PO-BOY VIEWS

By Phil LaMancusa

The closest “Culinary Buddha”

Louisiana’s cooking has ever had was a Chef named Paul Prudhomme, who dispatched wisdom, passion, and a world of flavors to the known world in his lifetime and beyond. Gate Gate Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha (gone on to the further shore of enlightenment).

As a guru, he taught us many things: that water tastes better when you drink it from your hands, how the magic of our food here is “twelve ingredients done twenty different ways,” how it’s okay to burn (blacken) your food, and how onions, celery, and bell peppers are the “holy trinity” of our cooking ingredients (with garlic as the Pope). Also, rumor has it, he was quoted as saying that “food is not adequately seasoned unless it hurts to eat it.”

Having three bedrock ingredients (or trinities) are not unusual: Spanish Cuisine has sofritto (tomatoes, peppers, and onions), the French have their mirepoix (onions, celery, and carrots), Greece, China, Italy, and India cooking all have a 'trinity' of sorts.

Define this 'trinity' thing? Consider it a recurrent flavor combination—a center of gravity in profile cooking. Even barbecue, with its myriad of interpretations has a ‘trinity’ of its own (pepper, vinegar, smoke).

So let’s examine this Creole/Cajun trinity thing—what we know and what we don’t know. Onions came over on the Mayflower. Garlic came up from the Southwest via Spanish Conquistadors. Peppers are native to the Americas, and that brings us into the seventeenth century. And now there’s the question of celery. Culinary celery probably began being cultivated in Italy and France in the 1600s. Before that it was used medicinally. Celery was farmed commercially in the late 1800s in the north (Kalamazoo, Michigan), and it grows in cooler climates, as do carrots.

And somehow, all of these forces came together in Southern Louisiana as the foundation of all that is considered to be present in our cooking—our defining culinary personality. When did this happen? Were they all out hitchhiking across the country and wound up in Louisiana together? Did they meet in a bar and start hanging out?

In perusing the Picayune Creole Cookbook, originally published in 1901, there is little mention of celery or bell peppers—certainly none in nine different gumbos, three jambalayas or even their Creole sauce recipe. Celery is used as a vegetable and in boiled shrimp and/or boiled crab, a lot is used to season the water used to cook. Certainly Cajuns who lived off the land most likely couldn’t afford the luxury of celery until middle twentieth century.

We know the French settlers in Louisiana may have been used to their mirepoix but likely would have had to get carrots from the north. Celery may have come down during the Civil War and possibly been grown here in the cooler months of November-December, but then what?

Logic tells us that without adequate refrigeration, only what could be grown and harvested in season and in proximity would make its way into our pots—onions, peppers (both mild and hot), parsley, watercress, and greens come to mind. Creoles would have had herbs as well: thyme, oregano, and bay leaves. Cajuns had all that and swamp insects, which deprived them of ingredients like tomatoes and wheat flour.

In the 1960s, when I migrated here, the “seasoning vegetables” (that which we now call the 'trinity') was ensconced in the local cooking. Celery was readily available as were potatoes (sweet and Irish), cabbage, carrots, onions, tomatoes, peppers, and little else as far as fresh vegetable staples went. There was plenty of fruit: avocados, pineapples, and bananas. Fruits and vegetables in season came and went. And coffee (and chicory)… lots of coffee.

At that time, the French Market was servicing over 3,000 people a day. There were meat markets and fresh seafood stalls along Decatur Street where tourists now shop for made-in-China souvenirs. There was a big super market just outside the Quarter (Schwegmann’s) that had, inside, a pharmacy, savings bank and a bar. Outside, they pumped gas for your car if you had one (lots of folks didn’t). It was a blue collar world then, and you could listen to the women as they made their groceries discussing what noodles to put in the Ya Ka Mein—whether to put pickle meat in their beans or: “First I make me my roux, good and brown, then I add me my seasoning vegi-tables, then my okree, crabs and swimps.” I miss those days.

Then the oil jobs moved to Houston, the shipping industry went to deeper ports, the bohemians were replaced by hippies and the whole culcha went to pot. Spanish sailor bars and Greek belly dancing joints started closing and just when it looked its worst for us. The tourists came like locusts and bailed us out. Ella Brennan bought Commanders Palace and took a chance on trading a German chef for a Cajun named Paul Prudhomme and suddenly we have a 'trinity' of vegetables.

It’s a good thing we didn’t have an HR back then, or they might have said that comparing the Father, Son and Holy Spirit to an onion, celery, and bell pepper motif was religiously derogatory—especially if you libel the Blessed Pope (who lives in Rome) to a head of garlic. We’re all gonna burn in Hell like a blackened red fish left too long in the pan.

In conclusion, the only thing that we know about the 'trinity' is that the combination occurred before the name was given, and once the name was given, it stuck like a cheap suit on a used car salesman, like ugly on an ape, like white on rice.

Come to think about it, here’s the next thing to ponder If a machine that polished rice into those little non-nutritional specks we consume didn’t occur until the late 1800s (1861, Sampson Moore), did the original settlers here eat brown rice with their red beans?