Divine Decadence
Everyone remembers Sally Bowles referring to her green finger polish as “divine decadence” in the musical Cabaret. It could define a number of other things, mostly illegal I suspect, but none more accurately than the cuisine of New Orleans. As an ex-pat of that fabled city, I often get nostalgic for its spell, and the easiest way to shed my Big Easy blues is food. I often cook Creole dishes, especially for dinner parties. Granted, my guests are sometimes taken aback by the richness of the meals, but, like Paula Deen says, you’ll be fine as long as you don’t eat like this every day. Friends who are watching their weight have learned to either check their diets at the door or let me know when they’re ready to splurge and fall way off the wagon. In my culinary...
Read MoreApocalypse Now? Maybe not.
HBO’s darkly amazing new series, True Detective, co-stars Matthew McConaughey, Woody Harrelson and south Louisiana. I use that particular billing because the surreal landscape is such a strong character it’s difficult to imagine its denizens being anywhere else. The third episode had the guys driving through an embattled terrain more wet than dry, and talking about how the land there is fast disappearing. Having lived in New Orleans, I knew this was no plot gimmick. Thanks to logging, drilling, oil spills, dredging and other man-made nightmares, the Gulf of Mexico gobbles up a football field of Louisiana wetland every hour. Every hour! No, that’s not a typo. When the French arrived in 1699, appropriately enough on Mardi Gras day, they christened the new colony...
Read MoreEbony & Ivory
After publishing novels more than thirty years, I’ve grown accustomed to all sorts of letters and emails from my readers. The most interesting and unusual one I ever received came last week from a 65-year-old woman living in the Midwest. It was in response to my latest novel, Creole Son, about French painter Edgar Degas’s 1872-3 visit to New Orleans and his encounter with an exotic caste classification based on degree of skin color. For those who didn’t read the book or are unfamiliar with the system, an octoroon is a person who is one eighth black and seven eighths white. Below is an old lithograph of a mulatto (left) and a quadroon, a person one quarter black, three quarters white. I was given permission to publish the following letter on the...
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