Mayhaw Man

You could save yourself a bunch of comet, not to mention grief, if you just line the tub with visqueen or some heavy kind of plastic sheeting. You can just throw it away and voila! No dirty ring! (or dirty comments or looks from those who are a bit leary of pigs in tubs )

Bavila, First of all welcome to eGullet. We are always glad to help out an expat. I hope that you are doing well up North, as I understand that there are some nice folks there, but that they are in need of a cooking lesson or two. Here is a pretty good, very inclusive site that carries lots of our native foodstuffs. You will notice, for example, that on the sausage page not only do they have variety, but they list who made the stuff. Sausage from Poche's in Breaux Bridge (it's not really in BB and it is a pain to find at night, but they think that they are in BB ), bacon from Richard's, stuffed chickens from Hebert's in Maurice, etc. The Cajun Grocer can fix you up. If you put together a decent sized order the shipping is pretty reasonable as well, especially if you are ordering dry goods. Here is the link to Uncle Bill's File'. It is the best. Hand did! I am pretty sure that this would be the guy you bought it from as he is often at festivals and is a regular at the Crescent City Farmers Market as well. Good luck and stick around. We always have people looking for local advice in Acadiana and you could be a big help.

Libationgoddess, The Pharmacy Museum IS neat. God knows how many people walk by there and never open the door. There is a bunch of really cool stuff in there and the people working there are always well informed and interesting. I'm glad all of you had a great time. Hopefully you got here early enough to enjoy some of that freaky weather that we had last week. I thought that I had died and gone to Canada. And Ludja, I have been riding on the Carousel Bar since I was a tot (really), and a couple of times I have spend enough time on there that I was eventually turning the opposite direction from the bar . Does that mean that I was not moving? Physics is not my best subject. Lots of people fall in love with NOLA, but she's the kind of girl you really can't ever take home to meet your Mom.

I like the one on Magazine and Jefferson, now that they put the awnings out. When the weather is nice (like that freak weather we had last week, coolest week in August in recorded weather history in New Orleans-Lord it was nice) you can't get a table out there. People are standing waiting for some of the wi-fiers to get up. And as far as the coffee goes, I prefer it to PJ's. I did used to love PJ's when they first opened on Maple Street ('82 I believe). I was living around the corner on Pine and remember thinking what a great idea? A coffee shop that serves good coffee and no beignets.

My wife spends all day, everyday, surrounded by fine art and artists and then comes home and creates her own. I don't even pretend to understand half of what she does or says with or about art, but I emailed her this thread and I thought that her response was pretty interesting (probably makes more sense to some of you, as you no doubt have a better understanding of this stuff than I) Mrs. Mayhaw 8/27/04

I meant literally where the ducks are concerned. My (and many of my other duck hunting compatriots) are incredibly happy when you and your northern dwelling neighbors start wearing your parkas around October 15. When you have a warm winter it screws up my major winter pastime royally. Cold weather is the only thing that keeps those birds moving South and the earlier they get started the better our chances of having something to shoot and eat in November and December. As far as Camellia Grill goes I still like it for what it is, really. An ok breakfast place with a really cool, unchanging atmosphere. The food is alright and the service is better than average, but it is a fun place to go (my kids love it for the fun and my wife loves it because she can remember her glory days of being a Newcombite ). For Uptown Breakfast I am a huge fan of THe Blue Bird Cafe on Prytania (behind Touro M.C. more or less). Great food, quick service, and a really nice staff. I like the Quarter Scene, and I also enjoy Cafe DuMonde in the Quarter. A number of hotels have really good breakfasts, the Maison de Ville has a very nice place for a quiet breakfast where you can watch New Orleans businessmen getting ready for their day (excellent spot for securing a barely used NY Times ). I like the Royal Blend Coffee Shop on Royal for their pastries and their convenient Internet Access, but my go to coffee downtown is CC's on Royal. Great coffee and some of the best people watching in New Orleans. It is far enough back in the Quarter that it is frequented primarily by "colorful locals" more than the bermuda short crowd. As far as cemetaries go, it all depends on what you like. Historically the St Louis Cemetaries and the Jewish Cemetary Uptown (near Langenstein's) probably lead the pack, for Cemetary Architecture the Metairie Cemetary is (to me) the clear winner. There are a number of groups that give tours of the cemetaries (including, I think, the Park Service-While I am on the subject, the Park Service tour of the quarter is totally worth it. It's free and accurate, unlike our buggy drivers who tell a more colorful, but less accurate, version of our history) The Metairie Cemetary might be the most beautiful one in the US. They have a self guided tour with tape decks that is pretty good, but the place is definitely worth the trip. For pure New Orleans Weirdness a trip out to the ninth ward and the St. Roch Cemetary is well worth your while. While you are out that way you could have breakfast at St Roch Seafood. Hope this helps

Then don't open this very nice nice from John Besh's Restaurant August in New Orleans. Flash and music. But I like it. I'm like that.

I missed the "in January" part of your post the first time around. Early January or late January? Mardi Gras is on Tuesday, Feb 8 this year so if your trip is late January, you could catch a parade and a bag full of geegaws. You could also catch a headache if you don't go ahead and make reservations-The first part of the month is Sugar Bowl/New Years and the end of the month will be Mardi Gras-so make reservations early.

And so it begins..... Visitors begin returning to New Orleans about the same time that the ducks leave Saskatchewan for their annual visit. Nobody wants to play in the summer. There are a few threads in this forum that might be helpful to you, beginning with Jason and Rachel's account of their week of dining here late last fall. You also might want to try Something Typically New Orleans or Good Cheap Eats in New Orleans (there is no shortage of great, budget dining!) This thread was the reason I came to post on eGullet. These people needed some straightening out. or A visitors thoughts on New Orleans or an excellent thread that involves dining with children in New Orleans, but is really more of a survey of some good places to eat and things to do-kids or no kids A Hawaiian Guy in New Orleans with Kids and a very large appetite This should get you started salivating quite nicely. Please let us know what you are interested in and I am sure that there are lots of people willing to give you a little highly opinionated advice.

I would collect stock footage of stuff like fairs, food factories, and kitchy restaurants. Next I would get a c-list celeb. (a gabby local weatherman would do the trick) to do voice overs describing these places. I would place the celeb in a cute little soda shop or standing at a major mid western fair in front of a "all American" hot dog, caramel corn, corn dog, funnel cake wagon, for all of the close ups of the host. I would then run these shows on a major cable network that runs this kind of stuff. It could happen. Someone might be crazy enough to try it.

Well, if you insist on Andouille I will have to mail you some as I don't know if you can get the real stuff in France , or at least have the nice folks at Jacob's Andouille in Laplace send you some, I could get them to throw in some of their deliciously spicy hogshead cheese as well.

Actually, I believe that P.Brewing still make Sam Adams, but I could be mistaken. This is an article about Jim Koch's Contract and Brewing Operations that, while being a couple of years old, gives a nice overview of what kind of organization it took to build Samuel Adams into a decent sized brand. His fellow brewers may not love him, but he is a very good businessman.

Lucy, I think that for the good of eGullet we had better test this out. I would hate to see this fail for someone who was mailing back alot of stuff. So here's the plan. I will pm you my address. You pack a large box with cheese, chocolate, and whatever else looks good and can be mailed. When I get the box of loot (I mean test items, just a little joke), I will report back about what kind of condition it was in upon arrival. This is important. It must be done in the most scientific manner. Brooks I think that you had better send a wide variety of cheeses as we don't know what kind that they plan to ship and some may travel better than others-I will need to report on that.

Glad you guys brought this up. As you might know, I don't have a kitchen currently. I have a wreck. One of the many culinary consequences of this disaster has been that I am drinking coffee out of a steam blower machine (cheap espresso maker), a French Press (6 cup B, very nice, works great, etc) or my vacuum pot (which is cool, but kind of a pain so I don't usually set it up when I am on the run). BUT-what is the proper grind for a French Press? I think that I might be going a bit fine, but who knows. Can a coffee expert help me out here? Thanks,

Welcome to eGullet. While Moonpies are certainly an important and weighty topic, you will most likely find lots more here to hold your interest.

My "I used to be a beer can collecting geek and my collection is boxed up in the basement" just went off. The first beer can was a flat top. Here's a photo and some other info: http://www.bcca.com/bccacan1.html Staying with the Iron City theme, I have an Iron City can or two from the 70's that are still full. If the feds ever find out, my house may be designated a Superfund site. You guys lurk in the shadows everywhere. I'm glad to hear that you got a life. And you were right. I should have said that "the first widely marketed type of cans were run on bottling lines with crown seal closures"

What I am saying, as clearly as possible, is that there was a cross culturalization going on in the South that began before 1800 and that contunues to this day. I would also like to point out that most people did not live on a plantation, anymore than everybody in Dallas lives in Highland Park or people in New Orleans live in the Garden District. Most people, before and after the Civil War and until World War 2 lived on very small farms, owned almost exclusively by others, and were very, very poor. It was a common condition and that was the way that it was. Race draws no lines when it comes to rural poverty. And frankly, all of this talk about mammies and such makes me very uncomfortable. I have spent a large part of my life living in, and studying, the rural deep South and I know that much of what others think of me and the people I grew up around has been influencedby a few books and movies and has very little to do with actual living conditions. Life here was not Gone with the Wind. Not ever, at least not in the general sense. Everybody, anybody, who could afford to leave here for the North or the West for money and a more comfortable life did so. It was hard here and that has only really changed in the last 30 years. The food that we are discussing here, and we are discussing food, is what people eat now in the North. They are eating Soul Food Southern Food because it is good and because it is familiar. The same as any immigrant group and just in the same way others not native to the South are coming to enjoy it as they do food from other groups of immigrants.

Precious little went up North until during and after WW1 and really not until labor shortages forced Northern Factory owners to recruit workers in the South during the first year of the American involvement in the Second World War. Around 1942 there were alot more people going North to work in Chicago and Detroit than there were staying here. That's where the jobs were. Even during the most massive building campaign in the history of mankind the Southern United States could not sustain and industrial economy of any real import, as the infrastructure was almost wholly agriculturally based. The factories were already there in the North, but instead of making Buicks and Studebakers they were making Shermans and B-17's. And I know to an absolute certainty that "the lady of the house" as you put it, could flat cook her ass off. That's the way it was. No woman of any stature failed to learn how to cook well or at least be competant in the kitchen. Women who were useless around the kitchen were totally out of the norm. It's funny, my favorite aunt died last year at 98. She didn't cook a lick, and until this very moment I never considered that my family always considered her to be an odd bird. (I didn't. She was great fun) Maybe that's why they all felt that way. Oddly, most of the women who were raised in the early half of the century that I knew could cook very, very well, but they couldn't make candy for love or money. On the other hand, the ones that couldn't cook were great at sweets. I have no clue why that is, but I can think of a number of examples. I do know that most women of any color down here who were raised in the first half of the century could cook, and they cooked the same stuff alot of the time-availability and preference and cost all weigh in there to some degree, I suppose.

I think that Soul Food (as we know it today) and Southern Food (as we know it today in the very general sense) are different sums of many of the same parts, but not the same thing. I am going to ruminate on this a bit and post a more thorough response (read this as I am cooking to beat the clock right now), but I honestly believe that those two terms do not mean the same thing, although there are many elements in common. I also believe, pretty strongly, that Southern Food and Soul Food have developed not only because of access to ingredients, but also because of the very diverse cultures that existed here in the early 19th century and because of the influx of various immigrant groups (for various reasons, some good, some horribly wrong) in the mid and late nineteenth century that were basically eating whatever they could to survive there was a lot of cross pollenation of the cooking pots. I can tell you that poor is poor and until WW2 and a mass immigration North for both black and white Southerners just about everybody in the rural South was poor-it wasn't all Tara down here, not by a long shot. And when you have mouths to feed you eat what's there and make the best of it, and if it happens to be like what your neighbor is eating down the road that has as much to do with the available foodstuffs, similar food prep stiuations, and cost than it does with any historical/cultural circumstances.

Joey. First of all welcome to eGullet. I can tell by your informed and absolutely correct answer that you are a going to be an asset to the site. Nice Work. You are exactly right. I have no idea why they would want to do this other than because they can (and because the American Aluminum manufacturers are going down the tube like used beer at a ballgame). The Japanese usually use all of the strange/innovative packaging first, and then it eventually gets here. Sometimes they do brilliant things that just don't fly here (for example those big 1.5's that you see here occasionally-that is double walled plastic-just like an ice chest and it works great-but American consumers seem to prefer individual servings) and sometime they do stuff that is just plain weird (Asahi had a package that the whole top of the can came off-it was rediculous-when you take the top off of a thin aluminum can, there is nothing to support it-it's not much more than aluminum foil ) Now one thing about these bottles is that they will be able to be run (I assume) on a regular bottling line with few or no change parts. This is a good thing as all of that stuff is really expensive and I don't think that Iron City is Rolling in it right now, 6,000,000 cases ain't that much beer. Anheuser Busch last year (this is of the top of my head, but I 'm pretty close I think on barrellage) did 90 million barrells of production last year. Thats about 1,238,400,000 cases. Now that is a bunch of beer! When you see them move towards aluminum cans, then you will know that it has finally caught on. I am kind of assuming that Alcoa did the testing of cooking times when a bottle was sitting static at X temp. That is not the same temp that the bottle will be subjected to in the hand of a 98F plus human being. Aluminum is a great conductor of temp and while it cools fast, I would pretty much bet that works the other way. Of course, I am not an engineer-but I know alot about cold beer. Alot. One more thing. I mentioned above that these could be run on a bottling line, well guess what in beer history could also be run on a bottling line? Cone Top Cans! They were the first cans ever used and were originally made of steel and took a regular bottle crown. It took a while to perfect the seaming process for the flat top cans. Those things can be pretty valuable to collectors if you happen to have a few on the wall in Dad's rumpus room. It looks like cans have come full circle. I wonder what's next?

If you dig a bit you will find some very interesting discussions surrounding this topic in The eGullet Q&A with Cookbook Author Joyce White and a little bit more about the roots of Southern Food in this thread about Southern Foods. Is they or Ain't they. And in my opinion, the idea that "Soul Food" (incidentally, I really hate that term as a catchall for these types of foods) is evolving and using whatever is available in a given locale, be it up North or otherwise, is exactly what SHOULD be happening. If you are a believer that this type of food has it's roots in the Carribean and Africa and was brought here mostly during the nineteenth century (as I am) then you can easily understand my belief that this food has been evolving ever since it hit the shore in North America. While okra (yeah, I know I talk about okra too much, but it's helping me make my point ) was probably brought here from Africa through the Carribean, many of the ingredients that are now considered "soul food" would have been more or less unavailable to the average person who was brought here as a slave or indentured servant (chicken is a prime example, as I am pretty sure that it was not a domestically raised fowl in West Africa prior to the twentieth century-I believe that livestock, promarily cattle and goats, would have made up the domestically raised part of the West African diet). Those people sure enough weren't eating red velvet cake and macaroni and cheese. That's evolution! In Southern Foods, Is they or ain't they-there are several good points made about how the food moved northward and what happened to it in the first and second halves of the twentieth century. Go read it. It will give you more ammo to discuss this here. I love this topic. Thanks for bringing it up.

It's never happened. I never have enough. Ever. I am constantly in a low supply-high demand situation. I think it is because my wife seems to have some issues with saving the grease, some health concern or another that is not clear to me at this point (although she says that it will be VERY clear when I am in the ambulance on the way to this place.) And I don't want to go there because they don't have any bacon anywhere. It's not a fun place. No smokes, no drinks, no bacon. What are they thinking about? All bacon grease jokes aside, I rarely eat fried okra at home. We eat the stuff a couple of times a week but almost always in another dish. Okra and Tomatoes is a major summer staple. Okra and Corn of of the Cob is a major hit around here as well. And when we do fry it I use peanut oil. I like to fry it quickly and that means the grease needs to be roughly 375F in order to do the job correctly and many oils are close to the burning point at that temp. Cottonseed oil works well too.

I like Code Red. I miss Barq's Red Creme Soda. Big SHot Red Creme is close, but not the same, IMO

Actually, in this day and age of centralized bottling plants the biggest issue for beverage bottlers is weight. While cans are certainly a bit (not much, interestingly enough) cheaper, the real deal has to do with how many cases you can shove into a truck with a 55,000 lb. limit for federal highways. A truckload of glass is heavy BEFORE you put the beverage in it, and a truckload of cans weighs almost nothing. Cans are so light that they are not even put of pallets, but on plastic slides called 'skids' and they are more or less jerked straight out of the truck by hand and onto the line. You can pack alot more beverages into a truck when it is full of cans. This was not of much importance when every town had a contract bottler plus maybe a coca cola bottler as well. Now that plants may be several hundred miles from the point where the drinks are being sold, and everything has to go by 18 wheeler, weight is a major cost concern. Everybody, including especially the beverage industry, knows that bottles are better in terms of flavor (although with beer, the tradeoff between glass and cans is a bit more complicated as light is harmful to beer, although less so in brown glass-but that's another discussion) as glass imparts no flavor whatsoever. And with the development of oxygen absorber crowns the issue of air in the headspace of the bottle has been solved-so it comes down to cost. Cans are cheaper to buy and cheaper to ship. And they are less costly to recycle as someone else does the work for them. Returnable bottles involve cleaning and that used to be a whole part of a packaging plant and an entirely seperate dept. in most cases. Giant machines, lots of wastewater issues, and some safety issues as well (have to clean with sodium hydroxide-caustic soda- and that stuff can be a pain (literally) to work around.

Planning and readiness are important, both in matters of civil safety and bacon grease. I commend your family for their clear and thoughtful planning.