Picayune Creole Cookbook

by The Times-Picayune

Creole cuisine is a distinctive New Orleans style of cooking, combining Spanish, African, Choctaw, and especially, French influences. Fearing that New Orleans culture might be lost, in 1900, the editors of the New Orleans newspaper "The Picayune" decided to collect recipes "from the lips of the old Creole Negro cooks and the grand old housekeepers who still survive, ere they, too, pass away, and Creole cookery, with all its delightful combinations and possibilities, will have become a lost art." This is a facsimile of the second edition published in 1901.

Genres: Cookbooks, Cooking, Food, Nonfiction

456 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1938

Reviews

[Redsteve · Rating 3 out of 5]

What I like about this "updated" version of the 1901 cookbook is that the editors didn't actually mess with the original text, they just added marginalia to assist the modern cook. This is a comprehensive book of late 19th C New Orleans cookery, including baking, syrups, candy-making, beverages, preserving all sorts of foods, menus, and seasonal meal suggestions, allowing the reader to not only see what people were eating then, but also how. Many recipes involve cooking with fire (vague temperature specifics in the original) and the ingredients are usually in "eyeball" proportions (e.g. a wineglass of..., ...the size of a pea/walnut/etc, enough to...).

[Nand · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've wanted my own copy of this cookbook for a very long time. I vied for my mother's copy, but she wasn't letting go of it! This cookbook is so often mentioned in creole recipes and I see the influences on my mother's cooking style within the pages, as well as in her side of the family (whom mostly hale from New Orleans). At first I was curious and intrigued with the page layouts, which appear as copies from original Picayune volume(s), yellow, aged and old-world, but they appear microscopic and somewhat hard to read over time. I have plenty more to take in and practice in the kitchen from these recipes aplenty, so I mark it as "read" with no certain true end-date in mind.

[Bryn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I got this from the library & didn't realise until I opened it up that it's a reprinted/updated version of an early 20th century cookbook rather than a modern one. The recipes have been changed to more standard measurements when the editors felt it necessary, but they preserved the original instructions and cultural context -- so this was really interesting as an insight into what reasonably well-off New Orleans families were eating circa 1905, but not so interesting to me as a practical cookbook.

[Eric Hudson · Rating 5 out of 5]

My 12th edition copy, was printed in 1954. The 1st edition premiered in 1900 and between 1982, there were seventeen editions. The last edition- a touristy magazine- was a sad shadow of the 16 hard copy additions with over 400 pages .

These books, authored by the historic Picayune Times News Paper, says something about the distinguished roll of this once daily journal, that’s since diminished to mostly online editions, because Americans choose to further stumble down the into the caverns of know-nothingness and ignorance, buy abandoning news papers as we have literature.

The look, feel, and smell, of this book continues to -upon its opening- unleash sensory over loads, as pleasurable and mysterious as they’re uncomfortable, creating a portal back to a bygone-yesteryear when to wealthy New Orleanians "good house wifery" required an adherence to the "creole cookery" of the past, to preserve a culture that celebrated pre Reconstruction America, where the, "old time mammy worked all kinds of magic in that black rafted kitchen of the long ago". These recipes were passed from “great, great, great grandmothers on down to the stately ladies of the tilted walls, aluminum, chromium, and stainless steel kitchens, to their “rosy girls”, as printed in my 1954 edition, with a dark sky blue hard cover and on it, a white silhouette of a Black Women, ( a Mammy) wearing a kerchief around hear head, a polka dote shirt-with rolled up sleeves ,and a large apron around an her antebellum dress, while stirring a large bowel, next to a pitcher.

This book also discusses- at that time of my copy’s printing- old line dining establishment (that no longer remain) and the chefs who owned them,- that preserved the foundations of today’s culinary New Orleans. Addionally, French terms, directions about slicing and dicing food, old forms of measurement, etc., are also listed under “Suggestions to House Keepers”

The recipes also do not disappoint, not just in flavor, ( I’ve mastered many of them) but in historical analysis of how many of the old eating habits of the New Orleans’s wealthiest white citizens, copied the captive Black people( forced to toil on their behalf) and their economically poor freed descendants.

There is a recipe for Chitterlings (Andouilles), but when I cook “Chitlins” once a year, I use my Aunt Murk’s recipe. Clearly back then rich white people loved Pigs feet, as there are 7 recipes, from St Hubert Style to Stuffed a la Periguex- both are excellent. There are also 7 ways to prepare Frogs ( Des Grenouilles) I prefer the Sauté a la Creole option.


There are of course all the numerous standard New Orleans dishes, including Red Beans and 10 different Gumbo recopies including with squirrel and rabbit. For both of these options I stick with my aunt Murks recipes although sometimes I use rabbit as it’s more available in Chicago.

There are numerous reciies for fruit wines, sauces, puddings, dumplings, biscuits, muffins, waffles, soups, creams( numerous berry vinegars ), chicken, crepes, preserves, cake icings, creole candies, coffee, pralines, and numerous foodstuff I’ve never heard of. There are also all sort of uses for wild game. And as you can see from the small sampling of the above list, meals for all every facet of morning, noon and night, including seasonal dishes and delights.

This book truly belongs in the kitchen of true culinary explorers and historians as opposed to those shallow and annoying foodies.

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

A compendium of awesomely trapped-in-time recipes from a bygone, er, still melting, melting pot of regional American delights. Many ambitious dishes within, stacked alongside a multitude of simpler times concoctions and just plain "What? Weird" anomalies. An interesting historical read even if you're not inspired to rise to any culinary challenges presented.

[Fredrick Danysh · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of Creole recipes from the files of the Times-Picayune newspaper. Contains popular authentic Creole cooking.

[Matthias Sundberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is such an awesome book. Especially if you like cookbooks.