LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

HEAD TO TOE

By Marcy Nathan, Creative Director

Iam one of those women who absolutely has to have a pedicure, even in winter. I have pretty feet—no hammer toes, crossover toes, or long toes that stretch past the other shorter ones. I could skip the polish and be fine. Still, twice a month, I go to Cindy’s Nails to get my hands and feet done.

I always take a book to read, but instead I usually end up looking at my phone—or worse, working. I was mid-pedicure and proofing the first few stories for this issue when I glanced at my feet and remembered, appropriately, that garlic cloves are also called toes. TOES! As in, “This little piggy went to Rouses Markets, this little piggy stayed home…” Which of course begs the question, why do we call a bulb of garlic a head of garlic and not a foot, or even a hoof?

One of the stranger things I learned while researching this issue is that you can taste garlic with your feet. Garlic contains a molecule called allicin—it’s what gives garlic its unique odor. Allicin can penetrate your skin, even the skin in your feet. Once it seeps into your bloodstream, it can travel all of the way to your mouth and nose.

Perhaps there should be a toenail polish color called Stinking Rose.

It’s not just your breath that can give away what you’ve recently eaten—or rubbed on your feet. Garlic gets into your sweat. If you’ve ever worked out with someone who had Chicken a la Grande a day or two before, you know exactly what I mean.

Chicken a la Grande is perhaps the most famous dish at Mosca’s, a roadhouse restaurant on Highway 90 in Avondale on the West Bank of New Orleans. There was a time in my life when someone could just mention Mosca’s, and the next thing you knew, my friend David—who was very well-connected—would be on the phone getting us a table. Someone (usually someone pregnant) would volunteer to drive so the rest of us could drink, and we’d be on our way. We could tell you what we were going to order before we even got to the Huey P. Long Bridge: Chicken a la Grande, of course, tossed salad with crabmeat, Spaghetti Bordelaise, Oysters Mosca. They cook everything to order at Mosca’s, and everything has garlic in it.

I was a child when I first began going to Mosca’s. My dad, an attorney, had once represented a client against Carlos Marcello, who was thought to be the mob boss of New Orleans. Marcello had been convicted in the Brilab corruption and labor racketeering case, and my older sister Nancy, who’d seen The Godfather, was convinced she was going to find a horse’s head in her bed. (Marcello was the landlord of Mosca’s.)

The stretch of highway in front of the restaurant was quiet and dark back then, and we’d make up stories about bodies buried in Avondale (Nancy wasn’t the only one with a vivid imagination in our family). None of these stories were true, of course. Carlos Marcello was just a tomato salesman, and there weren’t arms and legs of victims in the swamps of Avondale, just six to 10 garlic toes in the Chicken a la Grande.

Want the recipe for Mosca’s Chicken a la Grande? Visit our website and type “Chicken a la Grande” into the search bar at the top of the page. Enjoy!