that accompany it, and how the perfumed scent of fresh basil wafts from a crispy-crusted Creole tomato tart as it comes out of a hot oven.

Louisiana food is soulful; it is part of who I am, where I come from, what Im made of.

I grew up in Bogalusa, where Louisiana straddles Mississippi, and only the Pearl River separates the two. It was just one hour north of New Orleans but a world away from the fun and funk of its spicy gumbo pot of culinary wonders. Bogalusa was pimento cheese between two slices of Holsum bread; New Orleans was a sloppy, ten-napkin roast beef nestled in a crusty Leidenheimer loaf.

The only thing that saved this country boy from a bland upbringing was the fact that my father was a restaurant man. He was a 24-hour-a-day, 364-day-a-year restaurant man who dished up the tastiest meat-and-three blue plates between Jackson and the Big Easy. And it was hard work feeding travelers, shoppers, and the four thousand paper mill workers at the plant that backed up to the Acme Caf on Columbia Road. My father had grease running through his veins and a tireless work ethic that shaped my culinary world and filled me with a curious appetite to know more.

Watching the cooks in my fathers restaurant, I learned what any aspiring chef should know. To some, a twelve year old working in a restaurant kitchen would seem a forthright reason to call child protection services. To me, it was a privilege, a blessing. I learned more about cooking standing atop a wooden orange crate and peering over an eight-burner Garland range than most folks learn in a lifetime. It was my culinary school before I knew there was such a thing.

It was there that I got my education on the art of buttermilk-brined and -battered fried chicken with a crackly crust that snapped at the first bite. I learned to make a crispy crust chicken pie so rich it sends your taste buds into overdrive. I discovered the art of a spicy shrimp and okra gumbo made by the hands of a talented Creole cook who could just as well have cooked in the hallowed kitchens of Galatoires or Antoines as my fathers roadside diner.

Cutting biscuits was my job, and I learned never to twist the biscuit cutter, or the edges wouldnt rise. I discovered that even heat distribution of a well-seasoned cast-iron skillet was the secret to frying chicken. And I learned that salt, properly applied, brings out the vibrancy of flavor, even in the sweetest of dishes. It was an early education in down-home roots cooking that I packed up with me as I began my journey of discovery of the food of Louisiana.