Bayou, By Her By Sarah Baird Photos by Denny Culbert One of the great universal mysteries that still exists — at a time when mystery seems to be falling by the wayside — is how a food memory is created. Out of all the dishes eaten over all the years, what makes a single flicker of a bite linger in the mind? What elevates it to a gauzy, glimmering thought over other delicious encounters? One of the ephemeral moments that’s taken up long-term residency in my brain is the first time I ate a slice of tarte à la bouillie — 2015 or 2016, I want to say, but years are irrelevant in the rearview — at a pop-up bakery in a (now defunct) Central City butcher shop hosted by Mosquito Supper Club’s Melissa Martin.
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y this point, I had already gathered to dine at Martin’s long, ocean-hued table to eat the spoils of her generational culinary legacy, and showed off my two left feet at a zydeco dance in St. Maurice Church where Martin provided sustenance between songs. Born and raised in Terrebonne Parish, Martin’s cooking always feels wholly of herself, and for a while, a roving jamboree of music and merriment celebrating all things South Louisiana seemed to follow her wherever she decided to cook. But when I hoisted a fresh piece of tarte à la bouillie from its milky, sea-glass-colored stand and the velvety richness of the French custard pie melted in my mouth, I felt like I had truly learned something about Martin’s bayou home. It felt like memories distilled.
“From the beginning, I…set some boundaries. I cooked only the food I grew up eating — the style of food that my grandmothers, mom and aunts cooked. It was a style of food I never came across in New Orleans — full of flavor and stripped down,” Martin writes in her 2021 cookbook, Mosquito Supper Club: Cajun Recipes from a Disappearing Bayou. “I wanted to elevate the cuisine of the women in my life. They were my muses, and I intended to carry on their recipes and share them with whoever wanted to have a seat at the table.”
otherworldly nature of her Cajun home. Crabs are “the summer sun held together by shell and seawater” and “poetry”; okra is delicious, you just “need to know how to handle the slime” and Cajuns themselves are “standing guard at our stoves, resilient to the changing landscape…the bridge from the past to the present, holding the land and sea together.”
As the above meditation suggests, Martin is not only preternaturally gifted at channeling the dazzling magic of her bayou home onto a plate — from her earliest pop-up iterations to Mosquito Supper Club’s current beloved, permanent restaurant home — but she’s also a skilled author. Her recipe-packed love letter to South Louisiana cooking recently won the nationally coveted International Association of Culinary Professional’s Cookbook of the Year, but the soul of the work remains so deeply rooted in the mud of the bayou that it makes anywhere above I-10 feel like the “North.” Lyrical — almost musical — in its composition, Martin speaks about ingredients affectionately enough for them to be kinfolk and doesn’t shy away from alluding to the
Martin also sees so cloudlessly how paperthin the walls are between South Louisiana’s hardscrabble past and uncertain future; oysters as bellwethers for marine health and oysters as victim of climate change; and the beauty of the region’s brackish waters and their potential for destruction. The seams holding it all together are tenuous at best. Decades of environmental degradation and human destruction are causing not only the land itself to vanish — swallowing up coastline at an almost unfathomably breakneck pace — but threaten the very fiber of South Louisiana’s identity. “Our marshes are breeding grounds for shrimp, oysters, crabs, fish and more seafood — these creatures not only make up a large part of our diet in South Louisiana but also comprise our traditional industries. The environmental and physical scope of the region has changed. Only when fishermen started noticing lakes widen and bayous and marshes disappearing did we realize W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 3 7
