What Y’all Want to Eat Tomorrow?

If high school football is classified as a religion in Texas, then food is certainly a religion in my home state of Louisiana, where food is always a prime topic of conversation. While enjoying a delicious meal, someone will inevitably say, “What y’all want to eat tomorrow?” 

I grew up in southeast Louisiana, where from a young age I was schooled on the true meaning of good food. Fridays in my very Catholic family meant no meat, which was no sacrifice for us living in the Mississippi delta. We congregated at my Aunt Helen’s house for supper, eating whatever my Uncle Guy caught that day at “the cut”, the local fishing hole. After he closed his grocery store for the day, he retreated to the “pit” — a small indoor/outdoor building with a full kitchen located behind their main house — to fry up crispy strips of catfish or redfish lightly dredged in Zatarain’s Fish-Fri. I can see him coming in from the pit with each batch of fried fish, a frosted mug of beer in one hand and a cigarette dangling from his lips. He was known in our town as someone who would barter. Often, he would trade a bag of groceries from his store for a sack of oysters or an ice chest filled with freshly-caught Gulf shrimp. Sometimes it would be boiled blue crabs or boiled crawfish, swimming in their spicy broth along with corn and new potatoes. I never knew how good I had it until I ordered my first seafood dinner as a college student…utterly sticker-shocked at paying for fried shrimp for the first time in my life.

There was always Aunt Helen’s seafood gumbo simmering away on the stove in the main house in a pot big enough for a toddler‘s bath. My mom’s contribution would be macaroni salad or potato salad, Louisiana-style, almost the consistency of chunky mashed potatoes. My cousin Keith loved that macaroni salad, eaten on saltine crackers like a dip. And, the whole town knew my mother was the potato salad queen!

My cousin Penny was always on dessert duty, where she concocted one of her famous pans of bread pudding, or banana split pudding, or Hello Dollies, a five-layer cookie bar that is worthy of its own Tony. My Aunt Lillian would sometimes come for the weekend, and she would always bring a big batch of her famous peanut butter fudge. If Aunt Una drove down, well, that’s when the dessert showdown would be over. Boy, could she bake a cake that would make you cry. She was truly one of a kind.

Occasionally someone would go duck hunting and gift us three or four cleaned ducks. My mom, born to Scottish immigrants, wasn’t raised on Cajun food, but that didn’t stop her from making the best roast duck in the world. Stuffed with quartered onions and Louisiana navel oranges, seasoned with ordinary salt and pepper, she roasted them in a low oven for hours. The meat was tender and juicy while the skin was ebony-colored and crisp. 

Two recipes of hers were reprinted year after year in the local cookbook. Oyster Stew with Spaghetti was one of my dad’s favorites. He always requested it whenever he hosted the men’s card game. Her other specialty was something she called Scotch Potatoes, which was nothing more than a peeled Russet potato sliced into three thick pieces and then wrapped tightly in heavy duty aluminum foil. Tucked between each slice were thin slices of onion and thick slabs of butter, and then the whole thing was salted and peppered to death. After a very long time in a very hot oven, something magical happened. The outer layer of the potato caramelized and stuck to the foil while the inside of the potato stayed soft and fluffy. The onion virtually melted into the pool of butter at the bottom of each foil packet. Perfectly simple and simply perfection. 

The sight, taste, or smell of a favorite food can conjure up the greatest of our memories. Proust had his madeleines and Laurie Colwin memorialized her mother-in-law’s Latvian bread. While I’ve never successfully replicated my mom’s Scotch Potatoes, my memory of those silvery jeweled orbs lined up on a sheet pan next to the stove in her kitchen remains just as fresh as ever.