FIX YOURSELF A PLATE By David W. Brown Photos by Romney Caruso
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hen Linda Green was young, her grandmother would cook ya-ka-mein, a creole dish for which New Orleans is now famous. All the neighbors in her Central City community would smell the spicy noodle soup cooking and show up with a bowl in hand—literally. They’d sit on the porch until the ya-ka-mein was ready, and everyone would get their share, eat and shoot the breeze. “Ya-ka-mein is one of New Orleans’s best kept secrets,” says Linda, who is herself a New Orleans institution: an acclaimed chef who is called “the Ya-Ka-Mein Lady” for her success in bringing her family’s recipe to the world. Her culinary repertoire covers the whole span of down-home cooking. Food, family and community are intertwined, and a single bite of some special dish can transport us across decades. Her smothered duck, for example, takes her back to her childhood. It is an old family recipe resurrected for New Orleans festivalgoers. And like the ya-kamein for which she is celebrated, she learned the recipe from her mother and grandmother. “It’s all about family,” she says. “My mom, my auntie, my grandma—they showed us how to be a family, and that’s what I am with my children and grandchildren. They cooked and that’s how I learned to cook.”
As a child, her job in the kitchen was to chop vegetables next to her mother. “Oh Lord,” she says, “I used to have a big ol’ knife and a chopping board! I had to cut the stalks of celery, peel the garlic, chop the parsley, cut the green pepper— I had to do all that.” Her smothered duck was born of a Thanksgiving tradition.
They always had turkey and duck alongside oyster dressing, mirlitons and bell peppers. (“And you’ve got to have gumbo, definitely,” she explains.) When she was a child, though—seven or eight years old—she couldn’t quite get on board with the idea of eating duck. It scared her, so her mom took the oyster dressing and used it to stuff the duck. “Oh my God,” she says. “Let me tell you something: My mama cooked that duck, and every year after that, they could have anything they wanted on Thanksgiving and Christmas, but they had to have a duck in their house for me. I’ve been with duck ever since.” Her mother taught her how to cook it. “It’s tender,” she says. “It melts in your mouth.” The recipe is simple, she says, because many of the spices lining store shelves today simply weren’t available when she was young. They used salt and pepper and fresh vegetables, and she still does. The duck is quartered and washed, well-seasoned and set aside. Meanwhile, she prepares the roux: the goal is a caramel color, made with flour, duck fat, onion, green bell pepper, parsley, garlic and celery. She sautés her roux, getting her seasoning tender, and once it hits the right color, she adds water until the gravy is just right: not thick, not thin, but rather, where it can hug the rice just so. Once it’s ready, she pours the gravy on the duck, covers it in foil, and bakes it in the oven for an hour and 45 minutes. Once it’s cooked, she removes the foil and lets it roast just long enough to get a golden-brown color. “After that, baby, you’re good to go. You’re going to get you some smothered duck with gravy and rice, and a little potato salad on the side.” Her smothered pork chop recipe goes much in the same way. “When I tell you— mmm, mmm, mmm, mmm—it’s nothing nice. It’s delicious.” Serve it with potato salad, greens, cornbread and bread pudding.
♥ As for the cuisine for which she is most famous, she says it is a result of the great diversity of the city of New Orleans. “Ya-ka-mein is a Chinese dish,” she says. “But you have to understand that, even though it’s a Chinese dish, it’s an African American dish, too. What we did was take it, put our own spices and herbs in it, and
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