TRENDSETTING THE TABLE
Our Daily Bread Pudding French Bread Foreword by Gene Bourg Bread Pudding Background by Kendall Gensler
For many a newcomer to New Orleans, deciphering its quirky culture means first dispensing with American-style logic and then learning a new vocabulary.
the great majority of the ovens in these German and Italian stores turned out the sort of bread that New Orleanians have always known as "French."
Where else does crossing a river mean heading south to reach the East Bank?
Fewer than a handful of old-line bakeries producing French bread in the city are still around. To find them in the phone book, go to Leidenheimer, Gendusa and Binder.
Where else does the term "neutral ground" refer, not to a emilitarized zone, but rather to the median dividing a street. And where else would the baking of a traditional bread called "French" be left exclusively to Germans and Italians? In the Yellow Pages of a 1940s New Orleans telephone directory is a list of more than 200 small neighborhood bread bakeries, most of them identified by the owner's family name. Finding an obvious French name among them--like Bourgeois, Villere or Livaudais-- is next to impossible. About 90 percent of the list is filled with such monikers as Bacher, Ruffino, Franz, Brocato, Costanza and Klotz. But, it's a safe bet that 18 | CULINARY CONCIERGE | NEW ORLEANS
Mention this trivia to somebody scarfing down a sandwich in any of the city's legion of poor-boy ( po-boy ) shops, or a bread pudding in a fancy Creole dining place, and you'll probably get a blank stare. What really matters is that New Orleans' classic New Orleans-style French bread is still with us, and it's not an endangered species. New Orleans' French-style bread enjoys a mystique shared only by a few of the city's culinary classics. One possible reason is that the city of its birth is the only place in America you'll find it--thin-crusted, cottony, and sliced only minutes beore it is eaten.