New Orleans BBQ Shrimp: Slow Food Fast
One of the goals of slow food aficionados is preserving traditional, regional cuisine. New Orleans has been doing this for almost three centuries, mainly because Creole food put down such deep, irrefutable roots. Thanks to Louisiana’s incredible natural bounty from rivers, forests, bayous, and the Gulf of Mexico, cooks from France, Spain and Africa were inspired to create America’s one true native cuisine. Their world-renowned gumbos, jambalayas and étouffées are as far from fast food as you can get, and the fact that millions of foodies still seek them out proves they’ve stood the test of time. When a handful of New Orleans chefs reconfigured classic recipes to fit the nouvelle cuisine demands of the ’70s, customers stayed away in droves...
Read MoreCreole Defined: Not An Exact Science
It’s unexpected fun when a book title raises questions, i. e., Creole Son, my novel about painter Edgar Degas’s time in New Orleans. When people ask me to define Creole, I say it’s probably not what they think but lots more besides. Few ethnic terms are more misunderstood. The word comes from the Portuguese/Spanish criar meaning “to breed” and was applied to those born and bred outside the mother country. They were called criollos, which morphed into Creoles. The two most famous Creoles are probably Empress Josephine, born on the French Caribbean island of Martinique, and Simon Bolivar, a Spanish Creole born in Venezuela. Degas’s New Orleans-born mother Celestine made him half Creole. Creoles can also be of Portuguese, Italian...
Read MoreTwelfth Night at the Eleventh Hour
Like film actors wanting retakes, writers sometimes want to change a published work. Perhaps they’re unhappy with certain phraseology or maybe it’s something serious like a dropped plot thread, character development, or lack thereof. Turning a raw manuscript into a published book is a tedious process involving not just the author but editors, publishers, agents, and the occasional friend whose opinion is valued. You’d think writers would have every opportunity to get things just right, but other factors can be at work. Case in point, my historical novel Twelfth Night (1997). The contract required a “darkly erotic” story, but not until that first submission did I fully realize what was expected. My editor sent me back to the drawing...
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