John Besh - My New Orleans : the cookbook : 200 of my favorite recipes & stories from my hometown

JOHN BESH is the best of a new generation of New Orleans chefs. His world-class, award-winning cuisine springs from roots deep in the food culture of the place where he was born. My New Orleans: The Cookbook is Chef Beshs tribute to and celebration of the food he loved as a boy growing up on the bayous, refined in his years of study in America and in Europe, and brought home to his beloved city, where he has passionately thrown himself into the rebuilding of post-Katrina New Orleans, and to making Restaurant August, Lke, Besh Steak, and La Provence indelible parts of Louisianas restaurant landscape.

My New Orleans: The Cookbook is a rich stew of Beshs charming, personal stories of his childhood, his family and friends, and the unique food history of the city and its cooking. Seafood gumbo, crawfish touffe, jambalaya, crab bisque, beignets, watermelon pickles, fried oysters, red beans and ricethese New Orleans classics Besh loves are joined by strategies for more contemporary dishes in the 200 delicious recipes. Throughout, Chef Besh is generous with the kind of cooking advice that ensures every home cooks success with his recipes; the book is punctuated with informative sidebars. The photography goes beyond glorious images of mouthwatering food to portray the farmers and purveyors who raised the ingredients, always giving My New Orleans a sense of place and a sense of history, wonderfully told in archival black-and-white photos. John Besh makes you feel at home. As you experience his cooking through New Orleanss seasons, My New Orleans will become your New Orleans.

After attending the Culinary Institute of America and apprenticeships in Germany and France, John Besh led a squad of infantry marines in combat during Operation Desert Storm as a non-commissioned officer of the United States Marine Corps Reserve. In 1999 Food & Wine magazine named John Besh one of the Top 10 Best Chefs in America, in 2006 Besh won the James Beard Award as Best Chef, Southeast, and he went on to win the battle against Mario Batali on Food Networks Iron Chef. Gourmet magazine has ranked Restaurant August in its Top 50 Restaurants in the United States in 2003 and 2006, and Zagat New Orleans 2008 ranks Restaurant August #1 in food and service. Besh recently received the Louisiana Restaurant Associations award for 2008 Restaurateur of the Year.

www.chefjohnbesh.com

A portion of the proceeds from the sale of this book will be donated to Caf Reconcile, a New Orleans-based non-profit organization dedicated to providing at-risk youth an opportunity to learn life and interpersonal skills, and operational training for successful entry into the hospitality and restaurant industries.

www.cafereconcile.com

Produced and edited by award-winning editor and writer Dorothy Kalins, founding editor of Saveur, former executive editor of Newsweek, and director of Dorothy Kalins Ink.

Photographs by Ditte Isager, whose work appears in Gourmet, Conde Nast Traveler, and Martha Stewart Living.

My New Orleans: The Cookbook copyright 2009 by John Besh and Dorothy Kalins Ink, LLC. All rights reserved. Printed in China. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews. For information, write Andrews McMeel Publishing, LLC, an Andrews McMeel Universal company, 1130 Walnut Street, Kansas City, Missouri 64106.

E-ISBN: 978-0-7407-9047-8

Library of Congress Control Number: 2009920846

www.andrewsmcmeel.com
www.chefjohnbesh.com

Produced and edited by Dorothy Kalins, Dorothy Kalins Ink, LLC
Design by Don Morris Design, New York
Photographs by Ditte Isager/EdgeReps
Illustrations by Alexander Stolin
Jacket design by Don Morris Design
Jacket photography by Ditte Isager
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Andrews McMeel books are available at quantity discounts with bulk purchase for educational, business, or sales promotional use. For information, please write to: Special Sales Department, Andrews McMeel Publishing, LLC, 1130 Walnut Street, Kansas City, Missouri 64106.

DEDICATION

To the people of New Orleans
and to those who hold the city close to their hearts

CONTENTS

BASIC RECIPES: Flavor bases are the foundation of my cooking. Here youll find my Thoughts on Roux; Basic Stocks: Chicken, Fish, Shellfish, Veal; Basic Creole Spices; Basic Pan Sauces: Shellfish, Oyster, Crab; Basic Louisiana White Rice; Basic Homemade Pasta; Basic Sauce Ravigote and Remoulade; Basic Vinaigrette and seven variations

Courtyards are the gems of the French Quarter; a special one, below, is at the Soniat House hotel on Chartres Street.

INTRODUCTION

T HIS BOOK IS the story of a dreamy, starry-eyed boy brought up in the shadows of New Orleans, surrounded by cypress knees and tupelo trees, good dinners and great friends. Memories of my childhood, both good and bad, have etched themselves deep into my soul: everything that I cook and eat, see and smell, reminds me of where I come from and more or less dictates where Im going.

It was never my intention to write yet another chefs cookbook, with yet another bunch of recipes; there are as many books about New Orleans food as there are restaurants. Still, every day, as our traditions are in danger of eroding and melting into the American Crock Pot, it seems ever more urgent to protect the classics and reinterpret them. Thats what led me to launch restaurant August, in 2001, as a world-class place that could compete with the once-great restaurants of New Orleans; Besh Steak followed in 2003, Lke and La Provence in 2007. I wrote My New Orleans in the same spirit in which I launched my restaurants; its a book dedicated to roots and rituals, to the way I cook. As each of our magical foodstuffs comes into its prime, theres cause for celebrationCrawfish and rice, Mardi Gras, Shrimp Season, Gumbo weather, Boucherie, and reveillonsuch is the flow of our seasons, such is the flow of the chapters in this book. I care about the ingredients and the farmers and the fishermen, the shrimpers and the oystermen I grew up with; they are the heroes who have always shaped the rich, rainbow cooking of New Orleans, and their faces enliven the pages of My New Orleans.

While American foodways have become alarmingly homogenized, our cooking in New Orleans is still vibrantly alive. We have no choice but to embrace our culture; its what sets us apart from the rest of the countryand we love to consider ourselves different. We arent the most progressive group, but we do have values. We value time and waste as much of it as we can, spending all day cooking the good stuff, the gumbos and touffes, the courtbouillons, red beans and rice, the grillades and gravies, the jambalayas, and the whole suckling pigs. New Orleans embraced its slow cooking long before that became fashionable.