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.

“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.”

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.”

“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

Melissa Martin: I was down in Chauvin [in Terrebonne Parish] soon after the storm to bring my parents back home and assess the damage, and between Chauvin and New Orleans, neither place had electricity. Chauvin also didn’t have running water, but my parents would not leave their house. There wasn’t much I could do about that because I think they had to stay in their collective grief, but I realized pretty quickly that what I could do to help the community was not going to happen on the ground. I had to leave, which was a really, really painful decision.

As I drove toward Asheville, North Carolina to stay in a cabin with family — there were so many of us, my two sisters, their partners, my daughter, her partner, my brother, his partner, my other brother, his partner just cooking Cajun food in this huge house — I created the GoFundMe and made it live. And I was like, “Okay, this is my job for the next month.” Then I spent basically every moment of my life networking and fundraising, and frankly, losing my mind completely.

We injected $768,000 into the community by doing mini-grant programs: handing people anywhere between $400 to a thousand dollars; grocery cards — we served over 200 families with grocery cards — and a lot of hiring of electricians and plumbers to help people hook up a camper or a trailer on the land where their house was once. Then we put about $80,000 into a “float boat” sort of program, which was trying to help fishermen recover their seaworthy vessels that had been capsized in the bayous and lakes. We also bought new rigging and things like that for boats and crab traps.

The bayou is still just a disaster, but it’s better than it was at first. There are still trailers floating in the bayou, but there aren’t multiple homes floating and multiple boats capsized. But the levee for miles is still just covered with boats, houses, debris, cars — everything that had been picked up by water and blown over.

Excerpted from Mosquito Supper Club by Melissa Martin (Artisan Books). Copyright © 2020. Photographs by Denny Culbert.