Rouses Magazine - July August 2019

JULY | AUGUST 2019

The Asian Issue

Bรกhn-jour

The French Influence on Vietnamese Food

Harry Lee

The Chinese Cajun Cowboy

Heart & Seoul Korean Fried Chicken

At Rouses, we’re Coco for Coconuts.

We traveled all the way to Thailand for our naturally hydrating, nutrient-rich coconut waters, and coconut milk from the country’s prized Koh Samui. Our refreshing coconut sparkling waters were sourced in Vietnam. These are the some of the best-tasting coconut products you can buy anywhere in the world.

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www.rouses.com

Crabbing on the Coast

by Donny Rouse, CEO, 3rd Generation

photo by Romney Caruso

One of my fondest childhood memories is crabbing with my father and grandfather on Grand Isle. You didn’t even need a boat; you could just set a trotline in the sandbar, with one pole here, one pole there, and a long line baited with chicken necks or turkey necks from Rouses running in between. When the crabs were really thick you could walk the shore, dragging the bottom of the water with a dip net, and scoop them up.

My wife’s family has a camp in Dulac where we’d go crabbing from the pier. You simply take some string, tie a net with some bait on it, and hang it off the pier. A few years back, she and the kids started a new crabbing ritual in Orange Beach: On summer evenings, they’ll take a couple of flashlights to the beach to chase toodaloo crabs along the shoreline.

Now, I can think of a few better things to do with crabs than chase them — like eat them. At Rouses, we made our name selling local seafood. We boil crabs and shrimp in our stores all summer long, using my grandfather’s recipe. I boil crabs at home on the regular.

Here’s a little tip: There’s no need to boil crabs for 10 or 15 minutes;

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you’re overboiling them. Turn the fire off after five minutes, and the crabmeat will flake better when you pick it.

Today, Vietnamese-style seafood boils are becoming popular across the Gulf Coast. We experimented with Vietnamese crawfish boils during the crawfish season, and I love the idea of tossing boiled crabs with Viet-Cajun garlic butter (see page 15), because crabmeat, like fish, loves butter. And this recipe’s also a delicious example of the Gulf Coast as a true melting pot. You could also try using Drago’s Butter Garlic Charbroiling Sauce on your crabs, which we sell in our stores.

Crabs are in season almost year-round, but July and August are when they’re really running. They can be found in the Gulf, back bays and passes, spillways and saltwater estuaries all over the Coast — and at your neighborhood Rouses.

SUMMER’S HERE...LET’S GET CRACKING!

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Table of Contents COVER PHOTO

BY ROMNEY CARUSO

In Every Issue

1 4 5 6 7

Letter from Donny Rouse Contributors Letter from the Editor

68 A Product-finding Trip to Thailand

BY DAVID W. BROWN

70

The Traveling Chef

BY DAVID W. BROWN

How I Roll

BY ALI ROUSE ROYSTER

In Our Stores

Features

12

Bahn-jour

16

Un-pho-gettable

18

A New Place to Trawl Their Own

24

Bun Appétit!

28

New Orleans’ Chinatown

32

The Chinese Cajun Cowboy

36

Life in the Chinese Delta

42

Kanpai! (Cheers!)

48

Funk on da Table

54

Curry Favor

Cooking & Recipes

15 57

BY SARAH BAIRD

BY DAVID W. BROWN

BY KEN WELLS

BY JUSTIN NYSTROM

BY DAVID W. BROWN

BY JUSTIN NYSTROM

BY WAYNE CURTIS

BY MICHAEL TISSERAND

BY SARAH BAIRD

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Lanexang Village in Cajun Country

65

Common Threads

BY DAVID W. BROWN

BY SARAH BAIRD

J U LY • A U G U ST 2019

Viet-Cajun Seafood Butter

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Pu Pu Platter

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27 44 46 47 77

Tech Support

BY DAVID W. BROWN

Rice & Noodles Sushi Sake & Beer Ramen vs. Pho Asian Pantry

Coconut Red Curry Thai Coconut Curry with Shrimp

BY SARAH BAIRD

& Seoul 60 Heart

BY LOLIS ERIC ELIE

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Travel

Green Curry with Tofu Butter Chicken

In Memoriam

78

Leah Chase

BY LOLIS ERIC ELIE

Biryani Rice

63 Paper-Skin Fried Chicken Korean Ribs

72 Leftover Fried Rice 73 Thai Pineapple Fried Rice Som Tum (Papaya Salad)

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Lo Mein Thai Peanut Sauce

75 Pad Thai 76 Take A Wok on the Wild Side

BY DAVID W. BROWN

Hidden Gems The Gulf Coast is filled with dining gems, many of which have been featured in this magazine’s pages.

For this issue, we asked our foodie friends to share their favorite offthe-beaten-path Asian restaurants.

They include a windowless holein-the-wall under the expressway on Perkins Road in Baton Rouge and a Nepalese Indian restaurant on Alabama's Gulf Coast. Look for these hidden gems throughout the magazine.

We’re hungry for football!

Official supermarket of the new orleans saints and lsu athletics

groceries beer catering Family owned since 1960 ROUSES

Contributors SARAH BAIRD

JUSTIN A. NYSTROM

Sarah Baird is the author of the books New Orleans Cocktails and Short Stack Edition: Summer Squash. Her work appears regularly in/on Saveur, Eater, GQ, First We Feast, PUNCH and Food & Wine. She was the longtime food editor and restaurant critic for the New Orleans alt-weekly, Gambit Weekly.

Justin A. Nystrom is an Associate Professor in the History Department at Loyola University New Orleans. He is the author of Creole Italian: Sicilian Immigrants and the Shaping of New Orleans Food Culture.

DAVID W. BROWN David is a regular contributor to The Atlantic, The Week and Mental Floss. His work also appears in Vox, The New York Times, Writer’s Digest and Foreign Policy magazine.

He is a regular commentator for television and radio.

ROMNEY CARUSO Romney is a Mandeville resident and has been a professional photographer for over 25 years. He has styled and photographed food for hundreds of local and national publications, and for several cookbooks. His portrait series of chefs and bartenders, titled “Shakers, Knives & Irons,” was recently displayed in New Orleans and Los Angeles.

WAYNE CURTIS Wayne Curtis is the author of And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in 10 Cocktails, and a contributing editor to The Atlantic and Imbibe. He is a frequent contributor to the book review section of The Wall Street Journal.

LOLIS ERIC ELIE Lolis Eric Elie is a New Orleans born, Los Angeles based writer/filmmaker. He recently joined the writing staff of the Amazon series The Man in the High Castle. Before that, he wrote for the OWN series Greenleaf and the HBO series Tremé. A former columnist for The Times-Picayune, he is the author of Smokestack Lightning: Adventures in the Heart of Barbecue Country and editor of Cornbread Nation 2: The Best of Southern Food Writing. A contributing writer to Oxford American, his work has appeared in Gourmet, The Washington Post, The New York Times and Bon Appétit.

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PATTI STALLARD Patti is a freelance copy editor, proofreader and copywriter with decades of editorial experience in both the marketing and publishing arenas. A native New Orleanian and a culinary devotee, she was part of many creative teams that crafted ADDY awardwinning campaigns for a variety of clients, including tourism, professional sports and higher education.

MICHAEL TISSERAND Michael Tisserand is a New Orleans-based author whose books include The Kingdom of Zydeco; Krazy: George Herriman, A Life in Black and White; and a post-Katrina memoir,

Sugarcane Academy, about Tisserand and other parents persuading one of his children’s teachers, Paul Reynaud, to start a school among the sugarcane fields of New Iberia. Tisserand is a founding member of the Laissez Boys Social Aide and Leisure Club, a Mardi Gras parading organization.

KEN WELLS Ken Wells grew up on the banks of Bayou Black deep in South Louisiana’s Cajun belt. He got his first newspaper job as a 19-year-old college dropout, covering car wrecks and gator sightings for The Courier, a Houma, Louisiana weekly, while still helping out in his family’s snake-collecting business. Wells’ journalism career includes positions as senior writer and features editor for The Wall Street Journal’s Page One. His latest book, Gumbo Life: Tales from the Roux Bayou, is in stores now.

A Long-Lost Restaurant...

Formosa Gardens, Thibodaux "When I was growing up, Formosa Gardens was the place to go in Thibodaux for Chinese food. (It may have been the only place.) It was located on St. Mary Street — not far from Rouses #1, which is now our store support office — and I have fond memories of eating there with my family as a child, especially going on lunch dates with my dad. Usually on Sundays after Mass, my mom would go home with the smaller ones, and my dad would bring me to Formosa Gardens to eat, just the two of us. The best part of the whole place (in the eyes of a five year old, anyway) was the four golden dragon posts out front. When the whole family was there, we kids would name them, make up stories about them, try to scare each other by popping out behind them — whatever! We almost looked forward to having to wait a few minutes to be seated. The food was great, and my dad still talks about their egg drop soup being his absolute favorite!"

- Ali, 3rd Generation

Letter from the Editor

by Marcy Nathan, Creative Director

My father — whose memory these days is fallible — can still recall with perfect accuracy our family dinners at Trey Yuen, Genghis Kahn, and House of Lee. Trey Yuen required a 24-mile drive across the Causeway and a lot of hoopla, with four young daughters fighting the whole way over who would get to sit in the way way back of our station wagon during the drive.

Food memories are that powerful.

Today, Vietnamese food is a national sensation, but nowhere more than in New Orleans, which has the largest Vietnamese community on the Gulf Coast. Before Katrina, you had to travel to the outskirts of the city to get good pho, but now it seems like every restaurant in town is fusing its menu with dishes and ingredients from Vietnam and other Asian cultures. From gumbos to seafood boils, “local” is a mere matter of perception. The whole world is local in New Orleans.

I still sometimes get pho on the West Bank — we have three stores there and another opening in Marrero later this year. When I’m headed east to our stores in Mississippi and Alabama, I’ll stop at Dong Phuong for banh mi. But more often than not you’ll find me (and at least a few friends from Rouses) at Lilly’s on Magazine Street. Lilly is one of those people who makes you feel as though you’ve known her your whole life; she has an innate sense of hospitality. (Sarah Baird profiles her on page 16). Lunch at her Lower Garden District restaurant is practically a rite of initiation for anyone who works in our Downtown New Orleans office. The food is delicious. Jeremy, the downtown store director, says the same thing every time we go: “I could drink that peanut sauce.” (Lilly, consummate restaurateur that she is, always packs extra for him when we order takeout.)

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For this issue I asked our team members to submit their Asian hidden gems: restaurants that don’t get a ton of publicity, but that you just have to try. Mine’s out of the bag: Lilly’s, now and forever.

Everyone’s answers were very telling. I guess it’s true; you are what you eat. We got more than one Asian buffet (“It speaks to my inner fat girl”). A few “weren’t dere no more.” Others were too well-known to be considered gems, like this one, which came from Kenneth, our regional district manager for Alabama and parts of Mississippi: a sushi chain called Rock N Roll Sushi, started — where else? — in Alabama. Kenneth is a fifth member of the band Metallica.

He has close-cropped hair now, but I guarantee he wore it much, much longer in the past (and wore way fewer sleeves). The rolls at Rock N Roll are named after bands and singers. Kenneth, of course, likes the Metallica, but Rock N Roll also has a Guns N Roses roll and a Slash Roll, but no Springsteen Roll. May I suggest Thunder Roll, or Streets of Philadelphia Roll? I don’t know why the Led Zeppelin roll is made with softshell crab rather than the ZZ Top one. And I’m pitching for a jamming Grateful Dead buffet — or, hello, Phish?

This issue is a tribute to all the women, men and cultures that make the Gulf Coast so unique. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed making it. Especially McNally, our store artist, who orders crab rangoons — those crispy crab and cream cheese wontons — at every Asian restaurant she’s ever visited. We shot this issue over two days, and by the time we were done, McNally said she had eaten so many crab rangoons that her body was at least 90 percent cream cheese. Mine was easily more than 50 percent egg roll. And I guarantee if you’d tested Jeremy’s blood, it would’ve been pure peanut sauce.

Bywater Bakery, New Orleans "This spot is owned and run by our former bakery director, Chaya Conrad, and it’s really cool. Chaya and her husband, Alton Osborn, go to Thailand on the regular. Last summer they introduced a Monday night pop-up, Bywater to Bangkok, with Chaya cooking her favorite Thai dishes from a recent trip to Chiang Mai. Everyone was talking about those Pandan Filled Rice Crepes. I legit can’t wait to see what they have on the menu."

- McNally, Store Artist

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FRESH SUSHI

How I Roll

by Ali Rouse Royster, 3rd Generation

I may be showing my age here, but when I was younger, eating sushi was not on my radar — at all. While I think I knew that people ate raw fish and rolled it up in seaweed and sticky rice; I just never imagined eating it myself. In the late 1990s, maybe early 2000s, that began to change. Sushi restaurants popped up in nearby bigger cities, but it still seemed pretty far removed from me in smalltown South Louisiana.

I tried restaurant sushi as a student at LSU in Baton Rouge and quickly fell in love. Even more of a shock was the takeoff of grocery-store sushi!

When we opened our first Rouses in Covington in 2003, we started making sushi for our customers, and it was a hit. I think when we expanded the program to our Thibodaux store not long after, that may have been Thibodaux’s first sushi for sale!

Fast forward to 2019, and sushi is about as mainstream as chicken nuggets. My husband and I bring our three little ones out to eat at local sushi restaurants pretty regularly for a quick bite, and they’re all little edamame-eating machines. Our little girl (age three) loves to pop the beans out with her fingers, dissolving into giggles when one gets away from her. We still have to pop the beans out for the baby (he’s two), and we can hardly keep up. I tell my husband we need to start ordering two servings, because most times I don’t even get to eat one! Our oldest orders for himself now, and his usual is a clear soup and California rolls. (Y’all. He’s four.) We’ve started picking up rolls for him from Rouses as a lunch treat every now and then. If you’d have told 1999 me that in 20 years my toddler-age children would be eating sushi, I guarantee I would never have believed you!

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You’ve probably seen our professional in-store sushi chefs handcrafting sashimi and sushi rolls. We also have a variety of sampler platters, and sides like edamame and seaweed salad. Special orders and sushi platters are available.

BOILED GULF SEAFOOD As the Gulf Coast’s grocer, and avid fishers ourselves, we feel a particular commitment to preserve and protect our seafood industry, which plays such an important role in our culture and economy. Most of our seafood comes from local fishermen with whom we have close personal and professional relationships. But our commitment doesn’t end at our coast. We’re mindful of how all of our seafood is caught and farmed.

AT SEASON’S PEAK: TROPICAL FRUITS Our tropical fruit selection goes beyond pineapples, papayas, mangos, guavas and coconuts — we even have passion fruit, star fruit, and pink dragon fruit, which tastes like a cross between a kiwi and a pear. Jackfruit is our most distinctive selection. This giant spiky fruit can be used for both savory and sweet dishes depending on its ripeness. Firm green jackfruit is great cooked. It has a meaty flavor and texture similar to pulled pork. Ripe jackfruit has a sweet taste like a combination of pineapple, mango and banana. Look for a yellowish skin with spikes that have softened, and a shape that yields under gentle pressure.

AN OLD-FASHIONED BUTCHER SHOP We have full-service butcher shops specializing in fresh meat, sausages and specialty prepared food items. Our trusted butchers are available to answer your questions about cuts, grades and cooking techniques. Beef and pork are cut by hand.

Choose from steakhouse quality USDA Prime beef and USDA Choice beef. On the more affordable end, we also have USDA Select Beef. Most of our stores also have a dryaged beef locker, in which the beef is aged at least 25 days. Special orders are welcome.​

In Our Stores PRIVATE LABEL PRODUCTS

EAT RIGHT WITH ROUSES

If Rouses Markets is on the label, you know it’s good. We have close relationships with the dairies that bottle our milk, bakeries that make our sandwich bread, and manufacturers who package our products. Every Rouses Markets private label food item has been personally tasted by the Rouse Family and is guaranteed to deliver the best quality at the best price.

Imagine having your own personal dietitian with you when you shop. Rouses registered dietitian, April Sins, has handpicked more than 500 grocery items that have lower sodium and saturated fat, healthier fats, more fiber and less sugar. Just look for the Eat Right logo on the shelf tag or package.

FRESH FLOWER SHOP Our licensed floral directors are as picky about the flowers we sell as our chefs are about the ingredients that go into the foods we make. Visit www.rouses.com to order flowers for delivery within specified areas.

SOUP & SALAD BARS Our make-your-own salad bars feature an everchanging selection of prepared salads and freshcut vegetables and fruits. Our hot soup menu changes daily, though you’ll always find our famous gumbo — it’s a favorite year-round.

GROCERY DELIVERY If you don’t have the time to come to your closest Rouses, Rouses can always come to you! Order online at www.rouses.com for same-day delivery to your home or office.

CAKES & DESSERTS There are as many reasons to order our cakes and cupcakes as there are ways to customize them. If you’d like to place a special order for a cake or dessert, stop by or call your neighborhood Rouses Market. For locations visit www.rouses.com.

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DIGITAL COUPONS Get offers online at www.rouses.com and redeem directly in your local Rouses store with no need to download yet another mobile app.

CHEESE & CHARCUTERIE Our cheesemonger is an American Cheese Society Certified Cheese Professional, a title that requires passing a master exam covering everything from dairy regions to cheese making, ripening, storage and serving. Get his tips about cheese and how to build the perfect cheese board at www.rouses.com.

WINE, SPIRITS & BEER We offer wines and spirits at every price point and have experts on the floor to answer questions and offer pairing suggestions. Our craft beer selection includes cans, bottles and kegs from all over the Gulf Coast.

PREPARED FOODS You’ll always find something hot and delicious on our line. Depending on your location, you might find barbecue, pizzas, burritos or a Mongolian grill. All of our stores feature grab-and-go meals, including $5 daily deals, fresh sandwiches and salads, and heat-and-eat dinners.

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MANUFACTURER’S COUPON

EXPIRES: 8/31/19

Reproduction, alteration, transfer or sale of this coupon or its contents is prohibited and is a criminal offense.

SAVE 1 © Mondelēz International group

$ .00

on any TWO (2) NABISCO Cookies or Crackers (3.5 oz. or larger, any variety)

RETAILER: Mondelēz Global LLC or a subsidiary, will reimburse the face value of this coupon plus handling if submitted in compliance with its Coupon Redemption Policy, previously provided to you and available upon request. Cash value 1/100¢. Coupon can only be distributed by Mondelēz Global LLC or its agent. Mail to: Mondelēz Global, LLC 1538, NCH Marketing Services, P.O. Box 880001, El Paso, TX 88588-0001. Offer expires: 8/31/19.

CONSUMER: One coupon valid for item(s) indicated. Any other use constitutes fraud. VOID IF COPIED, TRANSFERRED, PURCHASED OR SOLD. Valid only in the USA, FPOs and APOs. © Mondelēz International group

Back To School Snacking With

NEW BLENDS. RICH COFFEE. RISE AND GRIND NEW ORLEANS Introducing new French Market Coffee.

Master crafted in small batches for a bold, smooth flavor that’ll be music to your mouth.

Try it today at Rouses.

We’re Celebrating!

INTRODUCING ROUSES NEW DIGITAL COUPONS Save on your favorite brands with our new digital coupons. Get offers online at www.rouses.com and redeem in the store with no need to download yet another mobile app. Create your free account today.

www.rouses.com/coupons

Shrimp bahn-mi, a popular Vietnamese sandwich photo by Romney Caruso

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Bahn-jour

by Sarah Baird Banh mi. Egg coffee. Pho. These dishes are now staples of Vietnamese cuisine, but their omnipresence is a rather recent development in the country’s long, complex culinary and sociopolitical history, which has been sculpted by edible influences from China, the Khmer Rouge and beyond. Above all others, though, it is arguably the French — who colonized the country we now know as Vietnam in 1883 — who have left the most lasting mark on the dining habits of the Vietnamese.

“Wandering the streets of Hanoi, one can now find pho shops near bakeries selling banh mi (warm, crusty baguettes, which make for excellent sandwiches), and market vendors selling freshly sliced and salted pineapple next to cafes where Vietnamese and tourists enjoy rich cups of coffee,” writes Erica J. Peters in her 2011 book, Appetites and Aspirations in Vietnam, which examines the food politics of Vietnamese culture during French colonial rule. “Two hundred years ago, none of those delights were there. A hundred years ago, they had all just arrived. The French colonizers who conquered Vietnam in the second half of the 19th century are long gone, but certain culinary contributions remain.”

If you’re up for a highly specific edible adventure, spend a day seeking out, making and eating only Vietnamese dishes with French influence for a delicious lesson that traces global history. (Trust me, it’ll be better than any bar crawl or progressive dinner you’ve ever experienced.) Here’s how to get started.

Ca phe da, a Vietnamese-style iced coffee•Get the recipe at www.rouses.com/recipes

for its drink-it-by-the-glass tastiness as for its ability to be morphed into other foods — like yogurt and flan — which more readily matched with traditional flavor profiles and provided a cooled-down counterpoint to the country’s warm climate.

Most often made using sweetened condensed milk as a base, Vietnamese yogurt is slightly less tangy than other yogurt varietals and retains a smooth, almost fluffy, consistency.

MID-MORNING BREAK: VIETNAMESE COFFEE Need a little early-in-the-day pick-me-up?

Look no further than Vietnamese-style coffee: a saccharine, but potent, elixir that took France’s coffee habit to a completely new level of delicious complexity.

“Before [French] colonialism, few Vietnamese had tried coffee,” Peters explains. “But during the period of French rule, coffee plantations stretched from Ca‘n

Tho through the Dalat region and north to Ninh Binh and beyond. Near those plantations, Vietnamese villagers drank an infusion of coffee leaves, prepared with fresh leaves like local tea. In colonial cities, however, a new style of coffee drinking found favor: brewed strong, with sweetened condensed milk, and iced in the tropical south.”

Vietnam soon developed a distinct and dedicated caffeine-fueled tradition all their own, while wholeheartedly adopting the culture of the French café as a meeting place and focal point of neighborhood social activities in cities like Hanoi and Saigon.

Ca phe da (literally, “iced coffee”) typically begins with a robust dark roast that’s been brewed in a phin (a metallic, French-style siphon), then added to a cup full of ice — much like the iced coffees that are now ubiquitous in second- and thirdwave coffee shops in the United States. A more popular version involves scooping a few tablespoons of sweetened condensed

BREAKFAST: SUA CHUA Start off your sunrise-to-sunset, French-Viet culinary exploration with a little sua chua, or Vietnamese yogurt.

“The Vietnamese had not used milk, butter or cheese in their diet before the French colonial period and consequently had never bred their cows for milk-giving abilities,” writes Peters. And while some Tamil immigrants from Southern India were producing goat milk in Saigon in the latter half of the 19th century, the French began importing their own cow’s milk, including condensed milk, from France.

The Vietnamese quickly adopted milk into their culinary repertoire, not as much

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Ava Street Café, Baton Rouge "There are a lot of really great choices for pho in Baton Rouge — Drunken Fish, Pho Café, Nine Dragon, Dang’s. My fiancée, Gloria, and I are addicted to the pho at Ava Street Café. We pick up or eat in at least once a week.

Gloria orders the mixed vegetable pho. The vegetable broth is so good I get it as the base for steak pho instead of the usual beef broth. We also order the garlic butter edamame, which is equally addictive."

- Chris, Category Manager

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Le Bakery & Café, Biloxi "A lot of the local restaurants get their French bread from this family-owned, FrenchVietnamese restaurant and bake shop on Oak Street. They also make croissants, cakes and pastries, both sweet and savory. The turnovers are to die for. I get the lemongrass-garlic grilled pork banh mi topped with house-pickled vegetables and a bubble tea. Check out Kim Long in Biloxi — another family-owned spot — for more great Vietnamese food."

- Jeremy, Customer

milk into the cup where the phin drips hot coffee, and then the marriage of coffee-and-milk is poured over ice, creating a more caramel-like beverage. And in Hanoi, a creamy, eggnog-like treat known as Vietnamese egg coffee brings together egg yolks, sugar, condensed milk and full-bodied, locally grown Vietnamese coffee for a multilayered edible exploration that’s become something of a local culinary touchstone.

Today, Vietnam is one of the world’s largest producers of coffee, second only to Brazil.

LUNCH: BANH MI For lunch, what else would be quite as satisfying as a banh mi — a sandwich that some (myself included) would rank among the world’s greatest?

“With banh mi, for a modest amount of money, you get to ingest Vietnam’s delectable history and culture,” writes James Beard Award-winning author Andrea Nguyen in her 2014 book, The Banh Mi Handbook: Recipes for Crazy-Delicious Vietnamese Sandwiches. “The bread, the condiments and some of the meats are the legacy of Chinese and French colonialism. The pickles, chiles and cilantro reflect Viet tastes for bright flavors and fresh vegetables."

Creating the perfect bánh mi filling is, of course, a matter of personal taste. There’s the mayonnaise or salted butter; the chiles, cilantro, pickled carrots and cucumber; the Maggi seasoning or hoisin; the pâté; and then the filling: cold cuts or lemongrass pork or gingery tofu — the sky’s the limit. (It’s a real “choose your own adventure” of delight.) But at its core, the sandwich starts with the bread — literally, the banh mi.

“The French, who officially ruled Vietnam from 1883 to 1954 but arrived as early as the seventeenth century, introduced baguettes to Vietnam,” Nguyen explains. “At first the Viets called the bread banh tay (Western or French bread; banh is a generic term for foods made with flour and legumes). By 1945, the bread had become commonplace enough for its name to switch to banh mi, literally meaning bread from wheat (mi). Dropping the Tay signaled that the bread had been fully accepted as Viet food.”

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Today, the term for the bread and the term for the sandwich are synonymous, with the crackly exterior and light, porous interior of a banh mi loaf a necessity for soaking up the sandwich’s rich condiments and juices.

DINNER: BUN OC Often served as a street food — and a favorite of the late, great Anthony Bourdain — bun oc is a vermicelli rice noodle soup with a rich, pork-fat-dappled, tomato-based broth that features snails (à la the French love affair with escargot) and a wide range of local accoutrements: shredded banana blossom, bean sprouts, curdled morning glory leaves, strips of fried green banana — you name it.

Snails have, of course, been eaten across Southeast Asia for centuries, but the French inspired new ways to prepare and enjoy the gastropods, from the aforementioned bun oc (which is, according to many, best enjoyed with an ice cold beer) to oc hap nhoi thit, a buttery, stuffed, baked snail preparation that closely resembles something you’d find on a menu in a Parisian bistro.

DESSERT: VIETNAMESE BÛCHE DE NOËL Ah, dessert — you’ve reached the end of your French-Vietnamese food crawl! But now it’s time for, wait, a Christmas confection? While you almost assuredly will not find a bûche de noël on any bakery shelves outside of the holiday season, the Vietnamese adaptation of this charmingly twee French cake is too fascinating not to explore.

A tubular chocolate cake shaped like a yule log (hence, its name) with an interior that somewhat mimics a higher-end, massive-scale Little Debbie Swiss Roll, bûche de noël is a wintertime delight across France and Francophone countries, with modern bakers going to extremes, blinging out the cake’s traditional woodland-like details (like mushroom-shaped meringues and frosting foliage) with everything from gold foil to non-traditional flavors, including strawberry and pistachio.

Records of French-style cakes being advertised in Vietnamese metropolitan areas date back to the turn of the 20th century and, by 1941, a newspaper ad in the French-language L’Echo was offering bûche de noël-making lessons in Saigon. Known as banh khuc cay giang sinh (Christmas stick cake) or banh bong lan cuon (rolled sponge cake), it’s a central component of modern Christmas activities in the country, which take the holiday celebrations very seriously — even though less than 10 percent of the country identifies as Christians.

“Kinh Do Bakery, a chain in three Vietnamese cities, reported in 2010 that they made 140,000 cakes in 50 different varieties, including a slew of different flavored logs,” writes Thu-Huong Ha in a 2016 article for Quartz about Vietnam’s bûche de noël affection.

“In 2007, the bakery’s celebrations included gifting a 22-meterlong version of the log, and the following year they served 50,000 people with their 4-ton cake.”

Try capping off your French-Vietnamese dining adventure by making a bûche de noël with Vietnamese flavors. Sure, it might be a little out of season, but a coconut-coffee-flavored log on a hot summer day is just quirky — and tasty — enough to be worth the trouble.

Aaron Gravois & Tuyet Vo, a first-generation Vietnamese American from Houma

Tech Support

by David W. Brown

This month’s tasty cover image is a Vietnamese-Cajun crab dish prepared

by Marc Ardoin, the corporate chef of Rouses Markets. The idea came from Aaron Gravois, our director of software development, and is our easy-to-make take on his sister-in-law’s recipe.

“I grew up with all the traditional food from around here,” says Gravois, who is from Vacherie. He counts off the usual — red beans and rice, gumbo, jambalaya — and adds: “Then I learned 20, 30 minutes away, there’s a whole other culture that eats much different food — food that I had never even heard of.” He was introduced to this food by his wife, Tuyet Vo, who is a first-generation Vietnamese American from Houma.

According to the University of Louisiana Center for Louisiana Studies, after the United States’ withdrawal from Vietnam and the subsequent fall of Saigon in 1975, Catholic Charities in Louisiana took a leading role in resettling Vietnamese refugees in the state. Houma was one of the cities where sponsors and housing could be found. Today it has a small but vibrant Vietnamese community.

“I just dove right into the food,” says Gravois. “It was definitely a culture shock, but there are a lot of similarities. Cajuns

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eat rice with every single meal. So do the Vietnamese! Both styles of cooking use fresh seafood, and have lots of flavor.” As for the differences: “Their food is a lot lighter than Cajun food, that’s for sure.”

Gravois and his wife have been married for over five years now. He says he has been spoiled by the meals he has enjoyed.

Vietnamese home cooking uses fresh ingredients. A vegetable is usually served on the side — sautéed Chinese broccoli, for example. Things like lemongrass chicken are a common home dish. It’s a simple sauté with garlic and oil. The chicken is cut and sautéed, lemongrass is added with fish sauce, and the whole thing is served with rice.

“It’s delicious,” he says. “When I first had that a couple of years ago, I thought: Oh man, what have I been missing my whole life?” His wife’s parents are from Vietnam — “My mother-in-law is an amazing cook,” he says — and he has enjoyed watching his three children grow up with such an extraordinary culture.

“Their favorite food is curry!” he says. “It’s pretty cool to see that, and a lot of fun.”

Viet-Cajun Seafood Butter (Enough for 5 lbs of crabs)

WHAT YOU WILL NEED:

1 pound (4 sticks) butter 1 (3-inch) piece lemongrass, chopped fine 10 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped 1 (2-inch) piece ginger, peeled and chopped 2 tablespoons Cajun seasoning 2 tablespoons cayenne pepper 11/2 teaspoons kosher salt 3 tablespoons lime juice 1/2 bunch cilantro, chopped for garnish

HOW TO PREP:

Melt ½ cup butter (1 stick) in a stainless steel saucepan over medium-high heat. Add the lemongrass and sauté until very soft. Add the remaining butter, garlic, ginger, seasonings and salt , and sauté over medium heat until the garlic is fragrant and translucent. Remove from heat; stir in lime juice.

Toss boiled crabs with the butter sauce and garnish with cilantro.

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 15

Lilly's rare flank steak pho, fresh spring rolls with strawberries and mango bubble tea.

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Un-pho-gettable

by Sarah Baird, photos by Romney Caruso New Orleans is home to the kind of Vietnamese food that inspires daydreams: from the pho tai at Pho Tau Bay in MidCity, to the lemongrass ribs at Tan Dinh in Gretna, to pretty much everything in the bakery at the James Beard Awardwinning Dong Phuong in New Orleans East.

For many people, though, it’s Trinh “Lilly” Vuong’s eponymous restaurant, Lilly’s Café, in the Lower Garden District — with its cozy, unassuming space that seems to always be filled with regulars — that has become the epitome of Vietnamese comfort food in the city.

“Before my parents married, my father was a French chef for a French doctor in Vietnam in the 1960s,” says Vuong of her FrenchViet cooking lineage. “After that, he worked at a French restaurant in Vietnam. My father had a talent in cooking. The way that he cooked was very unique, very special, and the food was very, very excellent.

So I kind of think I get it from my father!”

Soon, though, Vuong and her father fled the country as part of a large group of refugees who left Vietnam by boat and ship following the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. They landed first in Indonesia in 1980, then found American sponsors in Falls Church, Virginia and New Orleans before migrating to the Northeast.

“After the Vietnam War, my father [and I] escaped from Vietnam.

We lost everything. He left literally everything behind: Even my mom didn’t come with us on the boat. She stayed behind, and then my father sponsored my mother after two years. When we got to America, he had to do this, he had to do that — he had to do everything! My father worked very hard to provide for us and he worked many, many jobs. He could build a house for you, fix a car for you, he could do anything. But he didn’t follow through with restaurants [in America] with his background — I don’t know why.”

The heart and determination behind Lilly’s Café is nothing short of extraordinary, and a testament to how, through honoring a family culinary tradition, a person can help create new memories and legacies of their own for generations to come.

Vuong’s father passed away in 1999 in Massachusetts, and she returned to Louisiana. (“I had family here — aunts and uncles.

It’s going back to your roots; going back to your family; going home,” she explains.) Lilly began working at an aunt’s nail salon in Mandeville, eventually moving to a salon on Magazine Street. All the while, though, her thoughts were in the kitchen.

“So, I’m doing nails, but in my mind and my heart I’m thinking that I want to work with Vietnamese food. It’s a tribute to my father, because you know, food was in him. Cooking was in him, and so I get it from my dad. I’m telling my customers, ‘That’s my dream. I would like to have my own restaurant.’” She would even bring in handmade Vietnamese dishes for her customers to try — spring rolls, banh mi — that were met with rave reviews.

And in 2012, Lilly’s Café opened on Magazine Street as a Vietnamese food pioneer in the Lower Garden District, rapidly attracting attention from hungry diners across town while simultaneously becoming a linchpin restaurant for the neighborhood.

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Trihn “Lilly” Vuong of Lilly’s Cafe

Today, Lilly’s operation continues to be a true family affair: Her brother and mother both work front-of-house, her husband serves as chef, and Lilly’s aunt and sister-in-law pitch in on occasion.

Vuong also points to the community itself as a key part of the restaurant’s success.

“I couldn’t do it without everybody — they’re all so great. We have a wonderful neighborhood,” she says.

When asked to pick a signature dish, Vuong refuses to point to a personal favorite, but knows which one customers seem to adore: spicy tofu.

“Spicy tofu is unique. All the chefs come to have the spicy tofu, so that’s our trademark dish,” she laughs. “Pho, of course, is essential, and our pho is very different from other places. But I think the spicy tofu is the first choice that people come and try. Even Tom Colicchio from Top Chef came by, ate the spicy tofu, then came back two more times just for that!”

The heart and determination behind Lilly’s Café is nothing short of extraordinary, and a testament to how, through honoring a family culinary tradition, a person can help create new memories and legacies of their own for generations to come.

“I think my dad would be very proud. There were two siblings: my brother and me. My brother’s like my mom, and I’m very similar to my dad, so I think he would be proud. I thank God and thank my family.

This is all for my dad, you know?”

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 17

A New Place to Trawl Their Own

by David W. Brown

Gulf Coast culture has a dynamic richness greater, perhaps, than any other region of the United States, and much of that derives from the long history of enterprising immigrants settling here from every corner of the map.

Whether it’s the Italians who somehow found Daphne, Alabama (of all places!), and developed an unlikely yet thriving potato industry in the United States, or the cultural jambalaya that is New Orleans, where every building, festival and restaurant is equally likely to be derived from French, Spanish, Asian or Creole cultures, to deny the astonishing contribution of immigrants to the Gulf Coast is to deny the coast’s very existence. Even the magazine now in your hands would not exist without the family of immigrants who made their way to Louisiana and founded a grocery store chain.

In a time of withering debates over walls, it’s good to remember that large-scale immigration isn’t something that ended long ago, during the days of Ellis Island and a few Model T Fords rolling down New York City streets. The United States wasn’t built by immigrants, past tense; rather, it is still being built by them today. About a million people immigrate to the United States every year, and nearly 14 percent of the American population was born in some other country.

Immigrants are 30 percent more likely to start a small business than non-immigrants, and own 18 percent of small businesses today.

They started a few big ones as well — if you’ve googled something lately, or bought something on eBay, you can thank an immigrant.

One group of immigrants in particular has enriched and sustained the Gulf Coastal culture, adding among other things their stunning cuisine, while helping simultaneously to sustain the Southern seafood industry — and, relatively speaking, they just got here. The Vietnamese by far make up the largest Asian population in Louisiana, and are the fourth-largest Asian group in the United States. Over half are first- or second-generation Americans. And if you think that all of this has something to do with the Vietnam War, you are absolutely correct.

CONFLICT AND CROSSING OCEANS Vietnam after America’s withdrawal from the conflict was every bit the nightmare of descending forces you might imagine — especially for the South Vietnamese and particularly members of its government.

Flaring tensions with China, meanwhile, meant that the Hoa people — ethnically Chinese citizens of Vietnam — were no longer welcome.

For 800,000 Vietnamese, after the last U.S. helicopter lifted off from Saigon soil, it was time to leave — and fast. “Boat people,” as many Vietnamese refugees were called, then set sail in one of the largest sea migrations of the 20th century.

These desperate people in dire straits rarely received warm welcomes where they traveled. Thousands of Vietnamese attempted to flee via large cargo ships to various nations across Southeast Asia.

Refugee camps proliferated. Many countries were ill-equipped to deal with the influx; many others simply didn’t want to. With large ships now being identified and turned away, fishing boats were an obvious option: Vietnam is a coastal country surrounded by water.

Refugees attempted to abscond in the dead of night in hopes of slipping surreptitiously into some foreign land. These were journeys fraught with peril, and refugees faced down everything from sharks to pirates to typhoons. Refugee camps grew until they were bursting 18 J U LY • A U G U ST 2019

at the seams and, eventually, the United Nations convened an international conference to figure out how to handle a situation growing worse by the minute.

The conference yielded the Orderly Departure Program. The Vietnamese government allowed expedited expatriation, and the international community accelerated the resettlement process. The idea was to stop these highly dangerous, attempted escapes by boat; between 200,000 and 400,000 Vietnamese perished at sea — it was the very definition of a human rights catastrophe.

IN AMERICA Five years after the U.S. pulled out of Vietnam, about a quartermillion Vietnamese refugees had been brought to the United States for resettlement. They were processed through military facilities and dispersed across the country. They didn’t have it easy at first — the U.S., a nation of immigrants, has always been a bit schizophrenic on the subject. (Build a wall, but pass the tortillas on Cinco de Mayo.)

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” reads a plaque inside the Statue of Liberty — “…but not in my backyard,” says public opinion. About half of the immigrants ended up in Texas and California. A big percentage found their way to the Gulf Coast.

The Vietnamese by far make up the largest Asian population in Louisiana, and are the fourthlargest Asian group in the United States. Over half are first- or second-generation Americans.

And it was hard. When these poor people weren’t dealing with the triple traumas of surviving an unimaginably brutal war, a swift campaign of oppression by the victors and the hell of frantic escape, those who resettled in the U.S. had new nightmares of dealing with such new monsters as the Ku Klux Klan — a particularly loathsome menace in Galveston, Texas. When the Vietnamese arrived and attempted to take up shrimping — a trade they could actually do without the need to speak English — locals resisted. The Klan militarized and mounted an intimidation campaign that included burning crosses and fishing boats — one fire aimed at eliminating human dignity, the other at eliminating livelihoods. Klansmen in robes patrolled waters in boats of their own. Members of the Vietnamese fishing community eventually worked with the Southern Poverty Law Center to sue the local Klan and won, though the community would have to work hard to rebuild its sense of security, and fishermen their livelihoods.

When refugees weren’t facing fear at the point of a gun, they were up against such simple, tiny terrors as having no money and zero social status, not to even mention learning a wholly alien language under difficult conditions. (It is hard to conceive of two languages as different as Vietnamese and English.) Moreover, there wasn’t exactly much of a Vietnamese footprint in the U.S. before the fall of Saigon.

(Between the years 1950 and 1974, about 650 Vietnamese, total, immigrated to the United States.) So the refugees could rely only on themselves and on the kindness of strangers. Resettlement continued until as late as the 1990s. All told, about a million Vietnamese have immigrated to the United States.

FAMILIAR CLIMES Vietnamese refugees to the Gulf Coast in those tumultuous years of the 1970s and ’80s were drawn in part by a familiar climate and a geography perfect for practicing a common trade at the time: fishing. Louisiana in particular drew large numbers of immigrants because many Vietnamese were Catholic, and Catholic humanitarian

A traditional Vietnamese meal: Hot Pot

groups helped them resettle. (It is somehow fitting that both Louisiana and Vietnam are former French colonies.) Religion has thus been a unifying force for many large Vietnamese communities; it allowed these areas to grow, survive and thrive, and it gave immigrants a sense of self and of safety.

You can basically follow Highway 90 from Biloxi to New Orleans and find strong Vietnamese communities all along the way. The Gulf Coast was well-suited for Vietnamese cuisine and the staple dishes migrants brought from home. Fishing was a trade many practiced in Vietnam, and immigrants worked — and continue to work — long, hard hours. Today, a majority of the shrimping businesses along the Gulf Coast are run by men and women of Vietnamese descent. In the process of settling in, the Vietnamese community has rejuvenated neighborhoods and set first- and secondgeneration Vietnamese Americans on paths for success — especially with the language barrier removed for the younger generations.

VIETNAMESE CUISINE AND CULTURE Though early Vietnamese immigrants chose to open Chinese restaurants, thinking they would have an easier time of it, Vietnamese cuisine has exploded in popularity in Louisiana and along the Gulf Coast. The banh

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mi, sometimes called a Vietnamese po’boy, is a wildly popular sandwich composed of a baguette split lengthwise and filled with meats and vegetables (and when prepared as a dessert, even ice cream). And these days restaurants specializing in pho, the Vietnamese soup comprised of broth, rice noodles and meat, seem to be on as many corners as McDonald’s.

Vietnamese cuisine is known for its potent chilis and aromatic vegetables — things like garlic and shallots, cilantro and green onion.

Those foods were already being grown in the South, helping to make this place seem a little more like home. Moreover, like traditional Louisiana cuisine, Vietnamese food often features strong flavors in its broths. And of course, the dishes use fresh seafood — things like crabs, shrimp and fish.

So it’s no surprise that Vietnamese food was a natural addition to the region, and it has influenced local cuisine as well.

One classic Vietnamese meal that would have been prepared by new immigrants — as well as in restaurants today — is a hot pot. It is just what it sounds like: a big, hot pot sitting in the middle of the table, filled with flavorful beef or chicken broths, or fish stock, or a combination thereof, with heavy aromatics: ginger, garlic, lemongrass. The dish often has chilis in it, and the aforementioned vegetables are added with whatever proteins are desired — white, flaky fish

or shrimp, or other seafood that might be caught in areas along the Gulf Coast. The proteins are basically poached in the broth, absorbing the flavors of the various ingredients. It is a communal noodle dish, with its amazing aromas adding to the experience.

Because Vietnamese dishes so often use ingredients familiar to locals not of Vietnamese descent, but who use them in a different and interesting way, it can be exciting for locals to try Vietnamese cuisine for the first time. It is familiar and yet not familiar, and the popularity of Vietnamese restaurants along the Gulf Coast today reflects the interest of the non-Vietnamese locals in the cuisine.

It’s not just via food that the Vietnamese have added to the region. Vietnamese festivities have also joined the rich tapestry of Southern celebrations. The three-day Tet festival — the “Feast of the First Morning of the First Day” marking the Vietnamese New Year — has been celebrated annually at Mary Queen of Vietnam Church in New Orleans since 1990. The event is marked with live music, traditional cuisine and dancing, and fireworks. Other Tet celebrations are held all along the Gulf Coast.

VIETNAMESE AMERICANS TODAY Far from being an economic drain on the U.S., Vietnamese immigrants today have a

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 19

Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians and other Southeast Asians make up about one-third of the residents living in and around Bayou La Batre, Alabama.​

higher median household income than the whole of the country and are among the nation’s most culturally assimilated immigrant groups. After the catastrophic flooding from Hurricane Katrina, Vietnamese communities in New Orleans led the rebuilding efforts.

The hurricane was particularly harmful to the Vietnamese — many of their boats and houses were erased from the face of the Earth, and many lacked insurance.

Six weeks after Katrina, residents of the Vietnamese community of Versailles, in the

heavily damaged New Orleans East area, picked up hammers and began rebuilding.

The city took notice. Still, there were setbacks.

When the city attempted to open a toxic landfill in Versailles, the community rallied and fought back, first staging protests and then filing lawsuits. (Ultimately, protests won the day.)

Another significant setback in recent years was the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which pumped millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, devastating the local

Asia, L’Auberge Casino Resort, Lake Charles "This gem isn’t hidden so much as hidden in plain sight — it’s in one of the biggest casinos in Lake Charles. My tried-and-true is the Bun Bo Hue, which is a spicy Vietnamese soup made with beef shanks and Vietnamese pork sausage, but there are just so many choices. There’s even a sushi bar. Chef Vu hand-makes the nigiri, maki and sashimi right in front of you. The Rock-N-Roll is my everything. " - Brittney, Marketing

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seafood and restaurant industries. The community has been slow to recover. Still, this led many in the Vietnamese community to find their voices in the political arena.

The first Vietnamese American elected to Congress was Joseph Cao, who represented Louisiana’s 2nd congressional district from 2009 to 2011. The multiple indignities and stumbling blocks following Katrina and the oil spill required mobilization and action, and youths descended on Washington, D.C., in 2010 to advocate on behalf of fishermen whose livelihoods were harmed by the oil spill, and by the frustrating, foot-dragging way in which BP was attempting to clean up its mess.

And yet the Vietnamese community and its vibrant traditions and heritage survive, and the story of Vietnamese immigrants to the United States is ongoing. VietnameseCajun cuisine in particular has experienced rapid growth across the United States, influencing chefs in Seattle and New York City. The resilience of the Vietnamese people, their effervescent and beautiful culture, and their growing strength as a community and as a political force, together tell precisely the sort of American story that only its immigrants could write.

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Bun Appétit!

by Ken Wells So if I were on death row and asked to pick my last meal, my first choice would be a bowl of my momma’s seafood gumbo, my second her divine oyster spaghetti with her otherworldly spicy tomato sauce. Alas, my mom passed away many years ago.

My backup choice might surprise you: the spicy harvest pork from Brandy Ho’s Hunan Food restaurant on the apron of San Francisco’s historic Chinatown.

Cajun and Creole will always be my chief comfort foods and New Orleans my favorite foodie city. But I’m an Asian food hound. The nine eventful years I lived in San Francisco between 1982 and 1990 did that to me. The 22 years I lived in and around New York City from 1993 to 2015 (the last six in Manhattan itself) sealed the deal.

(The interim years I spent in London.)

As a bonus, in 2001 I was thrilled to snag a three-week trip to Hong Kong and Singapore to teach a feature-writing course to new hires on the Asian Wall Street Journal. There, with in-the-know locals as my food shepherds, I ate joyously from one end of those food-mad cities to the other. One interpretation of Hong Kong food is an upscale, gourmet take on traditional Cantonese. As for Singapore cuisine, that’s a story in itself. Singapore cooking, owing to its variegated immigrant population, takes its influences from China, Malaysia, India and Indonesia, and much of the best food is found in the stalls of street hawkers who dish out beloved gems like chili crab and Hainanese chicken rice.

But back to America. Both San Francisco and New York are blessed with the two oldest and most established Chinatowns in all of the U.S., and in my time in those cities I worked in walking proximity to each. They are populated by Chinese and other Asian immigrants who came with no intention of leaving their tasty traditional food behind. And given the relative sophistication of the dining scenes there, restaurants — even, maybe especially, casual Asian eateries — that aren’t at the top of their game don’t last long. Thus, both of these Chinatowns are Asian food paradises.

Of course, I had dined on Asian food — well, Chinese food — long before I arrived in San Francisco. Most of it, in retrospect, was not great (and some of it awful). Surely some of my Louisiana friends recall their parents — as mine did — opening cans of watery La Choy Chop Suey, heating it up and dumping it over white rice for supper on those days Mom didn’t feel like cooking. Pass the soy sauce, please, and lots of it.

I know one or two Chinese restaurants (Cantonese, most certainly) operated in Houma by the time I left for graduate school at the University of Missouri in 1975. It was a novelty then, and I recall being thrilled to dine on something as exotic as egg foo young (not realizing that the dish is actually an American pancake-omelet fusion creation with roots in Shanghai but with a Cantonese name.)

Until I arrived in San Francisco, however, all the Chinese food I’d ever had was of the ubiquitous Cantonese variety, a style of cooking that encompasses everything from egg foo young, pork fried rice and chicken chow mein to barbecue pork buns, beef chow fun and soup dumplings. Cantonese restaurants dedicated to dim sum, the popular steamed buns and dumplings typically filled with vegetables or pork, form a tasty subset of the Cantonese spectrum.

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...as you cruise through a fabled Chinatown like New York's... Look in the restaurant window; if it's full of locals, try to get a seat and ask the waiter what everyone is eating.

By some estimates, there are more than 41,000 Chinese restaurants in the U.S., and the Cantonese style heavily dominates. There are two reasons for that. First, most early Chinese immigrants to America came from what was known as Canton Province (Guangdong in modern China), which borders the South China Sea just above Hong Kong. Second, the style of cooking, while savory, isn’t particularly spicy, therefore suiting the average American palate. Cantonese cooks typically employ ingredients such as soy sauce, rice wine, ginger, vinegar, sesame oil and garlic but use few herbs and go light on the chili peppers.

But like many people who grew up in the Gumbo Belt, I’m a hot sauce guy, and I gravitate toward spicy foods. I love my sauce piquante, some extra cayenne in my jambalaya and an extra dash of Tabasco in my gumbo. So I was thrilled, when I arrived in San Francisco, to find its legendary Chinatown packed with Asian restaurants that could accommodate my envie for peppery dishes.

My initial introduction was to Hunan food, which takes its name from the sprawling, agriculturally rich province in central China.

Hunan cooking has a reputation for being “dry and spicy,” an effect achieved by its liberal use of chili peppers, chili oil, shallots, herbs and garlic. More than 80 Asian restaurants crowd San Francisco’s compact Chinatown which, at a half-mile long and a quarter-mile wide, is roughly the size of New Orleans’ French Quarter. While most of these restaurants cook some style of Chinese cuisine, you can find Thai, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese and Indian food there as well.

I was a roving correspondent in The Wall Street Journal’s San Francisco bureau, and our downtown office building was an easy

San Francisco’s historic Chinatown

15-minute stroll to Chinatown’s heart. One colleague who had been there for years and learned of my spicy food cravings said, “We’re eating Hunan for lunch.”

“Hu-what?”

Off we went to Brandy Ho’s Hunan Food on Columbus Avenue, strolling by the iconic Transamerica Pyramid building, which is a mere three blocks from the restaurant’s front door. It was and is an unassuming place with a red, white and blue awning emblazoned with its name on its storefront. But I immediately knew I was in the right place when I saw that a long, fanciful red chili pepper replaced the apostrophe in Ho’s.

Inside, the restaurant was and is as unpretentious as on the outside. A giant “NO MSG” sign dominates one wall. A bar fronts an elongated cooking station where you can sit and watch your food being prepared in giant sizzling woks over superhot fires. The main dining area is on two levels, and the tables range from two tops to some that can accommodate a dozen people. Big glassdoor coolers hold the perfect pairings for the spicy food offerings: frosty cold Tsingtao beer, a perfectly fine Chinese lager, and — it being San Francisco — a good selection of craft beer, including local favorite, Anchor Steam.

When you walk in you will be tempted to say what South Louisiana people say when they walk into Maw-Maw’s kitchen on red beans and rice day: “It sure smells good in here.”

As a novice, I had no idea what to order other than the leanings of my palate toward pork, chicken and beef, in that order, particularly combined with chilis, chili oil and garlic. And I love my noodles. But with a little help from my colleagues who were pretty much regulars

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and the inexpensive lunch special combinations on Brandy Ho’s lunch menu, it was easy.

The harvest pork, which would become my go-to dish, consists of tender slices of pork with diced onion and Chinese cabbage, hot-wokked in a wine and “hot bean sauce.” The only critical question from the server is “How hot? Mild, medium or hot?” — with a cautionary declaration that hot here means what it implies. I recall looking around the table at my more experienced colleagues for guidance but they just laughed. “C’mon, Tabasco Man. You gotta go for the hot!”

I took this as a dare, which it was — and the server wasn’t lying.

You have to pick through the mounds of red chili peppers to get to the food. As a person who used to drink Tabasco sauce from the bottle, I didn’t suffer third-degree tongue burn but, boy, those two (or was it three?) cold Tsingtaos really helped. From that point to this day, I’ve almost always stuck to medium, because the succulent pork melded with the savory vegetables is just too delicious to let the peppers overwhelm the flavors.

Anyway, I was hooked. As a showcase of the range of Hunan dishes, the harvest pork comes with two starters — an extremely tangy hot-and-sour soup and a cold noodle salad with sliced cucumbers in a divine peanut sauce that is the perfect counterpoint to the spicy main course. If I didn’t order the harvest pork, I ordered the house smoked ham with fresh cloves of garlic, green onions and bamboo shoots. When the dish arrives, it’s reminiscent of home; think the wafting aromas of a South Louisiana smokehouse suffused with the Asian aromatics of a great stir-fry. The starters for that dish include a triangular, deep-fried, melt-in-your-mouth green onion cake and spicy pickled veggies, typically cucumber, bell pepper and cabbage marinated in a hot-chili vinegar.

Brandy Ho’s had two or three Hunan rivals and we tried them all, occasionally veering off for Vietnamese, Thai and sushi. But it became the regular go-to lunch place on Fridays for at least half of the news staff during the entire nine years I served in the San Francisco bureau. I would eventually learn that the restaurant had been opened by first-generation Chinese immigrants only two years before I arrived.

Flash forward: I visited San Francisco this past April, and Brandy Ho’s is not simply still going strong. I went to lunch there with several former Journal colleagues and ordered — what else — the harvest pork. I can declare that it tasted exactly the same as the dish I first fell in love with in 1982. That kind of consistency explains why Brandy Ho is still cooking 37 years after it opened.

There’s a delicious rival to spicy Hunan — the cuisine of the northern Chinese province of Sichuan (formerly spelled Szechuan.)

But San Francisco, for all the variety of its Chinese food, isn’t the capital of American Sichuan cooking. New York is.

I learned that from a great mentor, a New Yorker by the name of Glynn Mapes who was the Page One editor of the Journal when I joined the paper in San Francisco. Glynn later became the London bureau chief and was my direct boss when I served in that bureau from 1990 to 1993. We more or less transferred to positions in the New York office, which was downtown, around the same time.

If I’ve become an Asian food hound, Glynn has long been the Big Dog of Asian food. Pretty much every workday at lunch time, he would leave the office and walk to Chinatown, where I think it’s possible that over the course of many years he ate in every single New York Chinatown restaurant. (His list of Chinatown restaurant recommendations still circulates in the Journal’s New York office to this very day, despite the fact that he left the paper about two decades ago.)

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 2 5

Top: Traditional Chinese snack, Yibin Burning Noodle Bottom: Sichuan peppercorns

New York’s historic Chinatown

Everybody wanted to tag along and I often did (but not five days a week.) We had some extremely memorable meals at places like Joe’s Shanghai, famed for its soup dumplings and scallion pancakes.

(Shanghai cuisine is its own interesting niche, sometimes called “red cooking” for its reliance on pickled ingredients, which give the dishes a shiny look, and thick sauces crafted from soy sauce and sugar.)

We also dined frequently at a Cantonese joint called Great New York Noodletown that — despite its tourist-trap name — offers the best Cantonese food I’ve ever eaten. In season, we’d go there to gorge on a dish that I know would go down well in the Gumbo Belt: salt-baked softshell crabs. The sautéed flowering chives side dish was emblematic of the exotic and utterly tasty take on Cantonese that Noodletown offers. (Both Joe’s and Noodletown are still in business.)

New York’s Chinatown had a couple of decent Sichuan restaurants but Glynn — a Sichuan snob in the best sense of the word — knew where the good stuff was. The first was Wu Liang Ye, an old-line midtown eatery tucked into a brownstone and famous for perhaps my personal favorite Sichuan dish: dan dan noodles. This is an interpretation (or perhaps a forerunner of) pasta served up with a meat sauce spiced up with chili oil. The other place Glynn would invite Sichuan acolytes to gather is Land of Plenty, also in mid-town.

I asked Glynn what it is about Sichuan that makes him call it the “king” of spicy Chinese food.

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He explained: “Two key ingredients distinguish Sichuan cooking from everywhere else in China: Sichuan peppercorns and Yibin preserved veggie buds. Surprisingly, Sichuan peppercorns are unrelated to chili peppers or black pepper. They are the roasted seed-husks of the prickly-ash tree. And they don’t taste ‘hot’ at all.

Instead, they produce a pleasant numbing sensation in your mouth, which allows the delicious taste of chilis — ever-present in Sichuan cuisine — to shine through without murdering your taste buds.

“The veggie buds, named after Yibin City, home of the best quality buds, are chopped-up bits of mustard green, which then are fermented and mixed with star anise. Sichuan stir-fried green beans, if they are authentic, must have veggie buds. Ask the waiter if the beans contain ‘ya cai.’ If the answer is no, find another restaurant.

(The dish is also sometimes served with minced pork.)

“So my favorite Sichuan meal would start with dumplings in hot chili oil (flat, rice-flour dumplings — slippery to eat with chopsticks but very tasty). Then, any meat or shrimp stir-fried with peppercorns.

And green beans with ya cai and minced pork as the vegetable.”

Glynn has another rule of thumb about picking a good Sichuan (or Hunan or Cantonese) restaurant if you’re in an unfamiliar city, or if you’re one of those tourists who just doesn’t want to bother with guidebooks even as you cruise through a fabled Chinatown like New York’s. Look in the restaurant window; if it’s full of locals, try to get a seat and ask the waiter what everyone is eating.

I offer a caveat to that. Like Cajuns who make a fetish over poule d’eau (pool doo) gumbo, which is an acquired taste for most of the rest of the world, Sichuan cuisine has a wild and exotic side. I recently dined in Chicago’s modest Chinatown and, perusing the dishes pasted on the window of one such restaurant, I discovered among the offerings pork intestines with fresh garlic and pork brain in spicy sauce.

I decided to keep moving. Even I have limits.

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All About → Rice ← BASMATI RICE

SUSHI RICE

India is responsible for nearly two-thirds of the world’s production of basmati rice.

The name comes from the Hindi word for “fragrant,” and appropriately so, since it’s basmati’s fragrance — slightly sweet and popcorn-like — that makes it stand out. Try toasting this long-grained rice in a bit of olive oil or butter before boiling or steaming to naturally release more of its fragrance.

Sushi rice is a short-grain Japanese variety, which produces a stickier finished product. Vinegar, sometimes blended with sugar and salt, is added to a cooling bowl of cooked rice, which gives it that distinctive, glossy finish. The secret is right there in the name: The literal translation of sushi is “vinegar rice.”)

JAZZMEN RICE

THAI RICE Jasmine rice has been grown in the mountain highlands of Thailand for centuries — it was first cultivated for the royalty of the kingdom of Siam — which is where it is mainly grown today.

This fragrant variety of long-grain rice, which has a flavor and aroma similar to basmati, but a bit nuttier, cooks up soft and fluffy with a clingy texture that makes it perfect for rice bowls.

Jazzmen takes one of the most distinctive and satisfying styles of rice and grows it right here in Louisiana. Jasmine rice, grown typically in Southeast Asia, is celebrated both for its gummy texture and its aroma — it smells like fresh popcorn — making it the perfect match for Asian cuisine. The LSU AgCenter took that same long-grain jasmine variety and spent years cultivating it for the local climate and soil. Today, two styles of Jazzmen are grown and harvested here: white and brown rice.

Both have lower sugar contents than other rice, making them well-suited for diabetics. Their texture and aroma are a perfect way to give a nice little twist to your jambalaya or red beans and rice.

&

→ Noodles ← The Chinese have assuredly been making and eating noodles since far earlier than any version graced Italian shores (one of the first written records of the word for “noodle” appears in a Chinese dictionary from the third century A.D). Today you’ll find noodles all over Asia, particularly in China. They can be made from rice (vermicelli), wheat (lo mein and udon noodles), buckwheat, yam — even mung bean.

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W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 2 7

New Orleans’ Chinatown

by Justin Nystrom

Recent years have brought renewed interest in elevated Chinese cuisine, one that transcends the familiar sack of white takeaway boxes normally reserved for rainy movie nights at home and that feature flavors wrought by the hands of a professionally trained chef. But Chinese food, whether fancy or everyday, is hardly new in Louisiana. Indeed, it’s been around a lot longer than you might think.

We can trace the story of the Chinese in Louisiana all the way back to right after the Civil War, when sugar planters recruited laborers from China to work in the cane fields. These immigrants quickly found deliverance from such arduous toil in the waters of the Gulf, where they began producing dried shrimp, a prized ingredient in Chinese cooking, for their countrymen. By the 1870s you could see huge platforms over the water in Barataria Bay built of cypress planks, some as large as a city block, where workers boiled shrimp in huge copper kettles and fanned them across the platform to dry in the sun.

Chinese-owned companies like Fou Loy Tai & Co. of New Orleans soon emerged and packed the dried shrimp — first, to sell to the markets in California, and then on to China itself, becoming, arguably, Louisiana’s first global food export.

Anchored by the dried shrimp business, New Orleans’ Chinese population grew steadily in the 1880s and ’90s, drawing newcomers from both California and China to working-class neighborhoods like the French Quarter or the area called “Back o’ Town,” where many started businesses. In 1875 the city directory listed only two Chinese laundries, but two decades later there were over a hundred sprinkled across every neighborhood in the city. By 1890, New Orleans even boasted a small Chinatown around the intersection of South Rampart Street and Tulane Avenue.

It’s tough to say when the first Chinese restaurant opened in New Orleans because, as is often the case for poor and marginalized people, historians commonly only find evidence of their existence when something remarkable happens — usually something remarkably bad. One of the earliest mentions in the Daily Picayune occurred when one Chinese employee murdered another in the kitchen of a restaurant “on the American and Chinese plan” at the corner of Royal and Dumaine streets on the 4th of July, 1887. Or in 1890 at a Chinese restaurant in the 900 block of Toulouse, where readers learned that three Chinese men got into a fight with “two well-known female hoodlums.” When a Chinese restaurateur was murdered in 1895, the paper described his establishment as a “cook shop…can hardly be classified as a restaurant — in one of the low hovels on Franklin Street,” a part of the famed Storyville red-light district.

While we may never know which one opened first, the number of Chinese restaurants increased so dramatically during the 1890s that, by the turn of the century, they earned a special subheading in the city directory. This phenomenon happened in cities across the nation, where Americans of all nationalities went to their local Chinatown to enjoy the standard Cantonese-style items found on any Chinese takeout menu today — dishes like egg foo yung, lo mein and the ubiquitous chop suey. It wasn’t the elevated art of fine Chinese cuisine, a gastronomy that critics place on a par with or even above French for its variety and excellence, but the workingman’s fare that became synonymous with Chinese food in 20th-century America.

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New Orleans’ own Chinatown was home to several restaurants like Sang Kee’s at 1117 Tulane, but most would’ve headed to the French Quarter or Storyville to enjoy a cheap meal. While many of these addresses are long gone, you can still stand in front of the Creole cottage at 912 Toulouse and imagine the aromas that would’ve emanated from Long Chee’s “chop suey joint,” or do the same at 1237 Decatur, where Jim Lee operated his place right across from the bustling French Market.

At five to 10 cents a meal, Chinese food was within reach of every citizen, and scholars writing about the topic point out the role of its affordability in popularizing the concept of “eating out” for every class. Shops tended to be open at all hours and on holidays, the genesis of the Jewish tradition of eating chop suey and lo mein at Christmas. Catering to the laboring classes in a segregated city, many Chinese restaurateurs operated separate dining rooms at addresses next door to each other, both served by the same kitchen.

Ironically, Chinese patrons ate in the white dining room, despite being the only ethnicity to be specifically barred from immigrating to America by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

Chinese-owned companies like Fou Loy Tai & Co. of New Orleans soon emerged and packed the dried shrimp — first, to sell to the markets in California, and then on to China itself, becoming, arguably, Louisiana’s first global food export.

In century-old, true-crime newspaper columns, the typical Chinese chop-suey joint was portrayed as a darkly lit noir fantasy, a smoky room lined with shadowy figures and thick with the smell of garlic, soy, whiskey and tobacco, playing cards smeared with 50-cent doses of opium fanned across a backroom gambling table. Suggesting more than a whiff of danger, and emphasizing a lack of cleanliness, such descriptions hindered the ascent of Chinese food to middle-class respectability and reflected the sort of discrimination the Chinese people faced in America.

At Yee Wah Sen’s joint on South Basin Street, for instance, one observer judged that “the mob that congregates here can show more different types of humanity than you are likely to see anywhere else in the city,” a range that included “the toughest specimens of the underworld” alongside the “aristocrat” and respectable middleclass types. As far removed as we’ve become from a once-alive waterfront buzzing with foreign tongues, it’s hard for us to imagine the situation of the 24 Chinese crewmen aboard the Cartago, a United Fruit steamer, when it docked following a run from Havana in 1915. Because of the Exclusion Act, all Chinese sailors had to be physically described so they might be found and thrown out if they overstayed their welcome. Did Ching Loo, with his “scar above the right eyelid,” join his shipmate Chong Chee, with the “basket of flowers tattoo on his right arm,” for a taste of home in Hop Sing’s place at 1110 Canal Street, just happy to have once again avoided being torpedoed by a German U-boat?

One of the earliest attempts to transcend the back-alley reputation of the chop suey house came in 1921, when a group of businessmen from the Fou Loy shrimp business entered negotiations to rent the old Fabacher’s Rathskeller on St. Charles Avenue. Here, they hoped to build “the first elaborate Chinese restaurant New Orleans has ever had.” They eventually opened The Oriental in 1922 at 414 St. Charles Avenue, where they served standard New Orleans fare like shrimp Creole and prime rib alongside Chinese à la carte dishes.

This first foray into mainstream New Orleans dining lasted barely a year, but in time others would realize this dream.

Top: Worker raking shrimp on boards to dry in the sun Bottom: Chinese American Store

A Long-Lost Restaurant...

Takee Outee, Bourbon Street, New Orleans "After two or three or more late-night drinks, we’d hit this walk-up window for chicken-on-a-stick, shrimp tempura and egg rolls.

I can’t remember if the food was good, but it for sure satisfied our drunken need for food, any food, right this second."

- Rob, Marketing

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Another effort to open an elaborate Chinese restaurant across from the St. Charles Hotel came in 1938 in a venture backed by a group of Chinese businessmen that included none other than a young Lee Bing, the father of longtime Jefferson Parish Sheriff Harry Lee. The proposed restaurant never materialized, possibly because of the war (which was already well underway in China by 1938) but Bing managed to open his own restaurant with partner Bennie Wong at 409 Baronne Street in 1940. One can imagine Bing at the bar pouring Old Comiskey whiskey for lunch patrons in a smoke-filled dining room full of men in suits eating noodles. Eventually Bing and wife Yip Shee built the sprawling, pagoda-themed House of Lee in 1959 on prime real estate along a then two-lane Veterans Boulevard (at the approach to the recently completed Pontchartrain Causeway). For many New Orleanians today, the House of Lee brings back fond memories and was often their first experience with Chinese food. This was in part due to the notoriety of Harry Lee as well as the sheer size and longevity — 36 years — of the restaurant that bore his family’s name.

Lee Bing’s place on Baronne Street belonged to a second generation of Chinese restaurants that opened in the 1940s and ’50s, particularly on and around Bourbon Street. Towering over them was undoubtedly Gin’s Mee Hong, which opened at 739 Conti Street in 1949.

Gin’s served the familiar Cantonese hits that by that time had become very familiar to New Orleans diners, but rendered them, according to contemporary critics, with a degree of skill not equaled elsewhere. By the late 1940s, Chinese food had finally shed many of the negative associations that had burdened it a half century earlier, paving the way for further growth during the city’s prosperous oil boom days.

We tend to think of the time we’re living in now as the golden age of New Orleans dining, an understandable claim considering the quantity — and quality — of our currently booming restaurant scene. But more than one critic has suggested that, when it comes to Chinese cuisine, what was available in the 1960s and ’70s remains unmatched today. If the 1890s introduced Chinese food to Americans as exotic and a bit dangerous, and the 1940s heralded its entry into the mainstream, then the relative prosperity of the ’60s witnessed the advent of a mature Chinese gastronomy. The late, ever-acerbic Richard Collin, whose book The New Orleans Underground Gourmet and whose pioneering restaurant review column in the States-Item helped usher in a more critically aware era in the city’s food scene, reveled in the options available in those days. Collin lamented what he termed “tired old Cantonese restaurants” serving “food bland enough for children.” He encouraged the city’s diners to get adventurous.

“Eating only chop suey,” noted Collin, “is like

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 2 9

Critically acclaimed Red’s Chinese in the Bywater, know for serving up “Creole and Chinese fusion” dishes

If the past is indeed prologue, it may be that such evolution is key to the cuisine’s future in New Orleans at a moment when it seems to be entering its fourth generation of development.

eating only hot dogs and hamburgers in all of America.”

Among Collin’s favorites was Ding’s on Houma Boulevard in Metairie, famous for its Peking Duck, which he described as “one of the greatest dishes in any cuisine.” This dish too often has become a parody of its former self, but at the time a Peking Duck meant advanced planning, a careful daylong preparation and a skilled tableside carving.

Ding’s was also the first restaurant to bring Northern Chinese cooking to New Orleans.

Looking at a photocopy of their handlettered menu today not only transports the reader back in time, but fires the imagination with items like “Pork w. Pungent Sauce” and “Hun Chou Shrimp” listed in both English and Chinese characters. Likewise, Chef Andy Tsai of Dragon’s Garden, also in Metairie, introduced spicy Szechuan dishes to New Orleans in the early 1970s 3 0 J U LY • A U G U ST 2019

— things like kung pao chicken, a staple on takeout menus everywhere today but virtually absent from the local scene at the time.

Chinese dining flourished in the years before the 1980s oil bust decimated the local economy, hitting the restaurant scene on the West Bank and Eastern New Orleans particularly hard. Among the casualties was Peking in the now-defunct Kenilworth Mall in the East, whose fried dumplings and shrimp toast local radio personality Tom Fitzmorris recalls with great appreciation.

Likewise, Jade East opened in 1976, when there was optimism that development in the area might support an upscale restaurant.

Here appeared the first Hunan dishes in the city including Hunan lamb. Both places are long gone, and for people who have lived in New Orleans only 20 years, they are not even a memory.

While traditional Chinese fare might still be found today at places like Panda King in Gretna, Little Chinatown in Kenner, Royal China in Metairie or the North Shore’s Trey Yuen, and the long tradition of comforting takeout remains strong, the “Creole and Chinese fusion” dishes — like those being served at Red’s Chinese in the Bywater — are what seem to attract critical acclaim in our own era. If the past is indeed prologue, it may be that such evolution is key to the cuisine’s future in New Orleans at a moment when it seems to be entering its fourth generation of development.

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W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 31

The Chinese Cajun Cowboy

by David W. Brown

Decades before Harry Lee was sheriff of Jefferson Parish, he was a geology student at Louisiana State University. He and his family had worked tirelessly to get him there — he was the firstborn son of an immigrant from Toishan, in the South China province of Kwangtung — and he didn’t choose his major.

Rather, it was chosen for him. Times were different then, and his father wanted him to study geology, so that was that.

At a geology field camp, one of Lee’s professors pulled him aside and said, “You are leading this group, but you really shouldn’t be a geologist. This is not where you want to be.”

It was true. Harry Lee’s heart belonged to law. Regardless, after graduation, he did a stint in the U.S. Air Force, came home and took jobs in his family’s businesses.

“My grandfather came over just over a hundred years ago,” says Cynthia Lee Sheng, the Council At-Large for Jefferson Parish Division B, and Harry Lee’s daughter. “As best as I can tell, it was 1917, and he opened a Chinese laundry, which wasn’t unusual for the time.”

She says she thinks of it now as being very entrepreneurial, but back then it was likely out of necessity: “He had eight children to feed, and if you are an immigrant, you have got to make it happen for yourself — sell whatever you can, do whatever you can — to make ends meet.”

Her grandfather later opened a barroom, and then a restaurant.

In 1959, he opened the House of Lee restaurant on Veterans at Causeway. (At the time, that area was still largely swampland.)

Harry Lee helped his father run House of Lee. It was the family business, and that’s simply what you did.

“My father grew up with a mind-set where you work hard for your family to make ends meet,” says Councilwoman Lee Sheng. “All of the siblings had to work very hard in whatever business they were in. They lived closely together and they worked as a family. And that was his upbringing.”

He was larger than life — the sort of celebrity from a different era of Louisiana politics — and voters and the national press couldn’t get enough of him, this highly interesting Chinese sheriff in the Deep South who wore a cowboy hat and shot nutria with the SWAT team.

LAW SCHOOL Harry Lee had to convince his father to allow him to go to law school.

The family patriarch was reticent, and only after the future sheriff agreed to continue managing the restaurant while attending classes did his father come around. Had it not been for that impassioned argument (something that would serve the lawyer well), he might have simply managed the restaurant for the rest of his life. But the younger Lee was now standing on his own, and his career was set in motion.

He eventually earned his law degree, passed the bar exam and opened a small practice. By 1975, he was the chief attorney of Jefferson Parish, but much bigger things were ahead. In 1979, he threw his hat into the ring — in some ways literally — to be sheriff.

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The Lee family, 1979 photo provided by Lee Family

Cynthia was only 12 at the time, and she stayed home from school for what would be a day that changed her family’s life. Her father and his campaign advisors were talking in the family living room, trying to figure out their first campaign commercial. “My dad went into the bedroom,” she says, “and then he busted out — I can still hear the door open — and he had his cowboy hat in his hand, and asked, ‘What if I wear this?’” He put the hat on his head.

“I remember as a 12-year-old going, oh no. I was mortified. Please do not wear that.” But that’s who her father was. It was no show, no gimmick. He was a cowboy boot-wearing hunter and fisherman — a Louisiana boy. Deno Seder, his campaign advisor, understood this immediately and wanted to give the cowboy hat a shot.

For the commercial, the Lees walked on the levee behind their house and, when it aired, word of this “new sheriff in town” spread like wildfire, changing the course of the campaign.

“It hit the public in a strange and beautiful way,” says Cynthia.

“Here is this overweight Chinese man who looks completely natural with his cowboy hat on, and his boots, and it came across that this is who he was, and they took to it. It was so authentic, and the public loved it.”

The family would later hear from moms who said that, when their kids played in the front yard, with little cowboy hats on their heads and stars pinned to their shirts, they weren’t playing cowboy; they were playing Harry Lee.

SHERIFF LEE

In 2007, Lee was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia. His family wanted time Harry Lee went on to serve as sheriff of to process the news, and wanted him to Jefferson Parish for the next 28 years. He process the news in private. So his office was reelected six times by wide margins. He issued a press release that didn’t discuss was larger than life — the sort of celebrity the diagnosis, and that made Lee deeply from a different era of Louisiana politics — uncomfortable. It was like he was lying to and voters and the national press couldn’t the public. He couldn’t wait, and wasn’t get enough of him, this highly interesting interested in waiting, to find the right Chinese sheriff in the Deep South who course of treatment. He needed to tell the wore a cowboy hat and shot nutria with the public, and in the very next interview that SWAT team. came along, he revealed the bad hand he One of Lee’s strengths was his ability to had been dealt. work with and through many people. He was a natural at pairing people to bring Cynthia considers the last six months of out their combined best, and he built a Lee’s life to be among her most treasured large network of friends that grew of its memories of her father, because of the own volition — people helping people. lessons she learned from the example he Being sheriff doesn’t mean riding your set. She watched her father face mortality horse with a shotgun-wielding deputy by up close, and it was life-changing for your side — at least, not most days. A lot her. “He was so humble, so grateful for of it is just managing a bureaucracy with the incredible life he had lived. He never efficiency, so that your decisions can be thought he would have had a life like this.” turned into actions. And Harry Lee was a After he went public with his diagnosis, natural at that.

Jefferson Parish, in ways big and small, Sherrif Harry Lee In his daughter’s estimation, his greatest revealed how they felt about the man who collectible bobblehead success in Louisiana politics was demonhad served them for so many decades. strating how you can be completely successful by being yourself, Near the end of his life, Lee would walk into a restaurant, and and by being honest. “He didn’t know how to lie,” she says. “He everyone would break out into spontaneous applause. Cynthia says told the truth, and he was not going to live his life any other way. He it shocked him, that he couldn’t believe he had really lived this life. was not going to compromise who he was — and he was successful.”

“There was an understanding on his part that this was the end of his There’s so much discussion today about how a politician has to be life, but he wasn’t afraid or bitter that he didn’t get to live longer. He clever but, says Cynthia, “He didn’t have a clever bone in his body. was grateful for the 75 years that he had.”

Telling the truth was such a strong principle to him that he couldn’t do it any other way.”

THE NEXT GENERATION

BEHIND THE SHERIFF’S STAR Harry Lee’s achievements as a sheriff are well-known and practically written into the DNA of New Orleans. Less well-known is Lee as a father and husband to wife Lai. “Because he was a law enforcement man, people want to think he had a gruff exterior,” says Cynthia, “but he was really one of the warmest people that I’ve ever met.” She thinks that on some level people knew that, accounting for some of his popularity. Lee was self-deprecating, with a great physical sense of humor. He loved to make fun of himself, she says, and when he laughed, his laugh was like that of a child — from the gut, every fiber of his being seeming to go into that laugh.

He was a warmhearted father, who, despite being sheriff, gave his daughter a lot of slack to make her own mistakes. When she was a teenager, he sat her down and explained that over the next couple of years, she might make mistakes like doing drugs or getting into trouble, and that was OK, but she needed to understand that such things are bad for you. “I was shocked he took that approach,” says Cynthia. She says he had a realistic view of things, and understood that people have to live their own lives, needing only a light hand to stay the proper course. “And for that reason, I never got into trouble!” she says. “I think if he had been strict at home, I would have been more of a rebellious teenage girl.”

Later in life when Cynthia had children of her own, Lee’s soft side really came out. “There was complete joy on his face, and complete joy just being in the presence of his grandchildren.”

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Lee passed his love of public service on to his daughter. “When I was young, I went to D.C. and I went to all the monuments and read the

PF Changs "Yes, it’s a chain, but it’s one with local roots — cofounder Paul Fleming is from New Iberia, Louisiana, and went to both LSU and Loyola. My wife, Cindy, and I always get the Pad Thai, but sometimes we’ll order a hidden gem from their “secret menu.” It’s the Mongolian Trio with beef, chicken and shrimp served in a crazy-good sauce of smoked black pepper, sweet molasses, soy sauce and garlic. Can’t make it to P.F. Chang’s? Look for their entrées and appetizers in our Frozen Food cases."

- Tim, Marketing

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 3 3

Left: Portrait of former Jefferson Parish Sheriff Harry Lee•photo provided by Lee Family Right: Collectible Harry Lee magnets

He loved Carnival season, and every year he rode in parades and threw magnets bearing his likeness to the crowds. The annual Harry Lee magnets became popular collectibles, and still adorn area refrigerators to this day. words, and was so moved by this ideal of America and what it is and how it’s a nation of immigrants — that it’s a strength we have.”

She ended up working for the Immigration and Naturalization Service and, in 2009, she was elected to the 5th District seat on the Jefferson Parish Council. In 2015, she was elected to the Division B seat as Council At-Large. Today, she is running for Jefferson Parish president.

“I never would have thought I would be an elected official, ever. It’s nothing I thought I would ever have pursued. But I have this belief in our country that was rooted in watching my father in public service.”

Her father is still part of Jefferson Parish and the city of New Orleans. He loved Carnival season, and every year he rode in parades and threw magnets bearing his likeness to the crowds. The annual Harry

3 4 J U LY • A U G U ST 2019

Lee magnets became popular collectibles, and still adorn area refrigerators to this day.

And people still come up to Cynthia and say that, while they didn’t know him, they liked her father and voted for him. Her reply: “No, you knew him. He’s just like he was on TV. That person you saw and liked and thought he was? That really was him.”

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Chinese merchants and grocers in the early 1940s.

Life in the Chinese Delta

by Justin Nystrom

Imagine a century ago, a young Chinese couple aboard a freighter in the North Pacific, Guangdong Province far astern, steaming east in search of Gam Sahn, or “golden mountain,” a mythical place most of us would recognize as the American dream. A sheet of paper in the man’s pocket bears the address of an uncle in the Mississippi Delta; in the woman’s sits a photograph of parents she’ll never see again, while far away in Greenville, a man eagerly waits for the favorite nephew he last saw as a boy, ready to teach him the life of a crossroads grocer in this land of unfamiliar language and custom.

Thus the cycle of migration unfolded for the Chinese whose grocery stores once flourished in the Delta. The first of their kind 3 6 J U LY • A U G U ST 2019

appeared in the 1870s, a time when many plantations began closing their commissaries, creating an opportunity for small stores to serve the needs of the region’s black majority. By the 1920s, groceries had become the only occupation of the Delta’s Chinese, with family members joining their kin in the Delta and taking advantage of hui, or the pooled capital of relatives, to open their own nearby stores.

Blood ties renewed the Chinese community in the Delta throughout much of the 20th century, at first in the teens and ’20s, and again after World War II, when the U.S. finally eased immigration restrictions. Raymond Wong’s parents arrived in 1948, drawn by family members who had come to the region a generation before. A young veteran, Wong opened a grocery store in Drew with his wife. Frieda Quon, a retired librarian at Delta State University in Cleveland, was born in the Delta and grew up in the modest living quarters in back of the Min Sang Company grocery that her parents ran in Greenville. She remembered hearing how her then 18-year-old mother, who had grown up in New York, came with her Chinese-born father to the Delta in 1941 to join uncles in the grocery business.

The American-born children of Chinese families fondly remember growing up in a parallel universe, socializing almost exclusively amongst themselves. The adults would gather together at night to play “marathon” mahjong games while they played with other Chinese children. “We called everybody uncles and aunts,” remembered Luck Wing of his boyhood in a Jonestown grocery. “It took me a long time to find out that they were not really uncles and aunts.”

When not in school, the children worked in their parents’ stores yet, like Wing, they were seldom encouraged to follow into the family business. Instead, most went on to college and careers that took them far from home.

Because of this self-isolation, the non-Chinese residents of the Delta remained mostly unaware of the thriving food culture on display at Chinese family gatherings after closing time at the grocery. “When the Asians got together,” recalled Raymond Wong, “they always had something to bring.” Most kept coops, producing the key ingredient for pak cham kai, a poached chicken dish served at Chinese New Year.

Gardens yielded green stalks of bok choy and the dong gua, or “winter melon,” a fruit

By the 1920s, groceries had become the only occupation of the Delta’s Chinese, with family members joining their kin in the Delta and taking advantage of hui, or the pooled capital of relatives, to open their own nearby stores.

Students at the Cleveland Chinese Mission School, circa 1937 • photos provided by the Mississippi Delta Chinese Heritage Museum

native to Southern China that grew well in the Delta’s warm climate and was prized for making into winter melon soup.

This changed in 1968, when Raymond Wong’s father opened the first Chinese restaurant in Greenville, naming it How Joy, which translates loosely to “good luck.” And luck was important: There was no guarantee that the town was ready for moo goo gai pan, shrimp in lobster sauce and green pepper steak. Wong, who had first considered moving to Atlanta before deciding to make a go of things at home in Mississippi, soon learned that Greenville was “starved for something different.”

The number of Chinese living in the Delta peaked in the early 1970s, when a downward pivot in the local economy motivated many to seek their fortunes elsewhere. With adult children moved away and the growing economic challenges, a generation of aging Chinese grocers began closing the stores that had once sustained their communities. Today, one is hard-pressed to find any left, with long-time holdouts Min Sang in Greenville and Wong’s Foodland in Clarksdale both closing in 2018.

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The landscape may look different today, but the imprint of the Delta Chinese has not been forgotten. As early as 1987, Raymond Wong recognized how much had changed, motivating him to host a reunion of his countrymen at How Joy. “I told them... let’s have a party that is separate from a wedding and a funeral…where everybody gets together, just people that want to come home.” Many replied, “Oh, I’ve been to Mississippi; I grew up in Mississippi. I’ll never come back.” But Wong’s appeal proved persuasive, and the event drew over 600 attendees back to the Delta from homes in Houston or Los Angeles.

More recently, a colleague of Frieda Quon at Delta State, archivist Emily Jones, helped to start a foodways collection project called Delta Wok that is gathering family recipes from Chinese people with roots in the Delta. In 2017, the university hosted a reunion that attracted over 400 people who shared stories and photographs from their time in the region. The response reflects the deep affection the Chinese harbor for the memory of their Delta upbringing and the place where their grandparents once came in search of the Golden Mountain.

China Rose, Metairie "There are several good Chinese restaurants scattered throughout Metairie; my friends Jodi and Peter got engaged at their favorite, “Miss Shirleys” (Royal China), but this is the only one rumored to have a secret menu. There are exotic offerings like pork tripe with green peppers (or pickles), and soft tofu and pork intestines, but for me the draw is more nostalgic. They serve the same special soup at this Fat City location as they did at their original in Lakeview."

- Marcy, Marketing

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 37

S:7.625”

FOR BUTTER LOVERS,

FROM PLANTS. BLUEBERRY OAT MUFFINS WITH CINNAMON OAT CRUMBLE

MUFFINS:

DIRECTIONS

Preheat oven to 425º. Grease a 12-cup muffin pan.

Combine 1 cup oats and oat milk; let stand 20 minutes until liquid is partially absorbed.

Meanwhile, combine 1½ cups flour, 2 teaspoons cinnamon, baking powder, salt and baking soda in medium bowl.

In another bowl combine eggs, 2∕3 cup brown sugar and ½ cup melted Country Crock® Plant Butter (any variant).

Stir oat mixture and egg mixture into flour mixture until just combined.

Stir in blueberries.

Divide batter evenly between prepared muffin cups.

CRUMBLE: Combine ½ cup brown sugar, 1∕3 cup oats, 1∕3 cup flour and ½ teaspoon cinnamon. Stir in 4 tablespoons melted Country Crock® Plant Butter (any variant).

Using hands, press mixture together to form crumbs. Sprinkle over muffins before baking.

PREP TIME: 20 MINUTES

COOK TIME: 25 MINUTES

RECIPE SERVES: 4 SERVINGS

INGREDIENTS MUFFINS:

CRUMBLE:

1 CUP WHOLE ROLLED OATS (NOT INSTANT) 1 CUP OAT MILK

½ CUP PACKED LIGHT BROWN SUGAR

1½ CUPS ALL PURPOSE FLOUR

1∕3 CUP WHOLE ROLLED OATS

2 TSP. CINNAMON

1∕3 CUP ALL PURPOSE FLOUR

1¼ TSP. BAKING POWDER

½ TSP. CINNAMON

2 LARGE EGGS

4 TBSP. COUNTRY CROCK® PLANT BUTTER (ANY VARIANT), MELTED

2∕3 CUP PACKED LIGHT BROWN SUGAR ½ CUP COUNTRY CROCK® PLANT BUTTER (ANY VARIANT), MELTED 1½ CUPS BLUEBERRIES ©2019 Upfield AWG19023

Bake 5 minutes. Keeping muffins in oven, reduce oven temperature to 350º and continue baking for an additional 20 minutes or until muffins are baked through.

Cool in pan 5 minutes. Run a sharp knife around muffin edges and transfer to wire rack to cool.

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on any ONE (1) Country Crock® Plant Butter (10.5 oz. tub or 16 oz. stick) product.

Consumer: LIMIT ONE (1) COUPON PER PURCHASE on product/quantity specified and MAXIMUM OF TWO (2) IDENTICAL COUPONS allowed in same shopping trip. Void if reproduced, transferred, used to purchase products for resale or where prohibited/regulated by law. Coupon value may not exceed value of item purchased. NO CASH BACK. Consumer pays sales tax. Redeemable at participating retail stores. Valid only in the U.S. NOT VALID IN PUERTO RICO. Retailer: Upfield.

1370, NCH Marketing Services, P.O. Box 880001, El Paso, TX 88588-0001, will reimburse the face value of this coupon, plus 8¢, if submitted in compliance with our redemption policy, available upon request. Cash value 1/100th of 1¢. Any use of this coupon not specified herein constitutes fraud. ©2019 Upfield AWG19023

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ON ANY ONE FIORA® 6-Pack Paper Towels

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Invoices proving purchases of sufficient stock to cover presented coupons must be shown on request. Any other application may constitute fraud. Coupon void where prohibited, taxed or restricted. Consumer must pay any sales tax. Cash value .001¢. Reproduction of this coupon is expressly prohibited. Mail to: Solaris Paper, Inc. Inmar Dept. #10326 One Fawcett Drive, Del Rio, TX 78840

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WITH PURCHASE OF (1) NEW ZATARAIN’S SAUSAGE AND ANY (1) ZATARAIN’S RICE MIX

ZATARAIN’S RICE & SAUSAGE

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Zatarain’s and associated marks and logos are trademarks of McCormick & Company, Incorporated, licensed to Bar-S Foods Co. ©2019. CONSUMER: Limit one coupon per purchase. DO NOT DOUBLE. Redeem only by purchasing the product brand indicated. May not be reproduced. Void if transferred to any person, firm, or group prior to store redemption. You pay any sales tax. Any other use constitutes fraud. RETAILER: Bar-S Foods Co. will reimburse you the face value of the coupon plus 8¢ handling if submitted in compliance with our Coupon Redemption Policy (available at www.bar-sfoods.com). Coupons not properly redeemed will be voided. Void where prohibited. Send to: Bar-S Foods Co. 438, NCH Marketing Services, P.O. Box 880001, El Paso, TX 88588-0001.

Kanpai! (Cheers!)

by Wayne Curtis The 16 pot stills that produce whisky at the cavernous Suntory Yamazaki distillery, not far from Osaka, have one thing in common: They’re all made of copper.

Otherwise, the place looks like a tag sale. Some stills are larger than others; some have bulbous attachments at the top, others don’t. They each have a funnel-like copper attachment that extends upward — it’s called a swan’s neck, and it determines the flow and content of the alcohol vapors — yet these are of varying widths, and they all bend at varying angles.

This randomness at first seems strange. Modern distilling is about streamlining and efficiency, of producing a consistent product with consistent equipment. Macallan, the Scottish whisky maker, last year opened a $186 million, state-of-the-art scotch distillery with 36 massive and largely identical stills. Patrón tequila in Mexico has a similar operation.

Yet the Yamazaki distillery appears willfully inefficient. It’s as if, in the age of the assembly line, they’ve opted to hire individual craftsman to hand-tool their products.

Which is exactly the point, says Mike Miyamoto, Suntory’s global brand ambassador. Japanese whisky, he says, reflects Japanese craftsmanship.

Japanese whisky took root in the late 19th century. But in American markets it’s been mostly a curiosity until the last two decades. It made a splash in 2001, when Nikka’s 10-Year-Old Single Cask Yoichi was named “best of the best” by Whisky Magazine. In 2003, the movie Lost in Translation was released; it won an Academy Award for its screenplay, and it drew attention to Japanese whisky — thanks to the Bill Murray character who, in the film’s story line, is hired to make whisky ads. Further recognition of Japanese whisky followed, including Suntory’s Yamazaki Single Malt Sherry Cask 2013 being named world’s best whisky by the Whisky Bible in 2015.

Sensibly, American (and European) consumers have started to pay attention. Exports of Japanese whisky to the United States surged 1,000 percent over one five-year period. And in recent years, consumer demand has led to shortages of the most soughtafter, long-aged expressions. The mania for Japanese whisky — and subsequent shortages — is not unlike what’s happened with high-end bourbons in recent years.

The two biggest producers of Japanese whiskies are Suntory (which makes Suntory Whisky Toki, Hakushu, Hibiki and Yamazaki whiskies), and Nikka (which makes Nikka from the Barrel, Yoichi, Miyagikyo and Taketsuru).

While the two are fiercely competitive, they share a common origin, which dates back to the 1920s.

Japanese whisky began, improbably enough, with port wine. A young pharmaceutical salesman named Shinjiro Torii saw that Japan was developing a fascination with all things Western (music, fashion, architecture), and he chose to produce his own port, a European specialty. It was a hit; not long after he turned his attention to whisky, and in 1923 built a distillery

4 2 J U LY • A U G U ST 2019

in the town of Yamazaki, drawn in part by the abundant and tasty local spring water.

Shinjiro hired a young distiller named Masataka Taketsuru, who had spent considerable time in Scotland learning the art of whiskymaking from masters at famed distilleries. Masataka opted to make a Scottish-style whisky, using barley malt imported from Scotland (and embracing the spelling of whisky without an “e”). Scotch is the closest cousin to Japanese whisky, and may seem only distantly related to American rye or bourbon.

Over time, Shinjiro and his distiller Masataka diverged in their vision for Japanese whisky. Masataka preferred to adhere to the approach he learned in Scotland, and pushed for a smokier, denser flavor. Shinjiro didn’t think the Japanese market was ready for that, preferring a lighter, cleaner whisky. The two eventually parted ways, and Masataka established his own distillery that eventually became Nikka.

The craftsmanship behind Japanese whisky is most evident in the stillhouse. The shape and size of a still has a lot of influence on the taste of the spirit that emerges from it. A swan’s neck with a sharper angle will block some of the heavier flavors from passing through; those with a flatter profile tend to result in a more full-bodied distillate.

Suntory wants both flavors — essentially creating a broad palette from which a master blender can craft richer, more complicated flavors.

Further increasing depth of flavor, Suntory opts to age a small percentage of its spirit in rarer, more expensive casks made of Japanese mizunara oak. The mizunara casks bring a subtle spiciness to the whisky, with a rye-like tang and an ethereal taste that’s been aptly described as “Japanese incense.”

Suntory is the largest producer of whisky in Japan and has about a million barrels aging in its warehouses. Most of these are used bourbon barrels made of American oak. But in addition to the mizunara oak and the bourbon barrels, Suntory also ages some whisky in casks that formerly held Spanish sherry, adding a deeper flavor that some compare to raisins — and mimicking an approach long taken in Scotland. Yet Suntory diverges from Scotland in that it employs a modern, steel-rack storage system, which allows easier access — making it easier to select and blend individual barrels for just the right flavor profile. It’s like using a small watercolor brush rather than a wide house-painting brush.

Whisky highball with soda water

Shelves lined with Japanese whisky photo provided by Yamazaki distillery

Japanese whisky appeals to those who prefer the lighter, less smoky scotches. Suntory’s Toki whisky makes for a good entrylevel Japanese whisky — it’s lighter and has an appealing touch of fruitiness as well. The Hibiki and Hakushu bottlings — as well as most Nikka whiskies — are denser with flavor, more like a long-aged scotch.

Like they do with scotch, aficionados of Japanese whisky often sip the long-aged product neat, or with an ice cube or two. Until recently, Japanese marketing campaigns encouraged consumers to enjoy Hibiki and other fine whiskey in highballs — that is, to mix it with a little club soda and serve it on ice. Highballs may well be the national cocktail of Japan — bars have machines that dole them out quickly, chilled and mixed in perfect proportions. Pre-mixed highballs are widely sold in cans throughout Japan, and you can see salarymen sipping them in bars and on commuter trains.

As demand for aged whisky has swelled and supplies have diminished, consumers have been switching to lighter, easier-to-find whiskies, such as Suntory Whisky Toki, in their highballs. “Toki can work with any style of drink,” says brand ambassador Miyamoto, “but especially in highballs.”

Japanese whisky has a koan-like quality: It’s new. Also, it’s old.

That is, it’s relatively new to the American market, but has been made for nearly a century. It was inspired by scotch, but over time has taken the traditional approaches of the West and added elements of the East, resulting in a product that offers the best of two worlds.

Those who enjoy sampling a range of whiskey — scotch from the Highlands, Speyside and Islay; bourbon from Kentucky and beyond — have a new adventure awaiting.

ROUSES

Rouses Market, Gulf Coast "Our Hawaiian Poke (pronounced POH-keh) is essentially a build-your-own Hawaiian sushi bowl that starts with sushi rice or greens as a base. You can add already-marinated chunks of raw fish and/ or fully cooked shrimp and snow crab; seaweed and cucumber salad; and toppings and sauces inspired by Hawaiian and Japanese flavors. My wife and I visited Hawaii in 2013 for our fifth anniversary. Of course we ate poke. I also dragged her to the very romantic fish market on the Big Island so I could bid on some opah (moonfish) for Rouses. (Despite that, we’re still married.) We had it shipped directly to the stores."

- James, Fresh Foods

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 4 3

SUSHI SPREAD photo by Romney Caruso

The sushi we eat today is vastly different from the barrel-fermented fish and rice known as nare-sushi, or narezushi. That version originated in Southeast Asia as early as the 3rd to 5th century B.C. as a practical means of preserving fish. The Buddhist dietary practice of abstaining from meat helped sushi extend to Japan, as people turned to fish in place of meat. Sushi-making techniques, including the use of cooked rice dressed with rice vinegar, sugar and salt — to make it savory, or umami — continued to evolve. (Umami, pronounced, oo-MOM-ee, is known as the fifth taste.) Thanks to advances in refrigeration, the dish we recognize today as sushi was eventually developed.

4 4 J U LY • A U G U ST 2019

The California Roll

For most of us, a California roll — an insideout roll combining cucumber, avocado, and crabmeat or imitation crab — was our first introduction to sushi. The roll is the brainchild of Japanese-born chef Hidekazu Tojo, who noticed customers at his Vancouver restaurant were squeamish about the seaweed used to wrap traditional Japanese rolls.

The Philadelphia Roll

Madame Saito, owner of Tokio HeadHouse in Philadelphia and self-proclaimed “Queen of Sushi,” invented the Philadelphia Roll, or Philly Roll, which is made with smoked salmon and — what else? — cream cheese.

ROUSES

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 4 5

Sake

→ Sashimi ← Slices of raw fresh fish; no rice. → Nigiri ← Slice of raw fish over pressed vinegared rice. → Makizushi or Maki ← Sushi rolls; fish & raw vegetables encircled in rice wrapped in nori (seaweed). → Uramaki ← Inside-out sushi; fish wrapped by seaweed, with rice wrapped around the outside of the roll. → Sushi ← The Japanese word for sour rice, the vinegar-dressed rice used to make nigiri, maki and uramaki. → Wasabi ← That spicy green paste is actually Japanese horseradish.

Sake, like sushi, is central to the culture of Japan. No other drink, besides green tea, is as closely associated with the country.

Ready to sip? Sake is typically served in a tall bottle called a tokkuri and drunk from a sakazuki, a small porcelain cup.

Although in America we usually drink sake warm or hot, certain sakes are served cold.

More than 100 professional sushi chefs work inside our markets around the Gulf Coast.

Our sushi chef Dan Nawang handcrafted the sushi you see on these pages.

4 6 J U LY • A U G U ST 2019

photo by Romney Caruso

Japanese Sake & Beer

In Japan, what most of the world calls sake is known as nihonshu (in Japanese, the word sake refers to all alcoholic drinks). Here in the United States, sake is usually referred to as rice wine. But its production actually has more in common with beer. Both begin by fermenting grain — in the case of sake, rice that has been polished down to its starchy inner core. After a thorough washing and steaming, it is inoculated with a mold enzyme, Aspergillus oryzae (known in Japan as koji), to convert the starch to fermentable sugars. (Koji also creates the umami flavors in miso and soy sauce). Sake yeast and water are added bit by bit over a series of days, allowing the sugar to slowly ferment. The result is a brew called moromi that, when ready, is pressed and racked to make sake, and then bottled.

Beer has been made in Japan since the 19th century. We stock some of the country’s most acclaimed and best-selling beers, including Kirin, Asahi and Sapporo, the oldest brand of beer in Japan. We also carry the Chinese beer Tsingtao, which is the second best-selling beer in the world. Selections vary by location.

Ramen vs. Pho

Ramen is a Japanese noodle soup dish served customarily in a rich, aromatic broth along with meat, vegetables and a soft-boiled egg.

Sounds a lot like Vietnamese pho? Actually, no. Pho is served with rice noodles, while ramen’s noodles are wheat-based. The chief difference between the two, however, is the broth. Pho is made with a light chicken or beef broth, which can be seasoned tableside, and is usually served with bean sprouts, lime and cilantro. Thin slices of raw meats can be added to pho right at your table, and cooked in that tasty broth base. Meanwhile, ramen’s broth is categorized first by its heaviness: kotteri (rich) or assari (light), and then by its base: pork, chicken, beef or fresh fish. Ramen varieties are further differentiated by their seasonings, and by such possible ingredients as charred onions, garlic, ginger, fresh scallions and mushrooms. Both dishes are experiencing a renaissance right now, as chefs around the world take what were once staples for feeding workers inexpensively and fusing them with new ingredients and styles of cuisine.

Top: Japanese ramen Bottom: Vietnamese pho

Mochi

These squishy, Japanese-style, bite-sized ice cream balls are wrapped in sweet, spongy rice dough. Look for self-service mochi bars in most of our stores.

Dinners and Tastings Join us for a five-course Asian spirits dinner featuring Gekkeikan sake, Roku Gin and Toki Whiskey paired with creations by Rouses own Chef Sally and our professional sushi chefs. July 10th at Rouses Market, 14635 Airline Hwy. in Gonzales and July 11th at Rouses Market, 4500 Tchoupitoulas in New Orleans. For more information visit www.rouses.com/in-store/events.​ We will also be sampling Kirin beer at select stores.

ROUSES

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 47

Funk on da Table

by Michael Tisserand When the future arrived for June Yamagishi, it appeared as a recording of Japanese pop star Chiemi Eri singing “It’s Only a Paper Moon.”

Yamagishi grew up in the city of Ise in Mie Prefecture, Japan. Ise, a coastal city on the tip of Kii Peninsula, is home to the most sacred Shinto shrine in the country. It’s also known for the prized Ise lobster, which is served in a variety of ways, including in ice cream.

But what Ise didn’t have during Yamagishi’s childhood in the mid-1950s was live music clubs.

His aunt’s record albums, Yamagishi says, “were the first encounter with music in my life.” These also included the Japanese version of the Fats Domino classic “My Blue Heaven” that was a national hit for the singing comedian Ken’ichi Enomoto. Yamagishi also grew up hearing a popular Japanese version of “When the Saints Go Marching In.” By the time he was 10 or 11, he’d heard enough to inspire him to pick up his first electric guitar. “I fell in love with its sound and the look of it,” he says, and soon he was working out Beatles and Ventures tunes.

By the early 1970s, Yamagishi was gigging nightly in Kyoto and playing in one of Japan’s first blues combos. It’s tempting to regard the title of Yamagishi’s first solo recording during this time — “Really?!” — as his response to anyone doubting that a musician from Japan could play the blues so well. But spend any time with Yamagishi, and it quickly becomes clear that such a confrontation wouldn’t be Yamagishi’s style. “Music is music,” he’s fond of saying, before letting his guitar carry on the rest of the conversation.

Yamagishi was in his early 20s when he first toured the United States, and he later came to New Orleans, he would tell Japan Times magazine, because he wanted to see the Mardi Gras Indians. Music critic John Swenson wrote of the journey: “His move to New Orleans in search of a higher level of musical enlightenment was something like British guitarist Eric Clapton’s decision, at the high point of his popularity with the supergroups Cream and Blind Faith, to become a sideman in the American blues and R&B band of Delaney and Bonnie.”

“June is of the moment,” Gros says. “Don’t ask him about yesterday; he’ll tell you, ‘I don’t know, I can’t remember.’ Don’t ask him about tomorrow: ‘Well, I don’t know, can you ask me tomorrow?’ But when I see him he’s excited to see me like the first time I met him in 2000."

Yamagishi doesn’t put his arrival in New Orleans in terms of musical enlightenment, however. “Wow, this is it,” is what he remembered thinking.

In New Orleans, Yamagishi quickly became a fixture on late-night stages in local clubs such as the Maple Leaf Bar, Tipitina’s and the Old Point Bar in Algiers Point. There, often draped in a large tie-dye shirt, he’d hunch over his guitar to lay down funk rhythms and then, his long black hair either loosely tied back in a ponytail or freely falling around his head, he’d lean back to break into the kinds of solos that have earned him acclaim as one of the city’s top funk

4 8 J U LY • A U G U ST 2019

Japanese guitarist June Yamagishi at Jazz Fest photo by Ryan Hodgson-Rigsbee

guitarists. Musicians from Dr. John to George Porter, Jr., to Erica Falls have wanted Yamagishi at their sides. The Japanese guitarist attracted to New Orleans to hear the Mardi Gras Indian would become a member of The Wild Magnolias’ band.

But it was a late-night meeting at the Maple Leaf Bar with New Orleans native John Gros that would lead to one of Yamagishi’s most enduring friendships, deepening the musical alliance between Japan and New Orleans in unexpected ways. By this time, Gros had earned his own reputation as a top New Orleans funk and rhythm & blues keyboardist, including as a member of George Porter, Jr.’s band, and was looking to start a regular jam session. Out of this desire came the long-running band Papa Grows Funk, with Yamagishi front and center.

It started with two musicians from worlds apart, speaking English in different accents and working very hard to understand each other.

Says Gros: “My first impression was, ‘He’s kind of wild-looking but man can he play guitar!’ I remember thinking that he was pretty cool and easy to talk to once I could figure out what he was saying.”

From there, a tight musical kinship quickly formed.

“June is of the moment,” Gros says. “Don’t ask him about yesterday; he’ll tell you, ‘I don’t know, I can’t remember.’ Don’t ask him about tomorrow: ‘Well, I don’t know, can you ask me tomorrow?’ But when I see him he’s excited to see me like the first time I met him in 2000.

“He processes life through his feelings. If you ask him for his opinion, he doesn’t say, ‘I think,’ he says, ‘I feel this way or that way.’

His playing is exactly the same. It’s alive. He will never play anything the same way twice. He is constantly evolving and wants to know how you are evolving. So when we play together the goal is to see how our life journeys cross paths on the stage.”

Growing up in New Orleans, Gros admits, his primary exposure to Japanese life and culture was identifying Japan as the home of the bad guys in movies and television shows like Baa Baa Black

New Orleans funk, rock, blues and jazz musician John ”Papa” Gros photo by Zack Smith

Sheep. “Having June in my life opened a door I am so blessed to have walked through,” he now says. This doorway has led to multiple tours in Japan. At first, Gros says, he felt like he was on a different planet, a place where even finding a tube of toothpaste became a mysterious expedition. “Being a big American guy, there was nowhere to hide my ignorance,” he says. He’s grown to love Japanese culture and food, and to find cultural similarities in the most casual moments.

“One thing that reminds me of my Louisiana upbringing is June and his friends sitting around the dinner table after a great meal telling stories, laughing and carrying on for hours,” Gros says. “And it won’t be long before we talk about the next meal!”

When a massive earthquake and tsunami hit Japan in 2011, Gros dug deep into the lessons he learned from his friendship with Yamagishi — as well as into his own Louisiana roots — to find the right way to help. A “Jammin’ for Japan” fundraiser brought together local musicians ranging from Kermit Ruffins to Jeremy Davenport to Bonerama, and by the end of a Sunday afternoon of music, $50,000 had been raised. “That money went directly to fishermen to rebuild and replace their boats so they get back to their livelihoods,” Gros says.

Last year, yet another new project for Gros and Yamagishi took Yamagishi’s musical journey full circle. During Yamagishi’s early years playing in Japan, he performed with drummer Johnny Yoshinaga and vocalist Mari Kaneko. That couple’s son, KenKen, became an enormously popular alt-metal musician in Japan, and he’s now collaborating with Yamagishi, Gros and drummer Nikki Glaspie in a New Orleans-style funk band called Funk on Da Table.

After playing a series of dates in Japan (including Mardi Gras in Tokyo) the band brought it all back home to New Orleans.

“With his long, dark hair, tattoos and top hat, KenKen’s image recalls early Alice Cooper crossed with Slash,” music critic Keith

ROUSES

Spera wrote in the New Orleans Advocate. For his part, Yamagishi offers a typical response when asked about playing music with the next generation: “Age or generations never occur to me as anything special. Musicians are musicians.”

The band released a live album of its show at Tipitina’s, which also included a recording of an extended song performed in Tokyo. This long, multilayered jam opens with Yamagishi’s ethereal, solo-guitar evocation of the Mardi Gras Indian anthem “Indian Red.” As his fingers work the strings, he calls forth a unique musical journey that is still reaching to find new turns, new improvisations.

The title of the song? “June’s Spirit.”

The Japanese Satchmo Trumpeter Yoshio Toyama and his wife, Keiko, a banjo player, were so inspired after seeing Louis Armstrong perform in Kyoto, Japan and going backstage after the show, that they moved to New Orleans to study jazz. They would stay for several years before settling back home in Japan. Toyama was a great musician in his own right. But it was his perfect impersonation of Armstrong’s gravelly singing voice and distinctive playing style that earned him the nickname "the Japanese Satchmo." ​

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 4 9

100% BUTTERY TASTE

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*0 calories when limited to 5 sprays, 1 spray = 1 serving

BUTTERY GRILLED CORN RECIPE SERVES: 4 SERVINGS

PREP TIME: 5 MINUTES

COOK TIME: 8 MINUTES

INGREDIENTS: 4 ears corn-on-the-cob, husked 20 sprays I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!® Original Butter Spray

DIRECTIONS: Evenly spray corn with 10 sprays of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!® Original Spray. Grill, turning frequently, 8 minutes or until corn is tender. Spray with remaining 10 sprays. Top with pepper or your favorite cheese to taste.

MANUFACTURER’S COUPON

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DO NOT DOUBLE

SAVE $1.00

on any ONE (1) I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!® product.

©2019 Upfield AWG19023

Consumer: LIMIT ONE (1) COUPON PER PURCHASE on product/quantity specified and MAXIMUM OF TWO (2) IDENTICAL COUPONS allowed in same shopping trip. Void if reproduced, transferred, used to purchase products for resale or where prohibited/regulated by law. Coupon value may not exceed value of item purchased. NO CASH BACK. Consumer pays sales tax. Redeemable at participating retail stores. Valid only in the U.S. NOT VALID IN PUERTO RICO. Retailer: Upfield.

1370, NCH Marketing Services, P.O. Box 880001, El Paso, TX 88588-0001, will reimburse the face value of this coupon, plus 8¢, if submitted in compliance with our redemption policy, available upon request. Cash value 1/100th of 1¢. Any use of this coupon not specified herein constitutes fraud. ©2019 Upfield AWG19023

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My/Mo is a miraculous match of magnificent mochi dough with marvelously mouthwatering ice cream. These mind-blowing mouthfuls come from master mochi makers who methodically mix and meld the mushy mochi with milky, melty ice cream.

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Curry Favor

by Sarah Baird

In our increasingly interconnected world, the spread of concepts and products across time zones and continents has become more commonplace than ever. In 1997, sociologist Roland Robertson described a by-product of this intricate global web as “glocalization” — a fun-to-say portmanteau of “global” and “localization” that refers to particular cultural touchstones that are characterized by both local and global considerations.

Sound complicated? It’s not, really. Take McDonald’s. In the United States, a Mickey D’s menu without a Big Mac or Quarter Pounder listed would be bizarre; after all, hamburgers are foundational grab-and-go foods for Americans. But when McDonald’s entered the Indian market in 1996, it created a menu that looked quite different due to the fact that cows are sacred in Hindu tradition.

Instead, there’s the McAloo Tikki, a toasted bun with a samosaspiced veggie patty made from potatoes and peas, and the Chicken Maharaja Mac — a Big Mac riff that uses chicken or vegetarian patties instead of traditional beef.

The menu swaps continue the world over. Headed to China?

Look for Fried Taro Pies — not apple — on the menu. And in Korea, the Bulgogi Burger speaks directly to a nationwide culinary staple reworked in burger form. McDonald’s, a global phenomenon, has customized its cuisine to reflect local taste in all of these instances and, in turn, has become a classic case study for glocalization.

The original “glocal” cuisine, though, is curry. Due to expansive trade networks and colonization throughout the 18th and 19th centuries by Portugal and Great Britain, curries traveled from India alongside tradesmen, slaves and servants across the seas. Today, country-specific curries of every flavor, color and texture can be found from the Caribbean to Fiji, each with Indian roots but its own local mark.

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But what, exactly, is a curry? It’s not a word that appears in any of India’s numerous recognized national languages. How, then, has it become so synonymous with a country’s cuisine?

“A lot has been written about the word ‘curry’ and whether it was actually an Indian word in the first place, or invented by the English,” writes chef Camellia Panjabi in her 1994 book, 50 Great Curries of India. “The Tamils…have the word kaari in their language. The Brahmins of Tamil Nadu, who are strict vegetarians, mean by kaari a vegetable dish cooked with spices and a dash of coconut. When the non-vegetarian communities of Tamil Nadu use the word kaari, it literally means meat, which they pronounce with more emphasis on the end of the word as in kaaree. The origin of the word curry seems to be a meat or vegetable dish to be eaten with rice, which is considered to be the main dish of the meal.”

And while language experts love to debate the somewhat vague and meandering history of the word, it’s fairly widely agreed upon that kaari was morphed into the word “carel” by Portuguese merchants in the 1600s, which was then fumbled again by European tongues when the British arrived and made it into, yes, “curry.”

Today, the term “curry” is most widely accepted as any sort of wet dish — an entrée with sauce or gravy, spiced or not — that incorporates techniques or tastes associated with India. Anglo-style curries are a source of national culinary pride for the British, with over 8,000 “curry houses” across the country and an incorporation into everyday cuisine that ranges back to 1747, when the first recipe for a curry appeared in Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Plain and Easy. For the next 200 years, you’d be hard-pressed to find a British cookbook without a curry recipe (or six) included, with Indian food now so deeply enmeshed in the culture that former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook described chicken tikka masala — a type of curry — as a “true British national dish.”

Thai Coconut Curry with Shrimp, Coconut Red Curry and Green Curry with Tofu•recipes follow on page 57• photo by Romney Caruso

“One of the most remarkable developments in the history of gastronomy has been the emergence of curry as an archetypal British dish. It used to be axiomatic to equate British food with blandness, but ‘going out for a curry’, the hotter the better, has become a way of life for many urban Britons,” writes Colleen Taylor Sen in her 2009 book, Curry: A Global History.

Curry’s ubiquity has also often found its way into British pop culture, from William Thackeray’s 1847 novel Vanity Fair to the classic scene from the 2001 film Bridget Jones’s Diary, in which Renée Zellweger’s character groans over her mother’s extremely specific, signature British-Indian hybrid dish: “It all began on New Year’s Day, in my 32nd year of being single. Once again, I found myself on my own and going to my mother’s annual turkey curry buffet. Every year she tries to fix me up with some bushy-haired, middle-aged bore, and I feared this year would be no exception.”

But outside of the largely Anglicized version of curries that the British — and by proxy, Americans — are most familiar with, how else has curry been incorporated into the culinary landscape across the world? Below are several sweepingly diverse ways in which curry has become “glocalized” — spanning oceans, centuries and deliciously diverse tastes.

BUT FIRST: WHAT’S THE DEAL WITH CURRY POWDER?

If we know that India doesn’t technically have any dishes that are called “curry,” per se, and we know that spice mixes in India are actually called “masalas” — then where on Earth did curry powder’s ubiquity come from? Once again, Europeans.

“What you don’t need is curry powder,” writes America’s matriarch of Indian cuisine, Madhur Jaffrey, in her 1973 book, An Invitation to Indian Cooking. “To me the word ‘curry’ is as degrading to India’s ROUSES

great cuisine as the term ‘chop suey’ was to China’s. ‘Curry’ is just a vague, inaccurate word which the world has picked up from the British, who, in turn, got it mistakenly from us. If ‘curry’ is an oversimplified name for an ancient cuisine, then ‘curry powder’ attempts to oversimplify (and destroy) the cuisine itself.”

Speaking of Indian food in any sort of all-encompassing, generalized way is a wildly inaccurate means of discussing a many-splendored country — with an equally varied and regionally specific cuisine — that’s so hulkingly large it’s actually a subcontinent.

(Imagine the utter outrage that would ensue if someone insinuated that the cuisine of North Dakota and Louisiana were the same.

Exactly.) The dishes that eventually would all be lumped under the heading “curry” are dishes with a rainbow of regional specificities and tastes. There’s doi maachi, a fish and yogurt curry specific to Bengal; kofta, a meatball curry; nalli korma, a lamb curry flavored with cardamom and saffron from the Lucknow region; and rogan josh, a curry consisting of mutton or lamb cooked in yogurt with ample red chiles, just to name a few.

But when these spice-laden, complex dishes sparked a national craze (and craving) across England in the late 18th century, there was just one problem: Spices were wildly expensive, and the majority of Britons couldn’t afford to buy each ingredient on its own.

In response, companies began creating spice mixes they dubbed “curry powders” which were marketed as a catchall spice blend for Indian cuisine.

And while commercial curry powders — then and now — certainly don’t reflect the actual flavorings of India’s diverse, sauce-based regional dishes, they have lent themselves to helping create different versions of curry all their own across the world.

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Curries of theWorld TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO: TRINI-STYLE CURRY Over 40 percent of Trinidadians are of Indian origin, having moved to the country while working, predominantly, as indentured servants after slavery was outlawed across the British Empire in 1833. “‘My great-grandparents moved to Trinidad from India, and Indians ask me, ‘How come you guys make the same thing we make but cook it different?’” Trini food scholar Dolly Sirju told The New York Times in 2015. “For me, India is totally different from Trinidad.

I’m not fascinated by it. What we do is take a little from each culture — Indian, African, Caribbean, Chinese — and that makes it Trini.’’

Perhaps the most noticeably “Trini” element of this highly specific curry is the use of a local herb known as shado beni (which grows wild across the island) as a flavor foundation for the dish. With a taste similar to cilantro or coriander, it is combined with parsley and garlic to make “green seasoning” — a slurry that finds its way into practically all Trini-style curries. (You can even buy it mass-produced and bottled in stores.) The integration of Scotch bonnet peppers, too, reflects the islands’ bounty — albeit with a fierier side.

INDONESIAN CURRY: GULAI

Cambodian Amok

CAMBODIAN CURRY: AMOK (PICTURED) Considered by many to be the national dish of Cambodia, amok is a fish-based, lemongrass- and kaffir-lime-flavored curry served in an elegant, traditional manner: presented in a banana leaf. The coconut milk-based sauce is steamed alongside flaky white fish inside the banana leaf until a creamy, custard-like texture is unlocked.

GERMAN CURRY: CURRYWURST

A dish of Sumatran origin and Indian influence via Dutch tradesmen, gulai is an Indonesian curry centered around a thick, savorymeets-spicy yellow sauce, which gets a great deal of its color (and flavor) from a spice mix known as serundeng: grated coconut fried with onion, palm sugar, galangal (a member of the ginger family), turmeric, coriander and bay leaf. With gulai, it’s all about the sauce, so any meat or vegetable component is fair game: gulai telur ikan is gulai made with fish eggs, while gulai limpa finds cattle spleen taking center stage in the dish. A popular vegetarian version spotlights unripened jackfruit, which grows abundantly across the country.

Currywurst isn’t technically a curry (there’s no gravy or rice, of course) but it is a curious example of curry — via Britain’s intervention and the creation of curry powder — as a glocalized cuisine. This wildly popular street food is made by cutting bratwurst into chunks (this is Germany, after all) then slathering it with a slurry of ketchup and curry powder. Almost a billion currywursts are eaten across the country each year, and from 2009 until its recent closure, the dish even had its own museum: the Deutsches Currywurst Museum in Berlin.

If you’re ready to branch out from the currywurst family tree and you’re up for a real one-two punch of pungency, curried herring (yes, really) is a popular snack across Scandinavia.

JAPANESE CURRY: KARE RAISU

SOUTH AFRICAN CURRY: BUNNY CHOW

While thoughts might more naturally turn towards ramen or miso soup when visualizing the beloved, slurp-worthy national dishes of Japan, it would be remiss to leave out a comfort food classic that has become ubiquitous across the country: kare raisu, or “curry rice.” Introduced to Japan via Anglo-Indian officers of the British Royal Navy in the latter half of the 19th century, the Japanese adapted this highly Westernized version of curry by making the sauce like a roux — combining curry powder, potatoes, carrots and onions into a smooth slurry, then combining that mixture with a meat (typically beef), to be served over a bed of white rice and topped with pickles. Today, it is everywhere.

Seriously. It’s been the most popular school lunch dish for Japanese children for over 30 years. Kare raisu has been served aboard the International Space Station. A Japanese superhero named “Kare Pan Man” has a head that’s made out of curry-stuffed, deep-fried bread.

The quick-heat pouch varieties of kare raisu make up almost 30 percent of all quick-heat meals purchased nationwide. There’s even a celebrity YouTube cat whose claim to fame is rubbing its face against a piping hot bowl of kare raisu. (Really.)

Durban, South Africa is home to the largest concentration of Indians outside of India. They arrived in the country, by and large, as indentured servants to work on sugar plantations in the late 19th century.

“While the recipes and ingredients differ from family to family, broadly, Durban curry has a deep-red color indicative of the spice level (hot, hot, hot), a slick of oil, and, if it’s not a fish curry, large chunks of soft potatoes — known as ‘Up-To-Date’ or ‘gravy soakers,’” writes Ishay Govender-Ypma, author of the book, Curry: Stories & Recipes across South Africa.

This fiery curry variation is the basis for a national takeaway-food favorite known as bunny chow or simply “bunny.” A sloppy — but portable! — dish, bunny chow starts with a thick block of white bread that’s hollowed out in the middle for the purpose of filling to the brim with spicy Durban curry. It’s often served with a small sambal (grated carrot, chili and onion salad), and diners in the know will wait to eat their bunny chow until the curry has soaked into the white bread, creating a chaotically messy, delicious treat.

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Green Curry with Tofu (Makes 4 servings)

WHAT YOU WILL NEED:

Spice Market in India

Coconut Red Curry (Makes 4 servings)

WHAT YOU WILL NEED:

1 tablespoon peanut oil 1 small onion, minced 2 garlic cloves, minced 2 serrano peppers, seeded and thinly sliced 2 tablespoons chopped cilantro 1-inch ginger root, peeled and minced ½ cup cubed potatoes ½ cup raw cashews ½ cup cauliflower florets ½ cup cut green beans ½ teaspoon sea salt 3 tablespoons prepared red curry paste 1 cup unsweetened coconut milk 2 teaspoons fish sauce Zest and juice of 1 lime Jasmine rice, for serving

HOW TO PREP:

Heat oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add ginger, onions, garlic, peppers and cilantro, and sauté until tender, around 5 minutes.

Add green beans, potatoes, cashews and cauliflower, and sauté until tender, around 5 minutes. Stir in salt and curry paste, and cook 2 minutes.

Pour in coconut milk. Add fish sauce, lime zest and juice. Simmer until the sauce thickens slightly, around 7 to 10 minutes, stirring frequently.

Thai Coconut Curry with Shrimp (Makes 4 servings)

WHAT YOU WILL NEED:

2 tablespoons peanut or vegetable oil 1 cup minced onion 1 tablespoon minced garlic 1 tablespoon minced ginger 1½ to 2 pounds 25⁄30 count shrimp, peeled 1 teaspoon (or to taste) minced hot chili, or crushed red pepper flakes 1 tablespoon (or to taste) curry powder 1 cup fresh or canned coconut milk ½ cup diced tomatoes Salt and freshly ground black pepper 2 tablespoons nam pla (fish sauce) ¼ cup minced mint leaves or cilantro leaves Warm jasmine rice, for serving

HOW TO PREP:

Heat the oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add the onion, garlic, ginger and chilies, and cook, stirring frequently, until the vegetables are tender and the mixture thickens. Add the curry powder and cook, stirring, for 1 minute.

Add the coconut milk and raise the temperature to medium-high. Cook, stirring occasionally, until most of the liquid is reduced and the mixture appears “dry.”

Add the shrimp and tomatoes, and season with salt and black pepper. Cook, stirring frequently, until the shrimp release their liquid and turn pink. Stir in the fish sauce.

Garnish with mint leaves or cilantro and serve with jasmine rice.

1 (14-ounce) package extra-firm tofu 2 tablespoons corn starch 6 tablespoons canola oil Salt and pepper to taste ¼ pound green beans, trimmed ½ cup snap peas 1 small head broccoli, cut into florets ½ bunch basil, stems removed 1 (14-ounce) can light coconut milk 2 serrano chiles, seeded and roughly chopped 4 cloves garlic, peeled 1 (1-inch) piece ginger, peeled 1 (1-inch) piece lemongrass, peeled 1 tablespoon brown sugar 1 teaspoon nam pla (fish sauce) 1 teaspoon ground cumin 1 teaspoon ground coriander 1 teaspoon kosher salt Warm jasmine rice, for serving

HOW TO PREP:

Cut tofu into 1-inch slices and place on paper-towel-lined baking sheet. Cover with another layer of paper towels and place another baking sheet on top. Let sit for 20 minutes.

Cut tofu into 1-inch cubes and toss gently in a bowl with corn starch. Heat oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Shake excess corn starch off of tofu, then carefully transfer tofu to skillet. Fry tofu, turning occasionally, until golden brown all over, 5 to 6 minutes total.

Transfer to a paper-towel-lined plate and set aside.

Bring a large pot of salted water to a bowl.

Add broccoli and cook until just tender, 2 to 3 minutes. Using a slotted spoon, transfer broccoli to a bowl of ice water. Chill, then drain well and set aside. Repeat same steaming and chilling process with green beans and with snap peas and set them aside.

Put basil, coconut milk, garlic, chiles, ginger, lemongrass, brown sugar, fish sauce, coriander, cumin, salt and ½ cup water into a blender, and puree until smooth. Transfer to a large skillet and bring to a simmer over medium heat; season with salt and pepper.

Add broccoli, green beans, snap peas and tofu to the skillet, and cook until just warmed through, around 2 minutes.

Serve with jasmine rice.

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Biryani, an aromatic rice dish typically made with basmati, is especially popular throughout India, though distinct varieties can be found in the Middle East & Southeast Asia as well.

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Butter Chicken (Makes 6 servings) WHAT YOU WILL NEED:

1½ cups full-fat Greek yogurt 2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice 1½ tablespoons ground turmeric 2 tablespoons garam masala or curry powder 2 tablespoons ground cumin 3 pounds boneless, skinless chicken breasts, cut into cubes 1/2 pound (2 sticks) butter 4 teaspoons vegetable or canola oil 2 medium-size yellow onions, peeled and diced 4 cloves garlic, peeled and minced 3 tablespoons fresh ginger, peeled and grated or minced 1 cinnamon stick 2 medium-size tomatoes, diced 2 red chiles, seeded and diced Kosher salt, to taste

²⁄₃ cup chicken stock 1½ cups heavy cream 1½ teaspoons tomato paste ½ bunch cilantro leaves, stems removed, for garnish Warm jasmine rice or biryani rice (recipe follows), for serving

HOW TO PREP:

Mix together the yogurt, lemon juice, turmeric, garam masala and cumin in a large bowl. Place the chicken in the bowl and coat it with the marinade. Cover and refrigerate.

Add the garlic, ginger, cinnamon stick, tomatoes, chiles and salt. Cook until the chiles are soft, about 10 minutes.

Add the chicken and marinade to the pan.

Cook for 5 minutes, then add the chicken stock. Bring the mixture to a boil, then lower the heat and simmer, uncovered, for 30 minutes.

Remove cinnamon stick and stir in the cream and tomato paste. Simmer until the chicken is cooked through, about 15 minutes more.

Garnish with the cilantro leaves and serve over rice.

In a large pan over medium heat, melt the butter in the oil until it starts to foam. Add the onions. Cook, stirring frequently, until they begin to brown.

Biryani Rice (Makes 6 servings) WHAT YOU WILL NEED:

2 cups basmati rice ½ cup clarified butter or vegetable oil 1 cup chopped yellow onion 2 teaspoons sliced garlic 1 teaspoon minced fresh ginger 1/4 teaspoon ground cardamom 1 cinnamon stick, halved 1 bay leaf 2 teaspoons salt ½ teaspoon ground coriander ½ teaspoon ground black pepper ½ teaspoon turmeric ½ teaspoon ground cumin ¹⁄₈ teaspoon cayenne ½ cup chopped fresh cilantro

HOW TO PREP:

Place the rice in a colander and rinse under cold running water. Then place the rinsed rice in a large bowl and cover with 3 cups of water. Let soak 30 minutes. Drain and reserve the starchy water.

In a large pot, heat the butter (or oil) over medium-high heat. Add the onion and cook, stirring, for 3 minutes. Add the garlic and ginger, and cook, stirring, for 45 seconds. Add the cardamom seeds, cinnamon stick halves, bay leaf, salt, coriander, pepper, turmeric, cumin and cayenne, and cook, stirring, until fragrant, about 45 seconds.

Add the rice to the pot and cook, stirring, for 2 minutes. Then add the reserved starchy water and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to low. Stir, then cover and simmer until the water is absorbed and the rice is tender, around 15 minutes. Remove from the heat and let sit, covered, for 15 minutes.

Add the cilantro, fluff the rice with a fork, and transfer to a large bowl. Remove the cinnamon pieces and bay leaf, and discard them. Serve warm.

photo by Romney Caruso ROUSES

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 5 9

Heart & Seoul

by Lolis Eric Elie

For years the gold standard of fried chicken for me was my Auntie Pat’s version. I was young then, barely a teenager. Still, I had ambitions of kitchen mastery and asked my aunt her secret.

She rattled off the usual ingredients — chicken, flour, salt, pepper, oil. Then she said something that surprised me: She put butter in the frying oil.

“I started off really young cooking,” she told me. “I don’t know where I went wrong, but that chicken that particular time just didn’t brown. So I called an older person and said, ‘I can’t get my chicken to brown.’

“She said, ‘Add butter to your grease and make sure your grease is hot when you add it.’”

I am familiar with the miraculous browning properties of butter, but I am also familiar with butter’s low smoke point. If you want flavor, yes, add butter. But you can’t 6 0 J U LY • A U G U ST 2019

fry with butter in the same way you would fry with vegetable oil. Or can you?

“As soon as the grease is hot, you put the butter in. About a half a stick,” my aunt told me. “It will not burn, but you can’t keep using that grease time after time.

“I would not recommend that to anybody today unless it was a one-time meal, because I realize how unhealthy that was.

But delicious? Yes,” my aunt said, reflecting the wisdom that comes with advancing age and increasing awareness of Surgeon General warnings. “That was the only way I knew how to cook. You had to make sure it tasted good.”

Chicken, flour, salt, pepper, oil and butter.

Those are the only ingredients. Still, try as I might, I could never get my chicken to taste like my aunt’s.

These days, I seldom fry chicken at home.

I don’t like the fact that the smell of chicken

grease can sometimes linger in the air days after the bird has been consumed. For years, Leah Chase and Willie Mae Seaton fried my chickens for me, and my relationships with those women and their fried chicken were mutually profitable.

Then, when I was working on HBO’s show Treme, Nina Noble, one of the show’s executive producers, came up the idea of creating a Treme cookbook that would incorporate the dishes that our characters were seen eating and cooking on screen. At one point in the show the chef character, Janette DeSautel, goes to New York and does her version of fried chicken.

According to her backstory, Janette was born in Alabama and thus was well-versed in the tradition of Southern fried chicken.

But moving to New York and working for David Chang, a Virginia-born chef of Korean extraction, she was moved to tap

Paper-Skin Fried Chicken with Spicy Syrup and Korean Ribs•recipes follow on page 63•photo by Romney Caruso

into some Asian flavor for her reimagining of the fried yardbird of her youth.

While Janette was on screen frying fictional chicken, I was working with Jacqueline Blanchard, a Paincourtville native and, at that time, a sous chef at Restaurant August, to create a recipe for this dish that would appear in the cookbook. Chef Jackie, as we call her, was overqualified to be working with me. But then, as now, she was generous with her time.

Initially, she’d intended to be an athlete.

But an early injury sidelined those ambitions.

She does cook, though, with the intensity of a competitor.

“I was mentored through school by the great Randolph Cheramie, a legend of Bayou Lafourche,” she wrote on the Treme blog around the time we were creating the recipe.

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“He had a presence. He knew if you were going to make it within the first five minutes with you. I began to realize that, in order for me to be successful, I had to really immerse myself. School wasn’t going to teach me everything.

“I was fascinated with haute cuisine, so when I graduated from Nicholls State after Hurricane Katrina, I moved straight to Napa Valley to take up a position with The French Laundry,” she said. “I felt like I was on another planet.”

After working at French Laundry and Benu in California, Frasca in Colorado and Blue Hill at Stone Barns in New York, she returned to her South Louisiana roots to cook on Tchoupitoulas Street at August.

These days Chef Jackie is busy as co-owner of Coutelier NOLA, the Oak Street knife shop she founded with her partner, Brandt Cox. That shop has recently

opened a second location, Coutelier NASH, in Nashville.

The inspiration for her take on fried chicken was her own discovery of Korean fried chicken during the time she lived in New York. That chicken had skin that was paper thin and cracklin’ crisp. But why would you go all the way to Korea to get fried chicken when you’d have to fly over a few thousand perfectly good American fried chicken places to get there?

For Southerners, few dishes are more important and emblematic than fried chicken. In his version of “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead (You Rascal You),” Louis Armstrong would have us believe that one of the worst things about death is the lack of fried chicken. “When you’re lyin’ down six feet deep, no more fried chicken will you eat. I’ll be glad when you’re dead, you W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 61

rascal you…” he sang in his version of the Sam Theard song.

But think about it: chicken, oil, salt, pepper, flour — certainly Americans couldn’t be the only folks on God’s green earth who realized that putting all these things together could lead to untold goodness.

A year ago I had the pleasure of appearing on the fried chicken episode of David Chang’s Netflix show Ugly Delicious.

That episode devotes much of its time to good ol’ Southern fried chicken. Among the Southerners frying chicken on screen is Asha Gomez, a woman from Kerala, India who currently lives and cooks in Atlanta. Like the folks at Saffron NOLA on Magazine Street, Chef Asha is one of a small group of Indian American cooks who proudly combine the flavors of their Indian roots with the tastes of their new homes in the American South. Her chicken is enough to make internationalists out of even the most jingoistic American.

Sue Ceravolo — who, like David Chang, is a Southern chef of Korean extraction — volunteered her Uptown New Orleans kitchen for us to experiment with this New Orleans version of Korean fried chicken.

One of the first decisions Chef Jackie made went against everything my mother taught me about cooking. She didn’t season her chicken. In my mother’s house, everything was seasoned. Nothing was boiled, steamed, baked or fried unless it had already been baptized by salt and pepper. Or, as food writer Nicole Taylor once said, “I live and die by seasoning the bird and batter.”

But of paramount importance to Chef Jackie was that the raw chicken be as dry as possible. Moisture is the enemy of

crispness, she told me. Salt can attract moisture. By leaving the chicken uncovered in the refrigerator overnight, the skin is able to dry out to the point of allowing maximum crispness.

Chef Jackie’s recipe calls for dredging the chicken in rice flour and cornstarch or tapioca starch. Those flours are lighter in color and consistency than the wheat flour generally used in American fried chicken.

Even when perfectly crisped and browned, the crust of this chicken will not be as dark as more traditional Southern fried chicken crust.

For those of us who have enjoyed the French fry renaissance, the double-frying technique will be nothing new. The initial frying, whether of chicken or potatoes, does most of the cooking. The second frying does most of the browning and crisping.

The second culinary decision Chef Jackie made regarding the chicken had me harkening back to an ongoing argument I have with David Chang and David Simon, the co-creator of Treme and a native of the Delmarva (Del-Mar-Va, or DelawareMaryland-Virginia) Peninsula. They insist that steaming crabs over seasoned water and then sprinkling Old Bay seasoning on the shells results in a tastier crab than the South Louisiana practice of boiling the seafood in crab boil. It seems to me that boiling imparts flavor throughout the meat in a way that steaming doesn’t. They disagree.

Chef Jackie seasoned the chicken largely with the application of a glaze of Korean hot pepper paste and a sprinkling of cilantro leaves. How could this combination, however tasty, possibly make up for

A Long-Lost Restaurant...

Ghengis Khan, New Orleans "New Orleans’ first Korean restaurant was famed for its divine whole fish, as well as for the impromptu musical performances by owner Henry H. Lee (formerly of the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra), the operatic waiters and other musicians. My four-year-old once wore her Wizard of Oz Dorothy costume to the restaurant, and Mr. Lee serenaded her with 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow' on his violin.

That eatery and Mr. Lee were favorites of ours."

- Patti, Copy Editor

6 2 J U LY • A U G U ST 2019

the lack of salt and pepper placed on the chicken flesh itself? I never tasted the plain, unglazed chicken. Since I had my doubts about this approach all along, I decided to test it in its full glory and not cast aspersions on its component parts.

The result was magnificent, as good as any fried chicken I’ve ever had anywhere.

Somehow all the components sang their parts harmoniously. The chicken was crisp, well-seasoned and even moist.

I’ve long had my reservations about the chicken and waffle craze that has swept the nation. Usually the component parts don’t quite go together. Chef Jackie changed my mind about that pairing when we did a book signing for Treme: Stories and Recipes from the Heart of New Orleans, at Buffa’s.

She accompanied her chicken and waffles with Steen’s cane syrup and vinegarinfused collard greens, and made all those components work. Trying that approach on my own, I combined chopped garlic, soy sauce, hoisin sauce, Korean pepper paste and Brer Rabbit syrup. That combination, drizzled over fried chicken and waffles, was magical.

Using this Korean fried chicken recipe as a jumping-off point, and considering my Auntie Pat’s revelation that butter and fried chicken are good together, I can’t help but imagine the various Creole-inflected possibilities inherent in the creative clashing of cultures. Imagine, for example, Chef Jackie’s fried chicken doused in the garlicky, buttery sauce that you would usually use for New Orleans style barbecue shrimp.

At Upperline Restaurant in New Orleans, JoAnn Clevenger has proven that remoulade sauce goes well with fried green tomatoes. What would happen if you applied remoulade sauce to Korean style fried chicken?

It’s difficult to think of cooking in this moment without pausing to reflect on the lessons Leah Chase sought to instill in all of us. First and foremost was the notion that food could and should be used to connect people, not divide them — I imagine ladders of chicken bones built to help us scale the walls of fear and isolationism that divide us. I’m not certain that this vision would fly politically. But then again, good politics don’t necessarily make for good cooking.

Korean Ribs (Makes 4 servings)

Paper-Skin Fried Chicken (Makes 6 servings) WHAT YOU WILL NEED:

White rice flour for dredging ½ cup cornstarch, plus more if needed ½ cup cool water, plus more if needed 2 tablespoons of minced fresh cilantro Vegetable oil for frying 8 bone-in chicken wings, legs or thighs, or any combination of your choice (2½ to 3 pounds total weight) Spicy syrup (see recipe below) 2 tablespoons of sesame seeds

HOW TO PREP:

The day before frying the chicken, rinse the pieces and pat them dry thoroughly with paper towels. On a baking sheet lined with several thicknesses of paper towels, arrange the pieces in a single layer without touching. Refrigerate, uncovered, for at least a few hours and preferably overnight.

When you’re ready to fry the chicken, pour oil to a depth of 2 to 4 inches into a deep fryer or pot with tall sides. Place pot over medium-high heat and heat to 350° on a deep-frying thermometer. Line a large baking sheet with parchment paper.

Put about 1 cup of the rice flour in a large pan or shallow bowl and dredge each chicken piece in the flour, turning to coat all the surfaces well. Then shake off the excess flour and brush off as much of the flour as possible while still holding the chicken with your fingertips, so there remains only an extremely light, transparent dusting of flour on each piece. As you work, place the finished pieces in a single layer on the prepared baking sheet.

In a medium bowl, combine the ½ cup cornstarch and ½ cup cool water, and whisk until completely blended and smooth.

When the oil reaches 350°, whisk the cornstarch mixture again (it separates readily). One piece at a time, dip the chicken in the cornstarch mixture. Let the excess drip off, then ease each chicken piece into the hot oil. (Make another batch of the cornstarch mixture if needed.)

Fry the chicken pieces for 10 minutes, working in small batches to avoid crowding the pan. Adjust the heat to maintain a constant 350° temperature as much as possible. Using tongs, transfer the chicken pieces to paper towels to drain.

When all of the chicken has been fried at 350° and drained for at least 2 minutes, raise the oil’s temperature to between 360° and 375°.

Again working in small batches to avoid crowding, return the chicken to the hot oil and fry until golden brown all over, around 12 minutes, maintaining the hotter temperature range as much as possible.

Drain the chicken on a wire rack placed over a baking sheet to catch the drippings.

While the chicken is still hot, use a pastry brush to brush the pieces all over with a thin layer of the spicy syrup, then sprinkle with minced cilantro and sesame seeds.

WHAT YOU WILL NEED:

¹⁄₃ cup soy sauce ¹⁄₃ cup brown sugar ¹⁄₃ cup rice wine 1 tablespoon sesame oil 2 teaspoons black pepper ¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper 1 medium onion, peeled and quartered 8 garlic cloves, peeled 1 small pear or tart apple, peeled, cored and quartered 1 1-inch chunk of ginger, peeled 2 teaspoons sesame seeds 3 pounds short ribs, cut in 1/2-inch slices across the bones

HOW TO PREP:

Stir together soy sauce, brown sugar, rice wine, sesame oil, black pepper and cayenne in a medium-sized bowl.

Grind onion, garlic, pear and ginger to a smooth purée in the work bowl of a food processor, then add to soy sauce mixture.

Add sesame seeds. Thin with ¼ cup water.

Place ribs in a wide shallow bowl. Pour marinade over short ribs and mix well.

Cover and refrigerate for at least 2 hours, or preferably overnight.

When ready to prepare ribs, remove them from refrigerator and bring to room temperature. Drain and discard marinade.

Cook short ribs on a hot grill or under the broiler for 2 to 3 minutes per side, until nicely browned but juicy.

Spicy Syrup WHAT YOU WILL NEED:

3 teaspoons pure cane syrup or honey 6 cloves garlic 1 cup sambal oelek (chili paste) 3 teaspoons soy sauce

HOW TO PREP:

Mince garlic and place in medium bowl. Add chili paste and combine.

Add soy sauce and stir well. Then add cane syrup or honey and stir well to combine all ingredients.

Glaze chicken with this sauce as it’s resting on wire rack before serving. If there’s any leftover, serve alongside chicken for extra dipping sauce.

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Blu Basil Wine & Grill, Lafayette "I’m obsessed with kimchi, the Korean side dish of salted and fermented vegetables. The Sriracha Kimchi Fries here come topped with bulgogi beef, kimchi, Sriracha, spicy mayo and a sunny side up fried egg. I dream about them."

- Eliza, Marketing

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 6 3

Lanexang Village in Cajun Country

Wat Thammarattanaram Lao Buddhist Temple photo provided by Iberia Travel

by David W. Brown

Laotians began arriving in the United States around the same time the Vietnamese did, and for the same reason. After the U.S. withdrew its forces from Vietnam, pieces moved rapidly across the chessboard of Southeast Asia, and communist forces quickly toppled the Laotian government in a civil war. In 1975, the U.S. began accepting Laotian refugees.

By 1980, the Laotian population of the United States had grown to about 50,000. (The number today is about a quarter of a million.)

That same year, Red Fox Industries, a fabrication and supply company in Iberia Parish, began offering job training funded by a federal law called the Comprehensive Training and Employment Act. The company’s doors were open to all would-be skilled laborers, and the small but burgeoning Laotian community in Louisiana took advantage of this to learn welding, pipefitting and other trades vital to the oil industry.

According to the University of Louisiana at Lafayette’s Center for Louisiana Studies, Laotians are the second-largest Southeast Asian group in Louisiana. Half of the Laotian community here still belongs to the skilled industrial trades as first learned at Red Fox (versus 15 percent for the population at large). Another 20 percent work in the fishing industry. The community has also proven entrepreneurial, with some Laotian Americans opening grocery stores and restaurants.

Today, the Laotian community around New Iberia is thriving — take, for example, Lanexang Village near Broussard, Louisiana, with the stunning Wat Thammarattanaram Buddhist Temple at its heart.

The village, the name of which translates to “million elephants,” was founded in 1986 when several Laotian families pooled their money to buy the land. The temple was built the following year, and is recognizable immediately and celebrated locally for its bright and ornate exterior and beautiful statues.

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The village attracts thousands of visitors from across the South every Easter weekend, when the community celebrates Lao New Year at the temple. It’s a three-day event, with music, parades, vendors selling clothes, jewelry and more from Southeast Asia, and authentic Laotian cuisine. The local community believes theirs is the largest Laotian festival in the United States, and the celebration is part of a wider effort by the residents of the village to preserve their culture for second-generation Laotian Americans who were born and raised in the U.S. — and to share their unique culture in the country they now call home.

Yak The Kathmandu Kitchen, Mobile "I keep hearing about the Momo, the Nepali version of stuffed dumplings, at Yak The Kathmandu Kitchen on Dauphin Street in Downtown Mobile. Nepali food sits at the crossroads of Indian and Chinese foods, and Yak serves everything from tandoori cooked in a traditional Indian clay oven to chow mein. The Tibetan noodle soup known as thukpa might replace my obsession with pho. I hear there’s also a killer lunch buffet."

- Kacie, Marketing

Common Threads

by Sarah Baird

For a large majority of people, the thought of running a family business — much less running a high-volume, fine-dining restaurant with their parents and siblings — would seem a little, well, daunting. But for the Vilkhus, who operate New Orleans’ most imaginative Indian restaurant, Saffron NOLA, the familial bond is the foundation for a delicious success story.

“It’s cross-generational entrepreneurship,” says Ashwin Vilkhu, general manager and beverage director of Saffron NOLA. “When we opened, we agreed that it had to be all four of us doing it. You have my parents, who are time-tested veterans in the kitchen, and then you have the youth, my sister and me, with kitchen and cocktail ideas that make sure everything is nouveau but still classic under one roof.”

Arvinder and Pardeep Vilkhu, Ashwin’s parents, arrived in New Orleans from India in 1984, when Arvinder (who, Ashwin says, fell in love with the city over a cup of gumbo) got a job working for the InterContinental Hotel. Soon, though, it was the couple’s unique culinary talents at home that started turning heads among their friends.

“They used to entertain all the time, and one time when they had some friends over, these friends were like, ‘We want you to cater our two-year-old’s birthday party — for 200 people,’” laughs Ashwin. “They gave it a shot, and it was a huge success, so that’s how their catering company started.”

Working largely out of their home (while still keeping their full-time jobs), the catering company quickly exploded in popularity, due in large part to an eclectic style of cooking that brought together elements of traditional Indian cuisine, New Orleans ingredients and more.

Saffron’s menu is full of thoughtful, jewel-like dishes that seamlessly combine Indian flavors with New Orleans ingredients and traditions, from curried gumbo, to spice-crusted gulf fish with curd rice and mango pickles, to roasted oysters seasoned with curry leaf and served with naan. “[My parents] can do so many different things in the kitchen. My mother had her mother and grandmother’s homestyle recipes. My dad had the technique and the French influence and training. Then New Orleans had the produce and seafood. Those three things in the mix meant that they could make this revolutionary food. And, at the time, people hadn’t been exposed to Indian food like that.”

Eventually, the family launched a once-a-week, pop-up restaurant in a Gretna strip mall called Saffron NOLA, which became one of the hottest under-the-radar restaurant tickets in town.

“At the pop-up restaurant, my sister, Pranita, and her friends were the waitstaff — it was always that much of a family-run business,” he jokes. “We were doing a fine-dining service but only one time a week. The critics came and loved it, but they always said they could never really blow it up like they wanted to because it wasn’t fair to ROUSES

The Vilkhu Family photo by Denny Culbert

other businesses who were open all the time. So, we always had great press, but were living in the shadows,” explains Ashwin.

But he had bigger ideas. “In 2016, I saw so much opportunity because of what was going on in town. You had [Alon] Shaya who was doing something different at his restaurant, and Nina [Compton] was doing something different at Compère Lapin, using their traditional roots and bringing in the New Orleans influence. I just thought, ‘Why aren’t we doing something more?’”

It took his parents a little bit of convincing (and a 50-page business plan Ashwin whipped up), but in August 2017, the family opened a permanent Saffron NOLA space on Magazine Street to rave reviews. Saffron’s menu is full of thoughtful, jewel-like dishes that seamlessly combine Indian flavors with New Orleans ingredients and traditions, from curried gumbo, to spice-crusted gulf fish with curd rice and mango pickles, to roasted oysters seasoned with curry leaf and served with naan. The space itself is also stunning, using textures — like silk walls and copper screens — to reflect the family’s Indian heritage and, ultimately, the beauty of a family’s love for one another and their cuisine.

“The culture we’ve created is a beautiful thing to watch. If the top people in a restaurant are good people like my parents, then it trickles down to everyone and everything. That’s Saffron. It’s a happy place.”

Red Gold Saffron is one of the most valued spices in the world.

This ancient medicinal is derived from a flower called crocus sativus, more commonly known as the saffron crocus. The crocus is painstaking to harvest, and the yield seems hardly worth it — just three threadlike stigmas per flower — were it not for the wonderful, subtle, aromatic flavor it adds to rice dishes.​

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 6 5

INGREDIENTS: 2 cups uncooked whole grain elbow macaroni 2 tablespoons olive oil 3 tablespoons butter 3 tablespoons flour 1 cup fat-free milk 1 cup panko breadcrumbs 1 tablespoon chopped parsley 8 ounces processed American cheese, cubed 1 package JOHNSONVILLEÂŽ Smoked Rope Sausage, quartered and sliced Cook macaroni according to package directions; drain.

Mix panko, parsley, and olive oil together in a bowl. Set Aiusde Meanwhile, in another saucepan, melt butter over medium heat.

Stir in flour until smooth; gradually whisk in milk. Bring to a boil, stirring constantly. Cook and stir for 2 minutes or until thickened.

Add cheese; cook and stir until melted.

Stir in macaroni and sausage. Spread panko mixture on top and bake at 350°F for 25 minutes.

A Product-finding Trip to Thailand

by David W. Brown

Coconut water is everywhere these days, driven by heath and fitness experts testifying to its restorative powers during exercise.

As to its potassium content, an eight-ounce glass of coconut water is basically a clear, liquid banana. (That’s 10 times the potassium as your standard-issue sports drink.) And it’s made by nature, which means that the ingredients of coconut water, generally, are: coconut water. And that’s it! As opposed to the buckets of high fructose corn syrup you’ll find in beverages brewed in chemistry labs.

Coconut water is loaded with antioxidants, magnesium and calcium, and is a better source for many amino acids than milk. (And unlike milk, you can chug coconut water after a hard spin class.) Did I mention that it’s low calorie? The only thing it can’t do, apparently, is cure baldness, but — and I am not making this up — it is apparently a great hair conditioner.

The point is, if you don’t have coconut water in your life, you are probably never going to become an Instagram fitness model, you probably have a ton of oxidants in your body and no magnesium, and your hair is probably a horrible mess but your friends won’t tell you. You probably eat bananas like some ancient Neanderthal born in the 20th century. I bet you don’t even go to spin class! But you want to do better. You might have forgotten your New Year’s resolutions, but your New Year’s resolutions have not forgotten you.

Don’t worry. Rouses is here to help.

Last year, Jason Martinolich, vice president of natural, organic and specialty foods for Rouses Markets, went to Thailand in search of the best coconut water in Southeast Asia to bring back with him for our customers.

“Whenever we are looking for a product — especially if we are going to put the Rouses brand on it — we always go to the places producing the best products of that type,” he says. “You really have to be there to appreciate what the growers do, and the foods that they have and the things that they specialize in.” Italy, for example, has the best olives in the world. When Rouses Markets decided to put its label on an olive oil, they went to the source, spent weeks scouring the countryside, and only when they were satisfied that they had found an olive oil that met the store’s meticulous standards for quality and nutrition did they agree to import it. Today, you can find it on our store shelves.

Coconut water was no different. “We visited factories and farms where they are growing the coconuts and where they are manufacturing and canning and bottling the water,” says Martinolich.

“We sat with the families running these facilities and spoke with them and learned about their businesses and how they got started.” He found a real fellowship there. “When you talk with someone in a family-operated business across multiple generations, it reminds you a lot of the story of Rouses, which after all these years is still a familyowned and family-run business.”

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CROSSING AN OCEAN

The story of Rouses coconut water began with feedback from customers, who heard about the product’s benefits and wanted to get it on our shelves. So Martinolich reached out to an importer in California who had been born and raised in Thailand. He knew the country, spoke the language and agreed to travel with the Rouses team to help find the best of the best.

“Mainly what we are looking for is not only a great-tasting product, but one that is good for you as well,” he says. When it comes to coconut water, you hear a lot about added sugars and added ingredients with unpronounceable names. Rouses didn’t want that.

“We were looking for 100 percent all-natural coconut water with no added sugars. So basically it is like you’re eating the fruit when you have a can of our coconut water.” Next time you are shopping, pick up a Rouses-label can and see for yourself. Look at the ingredients list. There’s only one. Coconut water.

“For us, that’s important. You can purchase a coconut water with added sugars at a better price, but we weren’t looking at going for the cheapest product. We were going for the best.

Once they found it, the Rouses team back in the United States got to work designing a label, which was sent to Thailand where it could be printed on each item. The water is canned fresh, right there in Thailand — out of the coconut and into the can. It’s shipped to the U.S. by boat and, once it reaches our shores, is transported to our stores. The only way to get it any fresher would be to fly to Thailand yourself and to crack open a coconut and start drinking. And even that would not be any more natural than what you’ll find on Rouses shelves. (It would be a lot more work, though!)

“You can get it from Rouses at the best price anywhere in the country.

You can put it against any national brand, and it will be as good as or better. It’s the best-tasting product with the best quality anywhere you will find in the United States,” he says. They also found a berryflavored coconut water that met the Rouses standard (all natural fruit with no added sugars), and for those who want a little jolt in the morning, a coffee-flavored coconut water with caffeine.

Customers also asked for more types of sparkling waters, and Martinolich decided to put the requests together, with the result: sparkling coconut water. “We found some popular flavors that we knew would resonate well with our customers.” In addition to a regular flavor, he also brought back pineapple-, mango- and watermelon-flavored sparkling coconut water. Again, they’re all-natural, with no added sugars except for the natural sugars found in the fruits themselves.

Rama, Baton Rouge "This hole-in-the-wall diner tucked away under the expressway on Perkins Road has the best Thai food in Baton Rouge. We always get the Rama spicy, which is like a taco, and the spicy meatballs. They come in a sauce that is so good you need extra wraps just to sop it up. The panang chicken is my favorite curry. Split a large soup — the servings are huge, and the presentation is beautiful. I like the lemongrass soup and the chicken soup, which is in a hot-and-sour coconut milk broth."

- Brittney, Marketing

Song Phi Nong, Houma "Thai restaurants like Song Phi Nong label their food from zero (mild) to five (“Thai spicy” or “Thai hot”) to denote the amount of chili peppers, ginger, garlic and peppercorns in a given dish. I like my Thai food scorching, so when I order the pineapple fried rice with chicken and shrimp, I go level five on the heat scale. Be warned though: If you do decide to order your food “Thai hot,” you may not be able to taste anything for the rest of the day."

- Steve, COO

Secret Thai Restaurant, Chalmette "They produce every dish from scratch at this little restaurant in the parish. The Thai beef jerky is fried sun-dried beef — it’s delicious, and much easier to chew than American beef jerky. I always order the Thai red curry, which is served with takenoko (young bamboo shoots cut like pasta) and fresh basil leaves.

My heat tolerance is level three. I got cocky once and ordered a level four, but within the first few bites, I was gulping down my Thai iced tea."

- Mickey, Culinary Trainer

Thai Ocha, Metairie "I almost hate to share the name of this restaurant because it’s so tiny, and I’ll never get a seat again, but the Drunken Noodles are that delicious."

- Brandi, Customer

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W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 6 9

The Traveling Chef

by David W. Brown photo by Romney Caruso

Brother, I went to six countries last year,” says Chef Nino Thibodaux, a chef for Rouses Markets, known for his weekly cooking classes held at stores across the Gulf Coast. “I travel the world to see what they’re doing, what they’re cooking, why they’re healthy, and why we are not.” He spent 10 days over Christmas in the Philippines, and used that time to learn everything he could about what makes their cooking great.

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His first three days in Manila were eye-opening. “Brother,” he says, “in 24 square miles of Manila there are 1,600,000 residents — it’s the highest population density in the world. For every square mile, there were 55,000 people! There’s traffic, congestion, confusion — and I loved it! Brother, there were open markets with fruits and vegetables I had never seen in my life. Fish I had never seen that looked prehistoric, with big ol’ teeth and shiny like mirrors!”

From a culinary point of view, he says, “it was like being in Willy Wonka’s world. It was amazing.”

For travelers who want to see the world and understand its cuisine, Chef Nino says you must never eat at tourist restaurants and always try the local street food. The Philippines was

no exception. From carts and stands to little holes-in-the-wall, he tried their soups; had their famed noodles; enjoyed lumpia, a kind of spring roll with vegetables; and relished a national delicacy called adobo — a dish of pork or chicken cooked in a vinegar and soy sauce marinade.

Not everything agreed with him. “Are you holding onto your chair, brother?” he asks. “They’ve got these things called balut.

I tried to eat it and I just couldn’t do it.” The dish is a boiled, 17-day-old, fermented duck egg. “It’s the embryo of a duck. It has little feet, it has a little beak, and it has the start of feathers.

You crack it open, remove that little beak, and eat the whole thing.

And it’s juicy, and who knows what you’re eating. And the smell was horrific. But it’s an excellent source of protein and it’s very inexpensive. You go to open air markets and there are mountains of these things for just pennies, and they eat them like they’re going out of style.”

Chef Nino stayed mostly in a place called Vigan City, north of Manila, and visited Baguio, a town in the mountains. His host

family lived in a humble yet immaculately clean home, where he ate, he says, “the finest food in all the world.”

He goes on: “They put on a spread. Fresh cut mangoes on the table. Bananas. Papaya. Coconuts. Brother, all these fresh fruits in the house. And the best noodles I ever had in my life. They make it out of rice or coconut or pasta, and flavor them different ways with fish sauce and other sauces.”

Chef Nino says the natural crops of the Philippines guided the evolution of its cuisine. “It’s like any other civilization. These things grow where you are, and you figure out what to do with them.”

Now that he is back home, he plans to introduce the cuisine of the Philippines to his cooking classes at Rouses Markets, with ambitious plans to teach a chicken adobo recipe that he learned, as well as lumpia, and a specialty called pineapple plank, which is meat cooked atop a slab of pineapple. “These are easy recipes — not that many ingredients — but [they] use methods of cooking we never thought about doing, and these amazing flavors are the result. And you can do them at home.”

“They“They put onput a spread.

Fresh cut mangoes on on on a spread.

Fresh cut mangoes thethe table.

Bananas.

Papaya.

Coconuts.

Brother, table.

Bananas.

Papaya.

Coconuts.

Brother, all all these fresh fruits in the house.

And thethe bestbest these fresh fruits in the house.

And noodles noodlesIIever ever had had in in my my life. life.They Theymake makeititout out of of rice or coconut or pasta, and flavor them rice or coconut or pasta, and flavor them different different ways with fish sauce and other sauces.” ways with fish sauce and other sauces.”

Mango Royale Our bakery decorator Charlyn Bantiling Mercadel, a native of Valladolid Negros Occidental, Philippines, created this recipe for our magazine.

Get the recipe at www.rouses.com.

Chef Nino’s adult cooking classes and Chef Sally’s kid’s cooking classes are held at Rouses Markets across the Gulf Coast.

Visit www.rouses.com for locations, dates and times. Our July theme is Asian Food.

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W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 71

Leftover Fried Rice (Makes 4 servings) WHAT YOU WILL NEED:

3 tablespoons soybean, vegetable or peanut oil 1 medium onion, roughly chopped 2 carrots, peeled and finely minced 1 tablespoon minced garlic 1 tablespoon minced ginger 3 to 4 cups cooked white rice, cooled (the cooler, the better) 2 eggs, lightly beaten ¼ cup rice wine 2 tablespoons soy sauce 1 tablespoon sesame oil Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste ½ cup green onion tops, chopped Leftover cooked chicken, pork, beef or shrimp (optional)

HOW TO PREP:

Pour 1 tablespoon of the oil in a large frying pan, and turn heat to high. When oil begins to shimmer, add onion and carrots and cook, stirring occasionally, until vegetables are softened and starting to brown. With a slotted spoon, remove vegetables from oil and place in a bowl. Set aside.

Pour remaining oil in the skillet, then add the garlic and ginger. Stir to mix well, then add the cooled rice, breaking up any lumps with a spoon. Toss well. When the rice is wellcoated, make a well in the center of the rice mixture and break the eggs into it. Scramble them right in the well, then stir, incorporating the eggs into the rice.

Return the reserved vegetables to the pan and stir. Add rice wine and stir well. Feel free to add leftover cooked chicken, pork, beef or shrimp.

The secret to great fried rice is starting with cold, cooked rice.

Feel free to add leftover cooked chicken, pork, beef or shrimp.

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Add soy sauce and sesame oil, stirring to incorporate them.

Taste to see if salt and pepper are needed. Remove rice mixture from the heat, stir in the green onions and serve.

Thai Pineapple Fried Rice (Makes 4 servings) WHAT YOU WILL NEED:

¼ cup soy sauce or tamari 1 tablespoon hoisin sauce 1 tablespoon rice vinegar 3 tablespoons coconut or canola oil 1 small carrot, sliced on the diagonal ½ cup chopped onion 1 small head Napa cabbage, shredded 3 green onions, white parts minced and green parts sliced 1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger ½ teaspoon minced garlic 1 serrano chile, seeded and minced ½ cup raw cashews 4 cups cold cooked jasmine rice or other long-grain white rice ¼ cup cilantro leaves ½ cup small chunks fresh pineapple Lime wedges, for garnish Chopped cilantro leaves, for garnish

Pour in the cashews and stir lightly. Add the rice to the wok using a fork to break up any lumps as you go. Stir-fry until the rice mixture is hot and lightly browned.

Add the sauce to the wok and stir-fry until the sauce is almost completely absorbed, around 2 minutes. Stir in the sliced green onions, cilantro and pineapple. Transfer the fried rice to bowls and serve garnished with lime wedges and a light sprinkle of chopped cilantro.

HOW TO PREP:

In a small bowl, whisk together the soy sauce, hoisin and vinegar; set aside.

Heat a wok or large skillet. Add the canola oil and heat until the oil is smoking. Add the carrots, onion and cabbage, and cook over high heat, stirring, until fork tender, around 5 minutes.

Add the minced whites of the green onion, ginger, garlic and chile, and cook until fragrant, around 1 minute.

Som Tum ( Papaya Salad) (Makes 4 servings) WHAT YOU WILL NEED:

½ cup roasted cashews, plus extra for garnish 2 small cloves garlic, peeled ¼ teaspoon salt 2 fresh Serrano chiles, sliced ½ teaspoon raw or white sugar 2 tablespoons fresh lime juice 1 to 2 tablespoons fish sauce (nam pla), to taste 8 grape tomatoes, halved 2 medium carrots, peeled and cut on the diagonal ½ pound green beans, cooked 1 small to medium strawberry papaya

HOW TO PREP:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spread the cashews in an even layer on a baking sheet. Place sheet pan in oven and roast cashews for 5 minutes.

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In a blender, mix the garlic, salt, roasted cashews, chiles and sugar together until a paste forms.

Transfer the paste to a large bowl, and add the lime juice and fish sauce, stirring to incorporate into paste mixture.

Add the tomatoes, carrots and green beans to the bowl and toss lightly.

Peel and coarsely grate or shred the papaya, discarding the seeds and inner membrane. Add papaya to the bowl and lightly but thoroughly toss all ingredients together. Taste and add seasoning if needed.

Sprinkle with extra roasted cashews and serve.

photos by Romney Caruso W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 7 3

Lo Mein (Tossed Noodles) (Makes 4 servings) WHAT YOU WILL NEED:

3 tablespoons sesame oil ¼ cup chopped zucchini ¼ cup chopped white onion ¼ cup broccoli florets ½ cup chopped carrots ¼ cup white button mushroom caps 1 cup unsalted chicken stock 2 tablespoons light soy sauce 2 tablespoons oyster sauce 1 tablespoon dark soy sauce 1 pound lo mein noodles, thick egg noodles or uncooked ramen noodles ½ teaspoon sesame oil Freshly ground black pepper

HOW TO PREP:

Heat oil in a wok over high heat until hot and shimmering. Add all vegetables and stir-fry until they are fork tender, around 5 minutes. Transfer to a plate and set aside.

Add chicken stock, light soy sauce, oyster sauce and dark soy sauce to the wok, and bring to a boil over high heat. Add the noodles and stir. Cook until most of liquid has been absorbed and noodles are just tender, around 5-10 minutes.

Return the reserved vegetables to the wok and stir to incorporate them. Stir in the sesame oil. Season with pepper and serve.

Lo mein noodles are made with eggs and look similar to spaghetti.

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Thai Peanut Sauce WHAT YOU WILL NEED:

½ cup smooth peanut butter 3 tablespoons unsweetened coconut milk 3 tablespoons hot water 1½ tablespoons fresh lime juice 2 teaspoons brown sugar 2 teaspoons soy sauce 2 teaspoons grated ginger root 1 garlic clove, minced ½ teaspoon Sriracha Pinch of kosher salt

HOW TO PREP:

Combine all ingredients in a food processor or blender and purée until smooth.

Pad Thai (Makes 4 servings) WHAT YOU WILL NEED:

4 ounces wide rice noodles ¼ cup peanut oil 1 tablespoon tamarind paste, or more to taste ¼ cup fish sauce (nam pla) ¹⁄₃ cup honey 2 tablespoons rice vinegar ½ teaspoon red pepper flakes ¼ cup green onion tops, chopped 1 garlic clove, minced 2 eggs 1 small head Napa cabbage, shredded 1 cup mung bean sprouts ½ pound 40⁄50 count shrimp, peeled ½ cup roasted chopped peanuts, for garnish

¼ cup chopped fresh cilantro, for garnish 2 quartered limes, for garnish

HOW TO PREP:

Place noodles in a large bowl and add boiling water to cover. Let sit until noodles are barely tender (check frequently to make sure they don’t get too soft). Drain the noodles and drizzle them with 1 tablespoon of the peanut oil to keep them from sticking together; set aside.

Place 1 tablespoon tamarind paste, fish sauce, honey and vinegar in a small saucepan over medium-low heat to make the sauce. Bring almost to a simmer. Stir in the red pepper flakes and set aside.

Place remaining oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat; when the oil shimmers, add the green onions and garlic and cook for about a minute or so.

Add the eggs to the pan.

When the eggs begin to set, scramble them lightly.

Add the cabbage and bean sprouts, and continue to cook until the cabbage begins to wilt.

Add the shrimp to the pan.

When the shrimp begin to turn pink, add the reserved drained noodles to the pan. Stir in the sauce.

Toss everything together to coat.

Garnish with peanuts, cilantro and lime wedges, and serve.

photos by Romney Caruso ROUSES

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 7 5

by David W. Brown

Unless you grew up eating it, there’s little chance you have much experience preparing Asian cuisine. Thankfully, there is one dish that is accessible and delicious, and makes a perfect romantic dinner for two (provided you spring for a bottle of wine). That dish is the classic vegetable stir-fry.

“Cooking stir-fry at home is about cooking something very small very quickly,” says Marc Ardoin, the corporate chef of Rouses Markets.

“Once you start cooking, you don’t stop until the dish is finished.”

People often think “hibachi grills” when they think of stir-fry, and a long counter with seating for a dozen. You see yourself flipping around your metal utensils and flicking a cooked carrot across the table and into someone’s mouth. No offense, but that ain’t you. If you’re reading an article in a free grocery store magazine to learn how to make a stir-fry, do not spin your knives like a bored samurai, and do not flick at your dinner guest a veggie that was freshly seared in hot oil. That’s how a date night turns into a ride in an ambulance.

Because this dish is all about speed, preparation is everything. When it comes to the vegetables you use, it’s OK to be creative.

Peppers, onions, carrots and shallots are obvious choices, but you can also go with things like cabbage and eggplant. No matter what you choose, however, Ardoin recommends chopping everything small and of a uniform size. “You don’t want anything big that takes a long time to cook,” he says. “It’s prepped, right there, and ready to go.”

A stir-fry is forgiving when it comes to starches as well. If you’re using noodles, you can go with rice noodles, egg noodles or even leftover pasta from that dish you made after reading the Rouses Italian issue. Whatever you prefer! Cook and cool your pasta before you begin. If you want to use rice instead, go with a regular long grain rice — again, cooked and cooled. When preparing rice for a stir-fry, rather than using two cups of water for every one cup of rice as you might normally do, try using one-and-three-quarters cups of water per cup of rice. That makes the rice a little firmer and helps it stand up to the frying process. You don’t want it to be too mushy.

The only hardware you really need when making a good stir-fry is that same wok that everyone gets as a wedding gift. Once your

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ingredients are prepped, the first step is to heat up your oil in the wok. You’ll want to use a blend of sesame and vegetable (or canola) oil. A blend is necessary because sesame oil has a very low smoke point and won’t hold up to high heat. (It will break down and burn faster.) But add a little vegetable oil, and the smoke point of the entire blend is elevated.

“You’re not using a lot of oil,” says Ardoin. “Use two or three tablespoons, total, in your wok.”

Once the oil is almost smoking hot, it’s time to make your base. First, add garlic, ginger and green onions to the wok and quickly stir. (This is the most common base flavor.) Once they are heated — and they will heat quickly! — add red chili flakes to your liking, and then the harder vegetables you’ve chosen to cook, such as carrots. After a few seconds, begin adding vegetables that don’t take as long to cook — things like onions and bell peppers. Stir as frequently as you can.

You’re stirring. You’re frying. Now it’s time to add your noodles or rice. “Right before you add one of them,” recommends Ardoin, “toss some fresh basil in there so that it gets a really fragrant, peppery bite.” Because you’re working with oil at such a high heat, things are going to cook quickly. Once your noodles or rice are nice and crispy, it’s time to add soy sauce or fish sauce.

Which you choose depends on your personal preference and your doctor’s recommendations with respect to your blood pressure. (Fish sauce is really salty.) “For soy sauce, you might use two ounces for a dinner for two. You don’t need a lot because the ingredients you’ve used will add so much flavor to it.”

And just like that, you’re done.

For your romantic dinner for two, if you’re drinking wine, go for something dry. You’ll have so many other flavors in your dish that you don’t want anything too fruity. A sauvignon blanc is a winning idea, or a dry chardonnay. If you’re going all in on this thing, consider warming some sake.

But don’t start drinking until you’re done cooking: That oil is hot, and avoiding an ambulance while stir-frying is always one of our goals.

Essential Asian Ingredients

Take a Wok on the Wild Side

coconut

sauces

Coconut water is the slightly opaque, naturally sweet liquid found inside young coconuts with green or yellow skins. Coconut cream is an emulsion of coconut meat and plain water. Do not confuse coconut cream with cream of coconut, which has added sugar. (If you like piña coladas, and getting caught in the rain, you like cream of coconut). There’s also coconut milk, which is made with coconut meat and water too, but the mix is less coconut, more water. Coconut milk is thinner than coconut cream, and has a lower fat content. The easiest way to remember the difference between coconut cream and coconut milk is to think of the difference between dairy cream and dairy milk. Finally, there’s coconut flour, which is made from dried coconut meat. It is a gluten-free alternative that’s high in fiber, protein and healthy fats, and low in in sugar, digestible carbohydrates and calories.

Duck sauce is an orange, fruity, sweet-andsour sauce typically used for dipping fried food. It usually comes in packets alongside Chinese hot mustard with your Chinese takeout. That Chinese hot mustard gets its heat from brown mustard seeds, which are stronger than the black and white mustard seeds used in most other types of mustard.

Fish sauce is a thin, pungent, fermented mix of salted anchovies and water that’s similar to soy sauce.

Hoisin sauce — sometimes called Chinese barbecue sauce — is another popular Asian condiment. This dark, thick, salty, slightly sweet sauce is made with fermented soybean paste, garlic, vinegar, sesame oil, chilis, and other flavors and spices.

spices Chinese Five Spice Powder is a commonly used ingredient in Chinese and Taiwanese cuisine. It includes all five flavors: sweet, sour, bitter, salty and umami; hence the name.

Chinese Five Spice Powder contains star anise, cinnamon, cloves, Szechuan peppercorns and fennel seeds, but may also by flavored with anise seeds, ginger root, orange peel, nutmeg, turmeric, cardamom pods and licorice.

Curry powder is a mixture of finely ground spices, such as cumin, turmeric, ginger and coriander, used for making curry, a type of stew. There’s actually no such thing as curry powder in India; there are just spices mixed together for savory, spiced Indian dishes. These mixtures, which vary from region to region, are better known in India as garam masala.

Miso is a traditional Japanese seasoning made of ground, fermented soybeans, salt, rice and other ingredients. It can be used as a soup base or as part of a sauce, glaze or marinade.

Cilantro is one of the most widely eaten herbs in the world and a key flavor in many Asian cuisines.

Most of us are familiar with dried, grated ginger, the kind you find in a spice jar, but fresh ginger — the gnarly brown root sold in our produce department — is an equally essential part of Asian cooking. Fresh ginger’s flavor is more pronounced than dried, but cooking will mellow the flavor.

Lemongrass stalks, when finely chopped, add a unique citrusy note to Thai cuisine.

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Plum sauce, made with sugar, white or rice vinegar, salt, ginger, chili peppers and plums, is another sweet and tangy Chinese condiment. It’s a must for moo shu pork.

Use soy sauce or gluten-free tamari in place of salt when you’re seasoning glazes, sauces, stir-fries and soup.

Don’t confuse Sriracha, aka Rooster Sauce, with our local Tabasco. While both contain a mixture of distilled vinegar, chili peppers and salt, Sriracha is more ketchup-y and has added garlic and sugar. In America, when we think of Sriracha, we usually picture the rooster-decorated bottle produced by Huy Fong Foods.

buy it fresh

Limes are a mainstay of Thai and Vietnamese cooking. They are used mainly for their juice, although lime zest and leaves are also used in cooking.

Oyster sauce is a thick, sweet and savory sauce that’s thicker than fish sauce and made with cooked oysters, or “oyster essence.” It is widely used in Chinese cuisine, especially to add rich, savory flavor to soups and stir-fries.

Thai sweet chili sauce is a thickened mixture of chilis, vinegar, sugar and garlic. It’s the perfect dipping sauce for crispy fried Thai egg rolls.

oils & vinegars Rice vinegar and rice wine are made from fermented rice. Both are used to flavor sauces, marinades and rice.

Sesame oil is the Chinese cooking equivalent of olive oil in Western food preparations. Toasted sesame oil provides a deeper flavor than less flavorful, delicate oils.

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In Memoriam: Leah Chase

by Lolis Eric Elie, photo by Cheryl Gerber Now that cauliflower is being used to make everything from pasta and pizza dough to “rice,” it can be difficult to remember that bygone era when cauliflower was not counted among the nation’s most popular vegetables. I remember that time well. Back then, I had only tasted cauliflower when it was served as the white presence in a bland, steamed medley with carrots and broccoli. I dismissed it as being unworthy of my attention and palate. That might still be my position had I not tasted Leah Chase’s cauliflower and crab soup.

Chef Leah always said she did not like serving buffet-style. Nonetheless, that style became the signature lunch service at Dooky Chase when the restaurant reopened after Hurricane Katrina. There and elsewhere, what was once rare became the “new normal.” Chef Leah’s nod to the tableside service she preferred was to insist that waiters serve the gumbo or soup as an appetizer before diners joined the buffet line. I was there one lucky day when the cauliflower and crab soup was the soup du jour. For me, that soup was a revelation.

How much of the wonderful richness of that soup came from the cauliflower itself versus from the techniques and seasonings Chef Leah applied to that vegetable, I cannot say.

But I have never looked upon cauliflower with the same jaundiced eye since.

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With Leah Chase’s recent passing I’ve had occasion to reflect on her legacy in and out of the kitchen. When talk turns to her cooking, much of the conversation is about gumbo z’herbes and stuffed shrimp and fried chicken and other mainstays of the Creole/Southern culinary canon. The point often missed in such conversations is that Leah Chase was a creative, dynamic cook who wasn’t constrained by the dishes for which she was best known. She was clearly ready and willing to branch out, make something as unexpectedly wonderful as her cauliflower and crab soup.

In 1997, Chef Joe Randall teamed with Marriott Corporation on a fundraising dinner for the Taste of Heritage Foundation, an organization that sought to identify and celebrate our nation’s greatest African American chefs. On the night before the event, Chef Leah hosted the chefs at her restaurant. The star of the show for me was a strange meat stewed in a tomato gravy. It tasted sort of like chicken, but what strange bones that chicken had!

Finally, when Chef Leah came out of the kitchen, she answered the question we’d all been asking each other. The wonderful stew she’d served was made of cowan, or turtle. She promised to make some more of it especially for me if I brought her a cowan.

But if I did, she said, it had to have the feet

still on it. She wanted to be sure it was what it was supposed to be and not some random roadkill. Like all great chefs, she had her standards…

The late Rudy Lombard grew up going to Dooky Chase’s Restaurant. When he opened Lombard’s, his own restaurant, in Oakland, California, one of his chefs thrust a spoon toward him and said, “Taste this.”

“What is it?” Lombard asked. It turns out the chef had re-created the steak sauce Chef Leah had served at her restaurant years before. We sometimes forget that, long before Dooky Chase became associated so closely with Creole cuisine, it was just a great restaurant where gumbo and stuffed shrimp shared the menu with steaks and lobster Thermidor. So powerful were that chef’s memories of those times and that flavor that he had worked for years to re-create it.

Now that Leah Chase is no longer with us, we have not just lost a library of old recipes, techniques and flavors. We have also lost something of ourselves. But we’ll have the memories of the great meals this esteemed chef served us, and they will have to suffice.

C H E E R S to 100 Y E A R S !

In honor of Community Coffee’s centennial year, we want to celebrate communities that inspire us. Let’s raise a cup to the incredible communities of Community® coffee drinkers who are helping to usher in our next 100 years.

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CommunityCoffee.com/100years

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