Research Can Be Tasty

Gretchen Craig means for her historical novels to be authentic right down to the kind of shoe laces the ladies used and what they cooked for supper. Her latest novel, CRIMSON SKY, is set in New Mexico among the pueblos where their supper was likely a stew of rabbit, corn, and beans. But in her novels set in New Orleans, her research includes desserts!

We live a day’s drive from New Orleans and one of the attractions that draws us back again and again is the FOOD. ALWAYS AND FOREVER and EVER MY LOVE, historicals with romance elements, are set in New Orleans in the 1830s. Like other historical novelists, I did book research, internet research, library research, and most fun of all, on-site research in the French Quarter.

One historical fact I learned was that in 1837, the country suffered a major financial downturn – we all know what that’s like. I used that event to move my character Josie out of her comfortable life on the plantation and into her journey to become an independent, realistic, and competent young woman.

In danger of losing her plantation, Josie takes herself downriver to New Orleans and opens a lunch counter on the waterfront. She makes apple and peach tarts, pork pies . . . anything her hard-working customers could walk away with and eat from their hands. Her specialty – Pralines. (I always called them pray-leens, but the natives say prah-leens. Just so you know.)

Culinary Corps in New Orleans - Part 2

If you haven't read yesterday's post, please do it first. I promise, this one will still be here when you get back. And thanks to Mark Carter for sharing his experiences as a volunteer with CulinaryCorps. Once again, welcome, Mark.

I have a fondness for food. I’ve visited New Orleans three times prior to this trip and have always found the city to be one of the most atypical American cities. Not because of its maintenance of the French Quarter but how the diverse groups and circumstances came together and both melded and upheld their identities. American culture tends to steamroller itself over nuance and removes many of the vestiges of an area’s origins. Somehow New Orleans partially escaped this process or was too mighty to succumb.

I love that it managed to do that, its individual parts and the final results. I suspect that many feared that in the ensuing restoration much of what built and preserved the culture might disappear. I worried that it required a certain critical mass of each group to both preserved what they had contributed and to ensure that the fruit of that mixture, what makes New Orleans a live and not a static culture, may not be able to endure with such a population loss. It’s my hope that the area’s renewal keeps those qualities; that the displaced families would find what they always loved about the place and hopefully to see it improved. That’s certainly no easy task and certainly not in a city mired in its government’s past behavior.

Doors: A Culinary Visit to New Orleans - Part 1

What I'm reading: Faceless, by Debra Webb

Thanks, Karen for sharing your thoughts. It boils down to "writers write" doesn't it?

Today, I'm pleased to be turning the place over to someone near and dear to me--my brother. As a young kid, he'd get up early Sunday mornings and cook breakfast. Pancakes, waffles, coffee cake, you name it. (He confessed later that he did it because he didn't like fried eggs, which is what our mother always made on Sundays.) His love of cooking, and of food, continued, and he became a chef. He's left that life ... or has he? And I'm proud to see the volunteer gene is evident in him, too. Welcome, Mark Carter.

What you notice first are the doors. Everywhere, in all parts of the city. Bleached and flaking paint. Open and exposed grain. Rotting and delaminating wood. Holes and gaps.

I thought that people had simply sealed the entrances to abandoned stores for security; temporary with no thought of posterity. When I saw them in most every neighborhood I thought that they remained from the early warnings of the approaching hurricane; storm windows of a sort waiting for the all-clear. But why had they been painted and continue to remain in place, weathering?

I’ve recently returned from a week in New Orleans and Ocean Springs, Mississippi with an organization called CulinaryCorps. Twelve of us, cooks and chefs at various stages, and from numerous cities and countries, volunteering to cook and more.

Thoughts that we might be ‘late to the party’ were quickly dispelled. One can limit oneself to indulging in the Quarter and have the familiar boisterous, tasty and tawdry New Orleans experience. That has been and will no doubt be the city’s saving grace. The cash cow of tourism was mostly spared and continues to provide visitors most of what they have come to experience and expect. It remains crazy, loud and over-amped; a city like no others. But its dirty little not-so-secret remains just a short drive, or even a walk, away. You can easily select your New Orleans experience. All fun? Stay around the Quarter. Despair? The Lower 9th Ward is just for you.