Fourteen observations and facts from "New Orleans Cuisine: Fourteen Signature Dishes and Their Histories, " a new book from the University of Mississippi Press ($29), edited by Susan Tucker:
-- Although no early 19th-century New Orleans gumbo recipes exist, documentation of its appearance on a menu can be found from the early 1800s. An 1803 report of a 12-hour party at which guests were served 24 gumbos shows the dish was already a local staple.
-- New Orleanians were probably among the first North Americans to taste bananas.
-- Southwestern France, the Italian Piedmont and Alsace-Lorraine, all areas of origin for early New Orleans immigrants, each had red kidney bean dishes.
-- Rice is intimately tied to West Africa, where it is still a dietary staple, and the slave trade. By 1721, thanks to the labor of 46 black and two Indian slaves, rice was growing of the Chapitoulas coast just north of New Orleans. Rice, which was likely to withstand heavy rains and floods that destroyed other crops, immediately became an important part of the diet of settlers and enslaved people.
-- In appearance and taste, Creole mustard is closer to the French Pommery Moutarde de Meaux than the milder brown Bordeaux-type mustard with sugar and herbs that is the German preference.
-- Molasses pie was a favorite recipe cited in early New Orleans cookbooks, and was a precursor to pecan pie, which doesn't appear in local cookbooks until the 1920s.
-- Mark Twain, Walt Whitman and Andrew Jackson patronized the Old Absinthe House bar at the corner of Bourbon and Bienville Streets.
-- By the mid-1850s, seasoned Croatian fishermen here worked out a dual method of fishing. They harvested natural reef oysters for cooking and canning, and cultivated oysters for raw half-shell consumption.
-- New Orleans is the only remaining outpost of European-style turtle soup.
-- Food historian Wavery Root claims the sea turtle "was so important for Gulf Coast Indians that it has been called the 'buffalo of the Caribbean.' "
-- "Heavy devil" is what riverboat cooks are said to have called bread pudding.
-- Cooling cut fruit was sold on summer nights in the Sicilian areas, a street custom that lasted until the 1960s.
-- For visitors to the 1884-85 World's Industrial and Cotton Centennial, two cookbooks were compiled and published: "The Creole Cookery Book" from the Christian Woman's Exchange and Lafcadio Hearn's "La Cuisine Creole."
-- Leidenheimer's owns both Reising and Angelo Gendusa Bakeries, and has added the bakeries' most popular breads to its production line.
On Monday at 6 p.m., Susan Tucker and contributors Michael Mizell-Nelson, Sharon Stallworth Nossiter, Patricia Kennedy Livingston, and Karen Trahan Leathem will sign copies of the book and speak at the Garden District Book Shop's Cookbook Club, 2727 Prytania St. You do not need to be a member to attend.
Sara Roahen, author of "Gumbo Tales," also wrote some of the book's essays. Leathem is museum historian at the Louisiana State Museum; Livingston writes for the Picayune; Mizell-Nelson is a University of New Orleans assistant professor of history. Nobles is a recent UNO graduate and writer; Nossiter is a former newspaper reporter. Tucker is an author, archivist and librarian at the Newcomb Center for Research on Women.
Culinarians are going to spend the next 100 years relying on this unusual book, which is the outgrowth of a project by the New Orleans Culinary History Group, a study group that has met since 1998.
The group held tastings and evaluations of the 14 dishes explored: the Sazerac, French bread, shrimp remoulade, oysters Rockefeller, daube glacee, turtle soup, gumbo, trout amandine, red beans and rice, mirliton and shrimp, Creole tomato salad, Creole cream cheese, bread pudding and cafe brulot.
The iconic dishes were chosen because they "tell the stages of adaptability, the centrality of public encounters with food, the passion for ingredients and talk of food, manners of serving, and social and economic forces that lie behind the way New Orleanians cook, " reads the book's opening essay. "They are symbolic of the social history of New Orleans."
A number of other knowledgeable local men and women well known in the local food world are part of the Culinary History Group, including Maureen Detweiler, Faun Fenderson, Kevin McCaffrey, Mildred Covert, Pat Gloriosa, Ann Maylie Bruce, Mary Tutwiler, Mary Ann Travis, Ann Travis, Beth Willinger, Gabe Mouledoux, Florence Jumonville, Dolores Martins de Barros, Phyllis Marquart, Poppy Tooker and Elizabeth Williams.
. . . . . . .
The chapter on shrimp remoulade concludes with two recipes. The red version, from "The Plantation Cookbook, " was preferred in a 2006 tasting.
½ cup chopped onions
¼ cup oil
½ cup tarragon vinegar
½ cup brown Creole mustard
2 teaspoons paprika
¼ teaspoon cayenne
2 teaspoons salt
2 medium cloves garlic, pressed
½ cup chopped green onion
5 cups shredded lettuce
2 pounds boiled, peeled shrimp
In a blender, place onions, oil, vinegar, mustard, paprika, pepper, salt and garlic. Blend 5 or 6 seconds, turn off, stir, blend another 5 or 6 seconds. Add green onions and blend for 2 seconds. Do not blend longer or you will have puree. Chill sauce overnight. Arrange beds of lettuce on salad plates, top with shrimp, and cover with chilled sauce.
. . . . . . .
The Culinary History Group also preferred this recipe it derived from Austin Leslie's "Chez Helene House of Good Food Cookbook."
White remoulade in the style of Chez Helene
Makes 6 servings
2 cups homemade or better store-bought mayonnaise
1 ½ cups chopped dill pickles
1 teaspoon prepared mustard
½ cup horseradish
1 teaspoon finely chopped parsley
½ teaspoon finely chopped garlic
Cayenne to taste
½ gallon boiling water
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons liquid crab boil
1 ½ pounds peeled shrimp
1 head shredded lettuce
For remoulade sauce, mix mayonnaise, pickles, mustard, horseradish, parsley, garlic and cayenne in bowl. Refrigerate. Add salt and crab boil to the boiling water. Add shrimp. When water returns to a boil and shrimp turn pink, remove and put shrimp directly into ice water to stop the cooking. Drain.
Divide the lettuce on six plates, top with shrimp and a generous amount of remoulade sauce.
. . . . . . .
p>Check out the archive of Times-Picayune recipes at http://blog.nola.com/recipes
Exchange Alley seeks to rebuild recipe collections. Send requests or recipes (along with a phone number, your name and where you live) via e-mail with ALLEY in the subject line to: email@example.com. Send mail to: EXCHANGE ALLEY, Food section, The Times-Picayune, 3800 Howard Ave., New Orleans, LA 70125-1429.