Best Food Writing 2010 (37 page)

I wanted to understand why she stuck it out, and how her faith got her through the devastation of Katrina. I wanted to see if through her story, I could find the strength to believe in my own. I asked her how she found the stamina to get back up when it all seemed so impossible. How did she not just crumble?

“The strong have feelings just like the weak, but they just don’t show it,” she said. Besides, she said, Katrina wasn’t the worst thing that ever happened to her. She had lost a child.

Her beloved eldest daughter, Emily, her right hand and the woman most likely to carry on all the traditions and knowledge Mrs. Chase had accumulated, died giving birth to her eighth child in 1990. That child died a short time later after complications from the birth. The day after her daughter died, Mrs. Chase was scheduled to open the restaurant at eleven A.M. So she did. “I lost myself in the pots,” she wrote in her memoirs. That day, I asked her why. “I could not put my sorrow on the whole world,” she told me. “Life goes on, and that’s what we have to understand with Katrina.”

I pushed her for a better explanation. You don’t come across eighty years’ worth of courage very often. I needed to understand where her strength—her faith—came from. She didn’t mind elaborating, using a baseball analogy.

“I tell people all the time, I think God is just like a pitcher,” she said. And He apparently favors the low, slow curveball.

“It’s a fun thing to see. It’s a hard thing to hit,” she explained. “But if you work on hitting this low, slow curve, it’s going over the fence. It’s going out of here. So I just think that God pitches us a low, slow curve. But He doesn’t want us to strike out. I think everything he throws at you is testing your strength.”

But Katrina?

“I tell you, I think I had more tears in the gumbo pot than I had gumbo,” she said. “But you just cry and you just keep moving. It’s not fair to put your hurt on somebody else.” And then she said something remarkable. Maybe God flooded New Orleans to show man his mistakes.

“When you saw those people floating around in water, you saw every mistake you made.You had too many people in this city who couldn’t fend for themselves. Where were we? Why were we not directing these people?” she said. “The levees broke on us, but we had many warnings, many times before. Why were we not checking those levees out after each warning?”

Like anyone who was there, the images from those first few days still fill her head. She says she has heard people—her own neighbors, even—say God brought his wrath down on poor black people because they weren’t living right. Or, they said, God just doesn’t like people of color. After all, the rich white folks in the Garden District didn’t get flooded out and didn’t lose their family members and their homes. But Mrs. Chase sees it differently.

“Look at it this way,” she told me as we sat in a back room at Dooky Chase. “If we would have been saved on this end, and the French Quarter and all the big, beautiful homes Uptown would have been destroyed, look what a predicament we would be in. We couldn’t help them up.”

Maybe the rich people were saved, she said, because they had the resources to help the poor people get back on their feet. If all the rich people had been washed away, no one would have been left to help the poor.

“Don’t you see how good things work? No matter how bad it is, good things work.”

Even now, when I’m on the floor, feeling scraped down to bare metal, I think about what she told me. And I try to follow her prescription: “Figure out what you have to do in life and then just go to work and do it. Look at your world as a beautiful world. And it is a beautiful world. It’s just your job to make it a little bit better.”

I figure I can do that. I can make the world a little bit better. They say religion is for people who are afraid of hell and spirituality is for people who have been through it. Even though I haven’t been through a hurricane or lost a daughter, I have had my own little trip to hell. And I know I will have more trials. When I do, like Leah Chase and millions of other people on this earth, I will pray. Without shame and with an open heart.

ON HOLY THURSDAY, I made Mrs. Chase’s gumbo z’herbes. It is a dish that requires faith. All recipes do, really. You have to trust the people who came before you, who burned a few things and threw out a few bowls of bad stuff in pursuit of a perfect dish. But in my interpretation of faith, whether recipe-based or soul-based, you have to have enough inner strength to change things up if you need to. God will send the directions, but you have to take the right steps.

The dish is served on Holy Thursday because for Catholics, that’s the last day you get to eat a big meal before Easter. Catholics, my mother included, wouldn’t eat meat on Good Friday. Those who hewed even closer to the faith would fast altogether. So you needed a good, meaty meal on Thursday to get you through to Saturday noon, when people would start eating normally again. Some food historians tie gumbo z’herbes to the African-Caribbean dish callaloo, but there is some indication it really has its roots in the Lutherans who settled in southern Louisiana in the 1800s and made a green vegetable soup for Holy Thursdays.

There is often a point when I’m cooking a new recipe that I panic. Sometimes it’s just for a second, when a sauce isn’t thickening or a batter seems suspiciously thin. I often start by blaming the person who wrote the recipe, assuming they didn’t tell me that I need to whisk something for an extra few minutes or they left out an essential half cup of flour. Then, quickly, I turn the blame on myself for either hurrying through a step or doing something boneheaded like adding cayenne instead of paprika. I can be easily distracted, burning toast if the breakfast conversation is just too engaging. But I am also the kind of cook who can pull herself out of the culinary shame spiral pretty quickly, bravely plowing forward and hoping that some combination of good ingredients, strong kitchen fundamentals and a well-written recipe will allow me to pull off almost any dish.

Still, it was all I could do a few days before Easter to believe the thin, murky green swamp that filled my two biggest pots was going to taste any good at all.

My kitchen in Brooklyn is kind of a puffed-up galley, with a nice back door that opens to a patio. There is enough counter space to make my friends in their tiny Chelsea apartments jealous of the setup, although those same counters elicit pity from my friends in the suburbs out West. I had plowed through Mrs. Chase’s recipe, and my small kitchen told the tale. It was as if a chlorophyll bomb had gone off. The sink was covered with trimmings from nine different greens, including carrot tops, collards and kale and a half head of lettuce I had in the fridge. Cutting boards held the remnants of ham, chopped brisket and andouille, smoked dark with pecan wood. In the two big pots, water seasoned with raw garlic and onions boiled. I had made a soft, brown roux in the grease from the hot sausage, and I had simmered a ham hock to make stock. I had pureed and pureed and pureed until everything was covered in green splatters, and the pots that once held ham stock now were filled with what smelled like a swamp with hints of forest fire.

Sara Roahen, an excellent cook and writer I met in New Orleans, spent some time cooking gumbo with Mrs. Chase. She recounts the experience in her fine, sweet book
Gumbo Tales: Finding My Place at the New Orleans Table
, which she wrote before and after Katrina. I called her when I was panicked over Mrs. Chase’s gumbo recipe. There are several versions floating around, in Mrs. Chase’s books and others. Sara’s version begins with the warning that your kitchen will be a disaster. And she was right.

There I was, with two huge pots filled with muck. The thyme and salt and cayenne tasted raw and out of balance. It was too hot, maybe, or too bitter. I hadn’t used Our Holy Mother of Lowry’s Seasoning Salt, one of the great saints of the New Orleans spice rack. Maybe I used the wrong greens or should have added the chicken, like Sara advised.

“I think you just have to go with it,” Sara said.

She was right. I said a little prayer and called people to the table. I had faith. Turns out the gumbo was awesome. It just needed time to come together.

THIS RECIPE IS my slightly tweaked version of Sara’s recipe, which is a tweaked version of Mrs. Chase’s. I have tasted both Mrs. Chase’s and Sara’s. They are both delicious, but different. Yours will be, too. This is cooking, not an assembly line. Just have a little faith in your own skill and in the experience of the cooks who went before you. Sara says that in every cookbook where the gumbo appears, the recipe requires an odd number of greens, say five or seven or nine, for luck. Don’t get too worried about that. Mrs. Chase told Sara that the connection between the kinds of greens and luck isn’t really that big a deal. Just select at least seven of the greens listed, although you can use what you have. But make sure the pile of greens seems like way too much to start.

Gumbo z’Herbes

Yield: Enough for a dozen or so people to have dinner, and maybe a little left over for the freezer.

1 large or 2 small ham shanks or hocks
At least 7 varieties of the following greens:

1 bunch greens, either mustard, collard or turnip or a
combination of all three
1 bag fresh spinach or a box of frozen
1 small head cabbage
1 bunch carrot tops
1 bunch beet tops
1 bunch arugula
1 bunch parsley
1 bunch green onions
1 bunch watercress
1 head romaine or other lettuce
1 head curly endive
1 bunch kale
1 bunch radish tops

3 medium yellow onions, roughly chopped
½ head garlic, peeled, cloves kept whole
2 pounds fresh hot sausage (a local sausage called chaurice is
best, but hot Italian without fennel works well)
1 pound andouille sausage
1 pound smoked pork sausage
½ pound ham
1 pound beef stew meat
1 cup flour
Vegetable oil as needed
3 teaspoons dried thyme
2 teaspoons cayenne pepper
3 bay leaves
Salt to taste
2 cups cooked white rice
½ teaspoon filé powder (optional)

1. Place ham shanks or hocks in a large, heavy stockpot. Fill the pot with water and bring to a boil; reduce heat and simmer while you prepare the other ingredients.

2. Wash all greens thoroughly in salt water, making sure to remove any grit, discolored outer leaves, and tough stems. Rinse in a bath of unsalted water (a clean double sink works well for this).

3. Place half the greens, half the onions, and half the garlic in a heavy-bottomed stockpot or 3 to 4 gallon saucepan. Cover greens and vegetables with water and bring to a boil over high heat; reduce heat to a simmer and cook for 20 to 30 minutes, until greens are very tender. When they finish cooking, transfer them to a large bowl, using a slotted spoon, to cool. Repeat the process with the remaining greens, onions and garlic, doing it in two or three batches if necessary.

4. When all the greens have finished cooking, reserve the cooking liquid.

5. Place the fresh hot sausage in a skillet or medium-size saucepan and set over medium heat. Cook until rendered of fat and moisture. Remove the hot sausage with a slotted spoon and set aside. Reserve the fat.

6. While the hot sausage is cooking, cut the andouille and smoked sausage into ½-inch rounds and set aside. Cut the ham and the beef stew meat into ½-inch pieces and set aside.

7. In a meat grinder or a food processor, grind the greens, onion and garlic into a puree, adding cooking liquid to prevent the greens from getting too thick. Do this in batches.

8. Remove the ham shanks from their cooking liquid, reserving the liquid for stock. Once the shanks cool, pick and chop the meat and set it aside; discard the bones and the fat.

9. Pour the greens cooking liquid and ham stock into separate bowls. Using your largest pot, or the two stockpots in which you simmered the greens and the ham, mix everything together. (Divide the pureed greens, the sausages, the beef and the chopped ham equally between the two pots, if using two pots.)

10. Fill the pot or pots with equal parts ham stock and greens cooking liquid and bring to a simmer over medium-high heat.

11. Heat the skillet containing the hot sausage drippings over medium-high heat. With a wooden spoon, slowly but intently stir in the flour until well combined. If the mixture is very dry, add vegetable oil until it loosens some, making a tight paste that’s still able to be stirred.

12. Continue to cook until the flour mixture begins to darken, stirring constantly. As Sara notes, you aren’t going for a dark roux, but you do want the flour to cook. Courage is the key here. Don’t be afraid to let it get dark.

13. When darkened and cooked, divide the roux between the two stockpots or put it into the single pot, dropping it in by spoonfuls and whisking to make sure that each is well incorporated.

14. Add thyme, cayenne, bay leaves and salt to taste.

15. Simmer for about an hour, or until the stew meat is tender, stirring quite often. Add more stock or water if it appears too thick.

16. Serve over white rice.

NOTE: Filé in its pure form is a bright green powder made from pounded sassafras leaves. The Creoles and Cajuns picked it up from the Choctaw Indians, and used it as a spice and a thickener in the winter when okra wasn’t available. If you like it, add it slowly at the end of cooking or even stir it into your own bowl at the table. Sara reports that Mrs. Chase told her, “It’ll lump up on you” if you’re not careful. Mrs. Chase’s father used to grind sassafras leaves for her, and she told Sara that Creoles always add filé to their gumbo z’herbes, even if few cookbook recipes call for it.