Twain's Feast (27 page)

Juvenile redfish, red drum, black drum, pompano, speckled trout, black bass, red snapper, flounder, and dozens of other fish—all sheltered among the maidencane and giant cutgrass, along with incredible numbers of blue crab and literally trillions of shrimp (if all of Louisiana’s shrimp survived to reproduce, in less than two years they would approach the volume of the sun). Decomposing leaves, grasses, detritus, and dead fish nourished the state’s incomparable oyster beds. Oysters and shrimp; ducks and deer; crab-eating, prong-toothed sheepsheads; even bony Atlantic croakers—New Orleans knew how to use them all.

Twain loved the city as much as he did its incomparable food. In another breathless letter, this one to his sister Pamela, Twain wrote, “I think that I may say that an American has not seen the United States until he has seen Mardi Gras in New Orleans.” He’d paraded with revelers dressed as giants and Indians and knights, danced with living playing cards and chess pieces and the queen of fairies. Watching Santa Claus march with genii “grotesque, hideous & beautiful in turn” to the music of drums, trumpets, clarinets, and fiddles, led him to the almost subdued observation that “certainly New Orleans seldom does things by halves.”

In 1861 Twain had left New Orleans as the city prepared for war; he’d fled west rather than pilot a Union or Confederate steamboat. Now, in 1882, his days of piloting and exploration were long over; now he was a famous writer, back in his country after an unwilling year abroad. It was time for Twain to loosen his manacles and return, for a while, to the site of his realized childhood dreams. It was time to go downriver once more—this time as a passenger.

On my first day in New Orleans, I find that in the old French Market, where Twain once saw shellfish, a rainbow of fruit in pyramids, and “everything imaginable in the vegetable line,” produce is now limited to a couple of stalls with bins of bananas, yams, onions, and watermelons. For every lemon there are ten cell-phone chargers; for every paper sack of fried peanuts, a dozen rainbow-reflector sunglasses. The real heir to the French Market of Twain’s day is the Crescent City Farmers Market, which moves between the Warehouse and Garden districts two days a week.

This being early July, it’s not the market’s prime season; there are only about half as many vendors in the small warehouse (they’re expecting rain) as there will be during the late-summer peak. But even now customers wander in the summer heat through baskets of okra, cymblins, and yellow squash, and watermelons piled high in a pickup. There are figs, cakes, towering basil plants, blueberries, peaches, Louisiana eggplants (“almost extinct”), and Creole tomatoes (Mr. B’s Bistro serves a perfect salad: three meaty slices, Vidalia onion, vinaigrette, and that’s it). There’s pesto and chèvre and Creole cream cheese, mushrooms and tamales and New Orleans French bread.

And shrimp. Man, does this place have shrimp. It’s not so much the volume; there are only two stands, both selling shrimp from coolers along with soft-shell crabs on ice and beautiful black drum fillets. But those stands are run by small, independent shrimpers and instantly raise my personal bar for what “fresh” means; the shrimp were swimming yesterday, the day before at the absolute outside, and they gleam. “Plump” is no longer a metaphor; these shrimp are chubby. When stand owner Clara Gerica drags one gloved hand through a bucket, she draws them up by long antennae (a sign of perfect freshness, I later learn—freezing causes the antennae to break off easily). They’re so big that sixteen will make up a pound, which she sells for a jaw-droppingly cheap five dollars.

“These markets are a lifesaver for us,” she says during a brief pause between customers. “Wholesale, we’d be getting maybe two dollars, so this is better than twice as good. And retail would be six, so the customer saves a buck there, too. We only ever sell at the farmers’ markets—it just makes more sense for us, lets us keep on doing what we’re doing.” It sounds like a throwaway line, but the truth is that saying it lets the Gericas keep on doing what they’re doing is saying something enormous. The fact that Clara’s husband, Pete, is shrimping at all now is a bit of a miracle.

All the people I meet in New Orleans—all of them—date their lives by Katrina’s landfall on August 29, 2005. Everything is
since Katrina
or
two years before Katrina, before the storm
or
after the storm, pre-K
or
post-K.
It’s the city’s B.C. and A.D., and everyone has personal stories of dread, flight, and loss. But Clara’s is among the most hair-raising I hear: She was in her East New Orleans home near Bayou Sauvage, waiting out the storm with her husband and eighty-one-year-old mother-in-law, when the house came apart around them. “The roof went, and I was thinking,
Well, that’s it
,” she says with a laugh. “Then the walls went down. Then we were in the water.” Pete managed to get into his skiff and came to pull his mother and Clara out. But Clara, a large woman who cheerfully describes herself as being in terrible shape, couldn’t get in until a floating chair gave her enough leverage to claw her way over the gunwale. As they rowed to higher ground, they were lucky enough to find their household safe floating by.

Bayou Sauvage, Clara says, is paradise—home to egrets, alligators, raccoons, and otters, all within the New Orleans city limits. But it’s also close to the MRGO, or Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet. The MRGO (often pronounced “Mr. Go”) is a fantastically wrongheaded Army Corps of Engineers shortcut to the Gulf; fifty feet wide when first dug, the canal later eroded to two hundred feet across, swallowing and killing tens of thousands of acres of marsh. During Katrina the storm surge up the MRGO was a big reason that the levees failed (it’s since been sealed off, closing one backdoor to the city). And at the same moment that they were being flooded from their home, Pete and Clara’s three boats were sinking. It was a year before Pete got back on the water, and even then it was on the boats of generous friends.

One great thing about small shrimpers like the Gericas is that they can sell a single fish at market. Far less goes to waste than with massive factory trawlers, which can have ten-thousand-horsepower engines and are interested in nothing but shrimp. In unregulated fisheries such boats can end up discarding as much as
fifteen times
as many pounds of bycatch as they do shrimp. And put aside the clinical word “bycatch” for a moment—we’re talking about rockfish, red snapper, sea horses, turtles, whatever life the fine-meshed nets sweep up. Just thinking about trading fifteen pounds of dead ocean life for a pound of shrimp gives me a migraine, and makes the small, fresh black drum fillets that Clara sells seem both decently human-scaled and even more appealing.

Using bycatch instead of tossing it over the side is one reason that Clara knows the taste of croaker as well as she does (Poppy Tooker, author of the
Crescent City Farmers Market Cookbook,
told me that locals most often use the fish for cat food). “Oh, that is excellent. It’s bony, but real sweet,” Clara says. She loves the fillets, which even people who eat croaker rarely taste—it’s too small and bony for most people to bother cutting off the meat before eating. But Clara’s gotten great at boning out fish. “Not by choice,” she says.

Tooker’s certainly right that croakers are almost determinedly modest. In 2004 a political fight erupted in Matagorda, Texas, over using croakers as trout bait; some guides worried that croakers made such appealing bait that the speckled trout population would be decimated. And croakers are less often sought for their own sake than used to substitute for more elevated fish, as when Rima and Richard Collin’s
The New Orleans Cookbook
suggests, a bit ironically, that they make a decent replacement for speckled trout. When you do see a croaker-specific recipe, it invariably calls for frying, going all the way back to Lafcadio Hearn’s 1885
Creole Cook Book;
fried fish is terrific—done well, it’s as good a meal as there is. But frying isn’t usually the go-to cooking method for expensive or upscale species.

A platter of small fried croakers makes a delicious, crunchy meal; the Collins suggest frying the center bones and tail as an extra delicacy. Hearn is frustratingly vague, saying only to serve with “any sauce or catsup desired,” but was probably thinking of one of his several butter or butter-and-lemon sauces, variations on a simple meunière. However it’s served, croaker is a fish to be eaten in quantity—I imagine Twain, straight off the steamboat, ravenous after a long shift, sitting down with friends around a platter piled high and golden.

With sheepshead he’d have had many more options; many Creole cooks loved the fish.
Creole
cooks, I say again—unless he ate a home-cooked meal in the backcountry, Twain may never have eaten Cajun food in his life.

The distinction between Creole and Cajun cooking is sometimes lost, which is understandable; Louisiana’s food comes from a fantastic blend of people and place you’ll find nowhere else in the world. But Cajun food, though influenced by both Native Americans and people of African descent, is really the food of Acadians. Exiled from Nova Scotia in 1755 by the new English rulers of Canada, French-speaking Acadians eventually found a home along the bayous of southern Louisiana, where their name was quickly corrupted as “Cajun.” So Cajun food is country food, often one-pot food; think jambalaya, dirty rice, and the wonderful rich corn stew called maque choux. There’s also a lot more pork, including fantastic roasted suckling pig, or cochon de lait. The distinctive charcuterie, from boudin to chaurice to hogshead cheese, is that of people making the necessity of butchering into a total delight.

Creole food, on the other hand, is the food of the several groups who call themselves Creoles. It’s the food of the city, with roots among wealthy French and Spanish planters and—crucially—the black cooks they first enslaved and later employed in their city homes and on extensive country plantations. It tends to be less spicy, and somewhat more codified, than Cajun. Its gumbos use less sausage and Choctaw filé powder but more seafood and okra. It uses the classic sauces, such as meunière butter sauce over deep-fried trout or hollandaise over the artichokes and creamed spinach of eggs Sardou. Instead of hearty stews, there are delicate soups, such as turtle soup and crawfish bisque. And Creole dishes are much more likely than Cajun to be traceable to a single restaurant or cook, such as oysters Rockefeller and pompano en papillote (both invented at the still-thriving Antoine’s). Creole food also has more pastries and baked goods, things like beignets and king cake. It was the food of restaurants, of full-time cooks, and it was what Twain ate while in town.

Using gumbo to tease out the intertwined roots of Louisiana cooking is a cliché, but it’s a cliché because it’s fun. So, briefly: Filé gumbo has roots on three continents, made in both Creole and Cajun variants (the original is Creole). The name
filé
is French and refers to the strings left by Choctaw-made sassafras powder;
gombo
is the Bantu word for okra. Gumbo begins with a French-derived roux, frying flour in fat until it’s as brown as the cook likes (using the fat left after browning chicken is awesomely good). But as the name suggests, its original roots are in long-simmered African meat-and-vegetable relishes served over rice. Gumbo can include almost anything taken from the bayou, ocean, gardens, and smokehouses of Louisiana; but while Creole gumbo is usually a relatively delicate brew built around seafood and thickened with African okra, Cajun generally ends by stirring Choctaw filé into a pot of sausage with chicken or oysters.

Whether you’re talking about Cajun or Creole food, you don’t often hear about sheepshead and croaker. That’s probably in part because they get lost among the riches—New Orleans easily has more beloved traditional dishes than any other American city. Barbecue shrimp, shrimp étoufée, beignets, calas, daube glacé, po’boys, muffulettas, trout meunière, trout amandine, boiled crawfish, soft-shell crabs, red beans and rice, pain perdu, pecan pie, bananas Foster, bread pudding with whiskey sauce . . . The temptation here is to fill several pages and then go eat, but the point is just that once you’re talking about sheepshead and croaker you’re pretty deep into the weeds.

But in the nineteenth century, sheepsheads were popular and often inexpensive. In 1885, twenty-five years after Twain left the river, you could still buy one broiled for thirty-five cents. The 1901
Picayune’s Creole Cook Book
called sheepshead “the most to be commended for household use, being susceptible of a far greater variety of modes of preparation” than any other Gulf fish. The fact that it was somewhat less rich than pompano and mackerel was, the writer thought, actually a virtue; it could be used every day “without injury to the stomach.”