Crisis of Culture in New Orleans

[Allen H]

This is the title of an essential though distressing series of articles that I am just catching up with. Written by Howard Reich of the Chicago Tribune, the most recent article, "Lost Treasures," details the obliteration, in the post-Katrina flooding last year, of several priceless collections relating to early New Orleans jazz. The article’s subhead summarizes nicely: “Treasures of music lovers now just so much debris” and “Even as the city rebuilds, it is clear 'a whole universe' of jazz history is lost.”

The article appeared in last Monday’s (Nov. 27th) Tribune and can be found at the newspaper's website along with other articles and videos dealing with the effects of the New Orleans disaster on jazz. (Type www.chicagotribune.com/crisis to access the section.)

Among the collectors whose losses are detailed by Reich:

-Dr. Michael White, clarinetist, owner of more than 50 rare clarinets as well as hundreds of photos and 78 rpm records. “His four-bedroom, three-bath house in the Mirabeau Gardens area of Gentilly had overflowed with rare treasures of America's first Jazz Age: handwritten notes from his interviews with jazz musicians born at the start of the 20th Century; a gleaming white mouthpiece that New Orleans clarinet icon Sidney Bechet once owned; scores for old Baptist songs; delicately lettered hatbands from extinct New Orleans brass ensembles.” White had begun interviewing early New Orleans musicians in the 1970s, realizing that fewer and fewer were still alive. “The jazzmen generously shared their secrets. New Orleans bassist Charles Zardis, who was born in 1900, told White what Louis Armstrong was like as a child still trying to play cornet, in the Colored Waifs Home. Trombonist Preston Jackson, who was born in New Orleans in 1903, told White how Bechet really sounded on the clarinet--live, not on record.” His reaction upon returning home after the flood is described: “’When I first came into the house, it felt like I had been cut to pieces and my body was just scattered all over the house,’ said White, who recalled hearing records crunch under his feet as he stepped inside a home that had been engulfed for weeks. White instantly realized he had lost it all--everything but a few 19th Century clarinets he had tossed into his car before escaping the city with Katrina approaching. As White assessed the damage, he opened instrument cases that were caked in mold and mildew and sludge. ‘It felt like there were bodies in there," he said.’

-Danny Barker, guitarist and banjo player, played with many of the greats and befriended Jelly Roll Morton in the late 1930s. He became interested in early jazz and, like White, had tried to document as much as possible, giving questionnaires to New Orleans musicians as long ago as the 1940s. These questionnaires, as well as black and white negatives of musicians he had known, handwritten notes, and artifacts, were destroyed.

-Sybil Kein, whose quarter-century quest had been to “find and reconstruct long-lost Louisiana Creole folk songs, a precursor of New Orleans jazz. Kein had traveled Louisiana, Europe and the Caribbean to track Creole descendants and listen to them sing these tunes to her. She transcribed the melodies and lyrics onto score paper, piecing together more than 150 of these songs and recording a fraction of them on CD. ‘I'm told I had the largest collection in the world by some of the other guys who had collected a few’ of the songs, said Kein. But when she returned to her New Orleans home on Spain Street, in the Gentilly neighborhood, she realized that 8 1/2 feet of floodwater had destroyed her library of Creole song, as well as 5,000-plus books, 1,000 baptismal records of slaves and free people of color, interviews with musicians and other original research for books she was planning.”

-Michael Gourrier, “who for decades amassed documents on antebellum orchestras in which many post-Civil War black musicians learned to read score--laying the groundwork for the emergence of jazz.”

[John P. Cooper]

A monumental loss.

[clinthopson]

I had dinner the other night with an A-M friend who had just visited her family in N.O. She said that things were slowlygetting back to normal, except in the 9th ward and St. Bernards, of course, but that she noticed a lot fewer brown faces.

[shrugs]

Originally Posted by clinthopson

but that she noticed a lot fewer brown faces.

where was she?

[shrugs]

There was tremendous loss of artifacts and historical items that resulted from the flood waters. The long-standing flood waters really did major damage.

Check out this site:

http://www.walteringlisanderson.com/

[shrugs]

Originally Posted by clinthopson

I had dinner the other night with an A-M friend who had just visited her family in N.O. She said that things were slowlygetting back to normal, except in the 9th ward and St. Bernards, of course, but that she noticed a lot fewer brown faces.

and what is normal?

and did she actually set foot in St. Bernard Parish?

[clinthopson]

Originally Posted by shrugs

and what is normal?

and did she actually set foot in St. Bernard Parish?

I don't know exactly where she went. Her family lives in N.O. so I imagine she was repeating what she had been told along with her personal observations.

From all the reports I've seen and read, a great many brown people haven't come back.

Maybe you could fill us in more.

I plan to visit N.O. in '08, lunch is on me.

[shrugs]

Originally Posted by clinthopson

I don't know exactly where she went. Her family lives in N.O. so I imagine she was repeating what she had been told along with her personal observations.

From all the reports I've seen and read, a great many brown people haven't come back.

Maybe you could fill us in more.

I plan to visit N.O. in '08, lunch is on me.

First off, thanks in advance for lunch. I may know a spot you have never been to.

The whole "less brown people" in New Orleans thing is just not true.There are less people period. But if you were to look at population numbers, I believe the percentages with be similar to pre-Katrina percentages with the only major difference being the total population. And of course the increase in our friends from South of the Border.


I am around faces of all colors all day long. I work in the Fauburg Marigny and walk through the Quarter and CBD every day after work.

Stay in certain areas of town and it will be white. But they were that way before the storm.

So when I hear that someone has said there are less brown faces in New Orleans, I wonder where did they go while they were here.

St.Bernard Parish is busting it's ass to come back. In the Lower Nine, the people haven't done much at all.

[clinthopson]

shrugs,

I appreciate the update from one who be there.

[hornplayer]

Kim Severson had an interesting piece in the NY Times Food section yesterday. I wonder what Alan Richman was thinking? I've met him, and tho I'd classify him as a "curmudgeon," I found his attitude downright hateful. I know both Poppy Tooker and Leah Chase, and they're too much ladies to say for print what they must be thinking... but I thought you'd enjoy this article, anyhow...

‘Faerie Folk’ Strike Back With Fritters
By KIM SEVERSON
New Orleans


PEOPLE here despise FEMA, insurance companies and anyone who has anything to do with levees.

But in a city with postal service so spotty that delivery of a magazine is cause for a party, a magazine writer from New York has moved to the top of the New Orleans hate list.

For eight pages in the November issue of GQ, Alan Richman, a veteran food writer, talked trash about New Orleans and its food. He did not just take a few jabs at some subpar gumbo. The man essentially called New Orleanians fat, lazy and too hung over to recognize good food. Mr. Richman suggested that before Hurricane Katrina, many of the big-name Creole restaurants — and here he may have a point — had the stodgy stink of 1950s French hotel food and might not be worth saving.

But what provoked the most vitriol was his assertion that there is no such thing as a Creole.

“I have never met one and suspect they are a faerie folk, like leprechauns, rather than an indigenous race,” he wrote. He added that “the idea that you might today eat an authentic Creole dish is a fantasy.”

That claim had the unifying force of an invitation to a seafood boil. An agitated city attacked.

“I’d like to throw him in the back room at Tipitina’s with all the Neville brothers and see if he still thinks Creoles don’t exist,” said Poppy Tooker, a cooking teacher who was raised in New Orleans.

Like some others involved with New Orleans food, she offers a vulgar gesture when Mr. Richman is mentioned. That’s because to say Creoles don’t exist is to deny the very culture that makes New Orleans different from every other city in the United States.

“You cannot live in New Orleans and not know what it means to be Creole,” said Greg Osborn, a New Orleans Public Library archivist and historian who is Creole. “There’s a connection among all Creoles that goes beyond the color of your skin.”

But when you try to get people to agree on just what a Creole is, you start to think Mr. Richman might be right. Ask six Louisianans to define it and you’ll get 12 answers.

“It’s the name everyone wants to be called but no one can tell you what it is,” said Dickie Breaux, owner of the Café des Amis in Breaux Bridge, a Cajun restaurant and music spot a couple hours’ drive west of New Orleans.

Louisiana Creole scholars use a textbook definition that transcends race and ethnicity. They say anyone whose ancestors were born in Louisiana during colonial times is a Creole. But Creole also means a genetic mix of colonial settlers, indigenous people and slaves, so it has a racial connotation. In Acadiana, the Cajun homeland in southwest Louisiana, Creole can be code for anyone who is not white. In New Orleans, some use the word to denote people of color with some white ancestry, but it is also claimed by white descendants of the French settlers.

The word has a larger meaning to people who live here. It takes in everything they are most proud of. It encompasses architecture, in the form of Creole cottages, and music, both zydeco and early jazz. And, of course, there is Creole food.

Not that any of that mattered much to Mr. Richman, who never liked New Orleans, although he came here on his honeymoon several years ago. (He is recently divorced, but insists he doesn’t blame the city.)

He says he was simply trying to write the first unsentimental piece about New Orleans food in a world in which having a contrarian opinion is no longer valued. “You have to be behind everything these days,” he said. “You have to be behind the president, you have to be behind New Orleans.”

After his article appeared, Mr. Richman was pilloried by bloggers. An e-mail petition called for his firing, based on “racist invective.” A spitting mad Brett Anderson, the food writer for The Times-Picayune, took him on in print, writing that “Richman’s story is a weakling’s idea of what it means to be tough.”

Despite the public pummeling, Mr. Richman is unrepentant.

“If people want to call themselves Creoles, fine,” he said. “I am now calling myself a tight end for the New York Giants.”

Leah Chase, 83, the city’s most revered Creole cook, hadn’t read the magazine. She is preoccupied with trying to reopen Dooky Chase’s, her restaurant, which was soaked in five feet of water. But she had heard plenty about it.

Last week, standing in front of her Federal Emergency Management Agency trailer, across from her restaurant in the Tremé neighborhood, she pointed out that she happened to be a real live Creole and that she cooked like one, too. But she was too polite to criticize Mr. Richman outright.

“You can never understand what is in a man’s heart,” she said.

One way to understand Creole food is to compare it with Cajun food. Creole is fancy and urban; Cajun is simple and country. Creole gumbo has tomatoes; Cajun does not. Creole dishes rely on butter; Cajun on pork fat.

The most important measure, though, is to remember that what ends up on the Creole plate is determined by who one’s grandmother was. The Creole kitchen has been touched by countries including Senegal, Gambia, Cameroon, Haiti, Spain, Cuba, Germany and Italy. The common denominators are the raw ingredients that grow in southern Louisiana and a cultural dip in French haute cuisine.

“It’s a better cuisine than any of them individually,” said Marcelle Bienvenu, one of Louisiana’s longtime culinary authorities.

Of course, like any culture’s menu, Creole cooking has expanded and contracted with every change that has rolled through town. Sometimes it has been for the better, as when the Italians brought artichokes and red gravy or when Cajun and Creole food met in Paul Prudhomme’s kitchen. Sometimes it has been for the worse, as when the lure of the tourist dollar turned some classic restaurants into Creole Disney.

After Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in late summer and early fall of 2005, home cooks and progressive restaurant chefs found that classic flavors like shrimp rémoulade and Creole cream cheese were as important to the city’s recovery as a good contractor, and easier to find. That added extra sting to Mr. Richman’s article. He attacked Creole culture exactly when people in New Orleans had become serious about preserving it.

One positive post-storm development has been the revival of old recipes. This year Ms. Bienvenu reissued her Cajun/Creole book, “Who’s Your Mama, Are You Catholic, and Can You Make a Roux?” (Acadian House Publishing). It has helped rebuild many cookbook libraries lost to the hurricanes.

She is also helping The Times-Picayune pull together a new cookbook. Less than two months after Katrina hit the city, the newspaper’s food editor, Judy Walker, began asking readers which recipes they had lost, and engaged more fortunate readers to fill the requests. She prints them in a reoccurring column, rebuilding the recipe files of the flood victims and turning young generations of cooks on to dishes they hadn’t heard of.

One dish that will be in the book is beef daube glace, which speaks to the fancier aspirations of Creole food. A proper Creole table in the 18th and 19th centuries was often set with slices of the daube, which traditionally requires a daunting day’s work boiling calves’ or pigs’ feet to make the gelatin that binds a mixture of boiled beef and chopped vegetables.

It appeared regularly at the réveillon, the meal served after midnight Mass on Christmas Eve and on New Year’s Eve. In the 1980s several restaurants tried to reignite the tradition by offering réveillon menus in December.

A more modern version of beef daube glace was developed in the early 1990s in the kitchen of Mr. B’s Bistro, a French Quarter restaurant that is still being renovated post-Katrina.

Gerard Maras, then the executive chef, dug through old cookbooks and talked to people who had eaten it for years before developing a dish that had the same flavor and texture but a more modern approach. Ms. Bienvenu will include it in the new book.

Barbara Trevigne doesn’t know much about beef daube glace, but she does know about the Creole link sausage called chaurice. A social worker, preservationist and performing artist, Ms. Trevigne calls herself a displaced Creole of color. She is living in a FEMA trailer while her soaked home is being rebuilt in the Seventh Ward, which is considered the most Creole of the city’s neighborhoods and which took on several feet of water.

She is waiting for a chance to fry some local chaurice, which takes its name from the Spanish chorizo and the French saucission. Ms. Trevigne used to buy hers from a local sausagemaker who lost his business to the flood.

“I miss all the food in the Seventh Ward, but I really miss that sausage,” she said.

Chaurice is highly seasoned with a slightly loose texture. Traditionally made with a mix of beef and pork, all-beef or all-pork versions are more common now. Its bite comes from black and red pepper, its depth from garlic and green onion tops, and its color from a handful of paprika.

Vance Vaucresson is from a Creole family that has been making chaurice for more than 100 years. Katrina took out the family sausage operation on St. Bernard Avenue, but a competitor from a nearby suburb of Metairie has allowed Mr. Vaucresson to make chaurice there while he rebuilds.

Mr. Vaucresson can talk about Creoles and sausage for days, but he was more excited last week when he watched rice fritters called calas boil in a pan of hot oil.

The cala (pronounced cah-LAH) has roots in Ghana. In 18th century New Orleans, Creole women of color who had the day off from their domestic jobs sold them out of baskets, shouting, “Calas, belles, calas tout chauds!“ (Beautiful calas, very hot!)

Save for a few Creole grandmothers, who made them for special events like First Communion and Mardi Gras, calas had almost faded away.

Since Katrina, they have reappeared in some restaurants, as a dessert or in the form of savory fritters made with wild rice and smoked catfish or with duck confit.

Ms. Tooker, who is not a Creole, became an unlikely savior of the cala. She has been making it for years at festivals and in cooking classes, and has used her position in the national Slow Food organization to raise the fritter’s profile. She makes the batter with baking powder, which traditionalists argue is all wrong. Some people think yeast gives the modern cala the flavor they remember from childhood. Other purists suggest no leavening at all, with a batch simply mixed the night before and allowed to gather natural bacteria and ferment in a warm place overnight.

For modern-day Creoles like Mr. Vaucresson, the leavening doesn’t matter a bit. What’s important is that one more piece of Creole history is being pulled back from the edge of extinction.

He stood in Ms. Tooker’s kitchen last week, eating calas as fast as she could pull them out of the hot oil.

“Whether it’s a good cala or bad cala doesn’t matter,” he said. “Any cala is a good cala because someone is still cooking them.”

He only wished Alan Richman had been in the kitchen to try one.

[shrugs]

http://www.vaucressonsausage.com/