Customer Reviews

Gumbo Tales: Finding My Place at the New Orleans Table

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

As a long-since transplanted--and not particularly "foodie"--native New Orleanian, "Gumbo Tales" reads like vivid, technicolor personal history to me: snowballs, Stage Planks, mirliton dressing, crawfish boil escapees... and how they all tie together a very specific, food-centered community. Since the hurricane, I've felt wierdly like part of my past was obliterated. (Yes, that's maudlin and self-indulgent considering what happened to those who lived in and around the city at the time of the storm, but there it is). This book can't bring back that missing part, but it certainly reminds me, all the more sharply, of what we've all lost.

A note about a previous reviewer's complaint of poor copy-editing: I can get pretty outraged about others' crimes against the language (while forgiving myself similar sins, of course). I spotted a few misdemeanors--and maybe a felony or two--in this book, as in a lot of published material. They didn't overwhelm my ability to enjoy it. You can best judge whether they'll overwhelm yours.

I learned of this book from Jonathan Yardley's review in the Washington Post. We were out of ideas for our son's Spring Break and we hit on New Orleans: an eating vacation with Sara Roahen as our guide. I studied the book on a stationery bicycle as I tried to lose 15 pounds to get into shape for six great meals at Commander's Palace, Herbsaint, Bayona, Palace Cafe, Antoine's, and Galatoire's (listed in order, from greatest to merely great). Plus a few po' boys, lesser meals, and snacks, constrained only by our appetites.

This is a delightful and worthy book. It is organized around New Orleans' principal food groups with chapters on gumbo, red beans and rice, po' boys, etc. For each Roahen researched vintage cookbooks to trace origins, variations, and controversies. She uses this framework to interweave stories of her life in New Orleans and her experiences with the food and the people who make it, eat it, and live by it. She is a good writer, and her book served my purpose well. Every meal tasted better because of the context she provided.

That said her "menu-item framework" is awkward for the story she is telling. The book needs introductory chapters to describe New Orleans cuisine today, its evolution, and why it is unique (and superior!)

The introduction should follow easily from her careful research, but she doesn't even take up the fundamental distinction between Cajun and Creole until a chapter about poisson meuniere amandine, 159 pages into the book. The introduction should lay out the basic taxonomy of New Orleans food purveyors from the traditional five star restaurants, through contemporary innovators, to cafes and po' boy shops and street vendors. It would be a logical place for some of the personal vignettes of people who influenced her life in New Orleans which are awkwardly shoe-horned into chapters about food (e.g., the restaurant critic, Tom Fitzmorris in le boeuf gras) with which they have only a passing association.

Finally, I question her choice of menu items. There is a boring chapter on Vietnamese cuisine and another on a Mardi Gras coconut-trinket that I would gladly have traded for some missing chapters on traditional New Orleans cuisine: jambalaya, bread pudding, hot sauce. What is New Orleans without Tabasco?

Sara Roahen has written a kind, sweet, humble, and humorous book on New Orleans food culture. Its full of wonderfully human stories about food passion and connection, the region and its people. One dreams of getting down there, and I could taste the food. Its a scrumptious book, and a great read. Each chapter is beautifully finished with the lines of its last sentence. Pass the red beans and rice, please.

I'm always searching for books about and related to New Orleans which can put me in a New Orleans state of mind even from the Northeast. It was fortuitous, then, that I selected Gumbo Tales as my most recent reading material.

I fell in love with the city of New Orleans on my first visit four years ago, and I try to visit as often as possible. When I can't, a book or a movie is the next best thing, and I eventually plan to call New Orleans my home. Gumbo Tales provides the perfect window into the culture of New Orleans, and I was sad the book was over when I finished.

One of the things I liked most about the book is that it's from the perspective of a non-native New Orleanian such as myself. That I could really identify with, moreso than I can with books and stories written by people who were born and raised. I identified with the process of coming from the outside, becoming enchanted, and wanting desperately to be part of the culture. I identified with Roahan's first experiences of New Orleans traditions as a newbie. I cackled out loud reading about her crawfish mishap. I cried several times because of the book, especially when she wrote about the city's struggling spirit in the wake of the events of 2005.

Besides the sentimental feelings the book gives you about the city, the descriptions of food are really the main ingredient here- and they are brilliant.

Roahan's book was the perfect find for leaving-town-reading, for keeping the feeling of NOLA going even when you're far away. Gumbo Takes made me feel not alone in my New Orleans experience and stubborn love for the place. I recommend this book to anyone who calls New Orleans home, once called it home, plans to call it home, or just wishes they did.

This proved the most insightful -- and unexpectedly useful -- book I read prior to going to New Orleans. In fact, you could say it provided a springboard for my exploration of the city.

See, I always need a focus when I travel. For New Orleans, it was food and music. (A no-brainer, I admit, but I ain't proud... sometimes the obvious is the also the best.) This book made me seek out muffalettas at Central Grocery, po'boys, mudbugs, bread pudding, sezeracs, and (of course) gumbo. Oh, and a "lucky bean" at a St. Joseph's day feast. (Read the book and find out what that is.)

Okay, 'nuff about me. About the book. What a banquet! There's so much here beyond the food -- it's a stew of rich experiences, well seasoned with humor, and garnished with verve and wit. Roahen's food writer's gift for vivid description extends to people and places as well. There's history here, too, to give it all perspective. And tragedy: Katrina.

I'll definitely be re-reading this one before my next trip to New Orleans. And, oh yes, there will be another trip.

What a fun book. I live in Houston, and know New Orleans from several over-eating visits. Sara really brought you right back there and so far beyond in the history and fun details. I'm looking forward to going back. Her writing style is playful and fun, perfect for her topic. She hit just the right balance with Katrina details - since it will never be the same, yet will always be the same.

If you read only one book about New Orleans, it should be this one. Sara Roahen's love of the the city's food is exceeded only by her love of the people who make it and their creation of a unique culture. Her love of the food is the more convincing by being hard-won -- a struggle against mid-Western roots and west coast vegetarianism. But her natural curiosity (and the exigencies of being thrust into the role of restaurant reviewer) leads her far beyond the cliches of gumbo and crawfish into the exotic realms of the mirliton and turducken, to name just a couple. For those who fuss about the absence of jambalaya and bread pudding in these pages, I too would like to read her treatment of other local specialties, but I'm thankful she has saved something for another book!

Sara Roahen writes with such wit and wisdom, her book becomes more than a critique of New Orleans restaurants. It is a travelogue of the Big Easy pre-Katrina and post-Katrina. She can melt your heart with stories of survivors who rebuilt, and some who did not, without becoming maudlin. She is self-effacing and honest with her anecdotes about her childhood and relatives growing up in a different part of the world - Wisconsin. She has written a decisively good book for its genre. It made me want to visit New Orleans, a place I had never wanted to see before. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wishes to see, smell and taste New Orleans.

As a native New Orleanian obsessed with all things local, Roahen's book has an honored place on my shelf. So many questions I've always had are answered. Camelia red beans, Ya Ka Mein, braciolone (all my life I've never seen the word spelled), Vietnamese out in the East, it's all here and more. Roahen is very clear that she is not "discovering" anything here. There is respect for the people she interviews and a humbleness that is often not present in other books about the city written by non-natives. Maybe a little too much info for someone not acquainted with New Orleans food, but essential for those who need to know it all.

Gumbo Tales is Sara Roahen's attempt to identify and dissect the culinary history of New Orleans. First arriving in New Orleans with her now-husband, then a medical student, she quickly became immersed in the various foods and flavors and customs, cultures and festivities of her new home. Each foray into a new food or restaurant opened yet another door to yet another food to try, another cuisine that is part of the New Orleans melting pot. Roahen `s work became that much more urgent after Hurricane Katrina stripped away many of the beloved landmarks and scattered the population. Much of the measure of recovery is the return of beloved food providers and sightings of new places opened to eat. New Orleans is much more than gumbo and this book takes the reader through a culinary maze of oysters, Sazeracs, Hansen's Sno Bliz, po-boy sandwiches, Italian influences, turtle soup, muffuletta sandwiches, mirlitons, red beans and rice, Cajun heat, Paul Prudhomme, turducken, crawfish, Galatoire's, and okra as well as many others. Every culture that has visited New Orleans has added its cuisine and had adapted the existing cuisine. There is no right...though there are several defined wrongs about the way to eat.

Don't read this book hoping to add to your cache of recipes to try. This is a love letter to New Orleans and its people and the food that gather around in good times or when in need of a taste of home.