Mosquito Supper Club: Cajun Recipes from a Disappearing Bayou

by Melissa M. Martin

Winner, James Beard Award for Best Book in U.S. FoodwaysWinner, IACP Book of the YearWinner, IACP Best American CookbookAn NPR Best Book of the Year A Saveur, Washington Post, and Garden & Gun Best Cookbook of the Year A Bon Appétit, Food & Wine, Eater, Epicurious, and The Splendid Table Best New CookbookA Forbes Best New Cookbook for Holiday Gift Guide 2021Long-Listed for The Art of Eating Prize for Best Food Book of 2021“Sometimes you find a restaurant cookbook that pulls you out of your cooking rut without frustrating you with miles long ingredient lists and tricky techniques. Mosquito Supper Club is one such book. . . . In a quarantine pinch, boxed broth, frozen shrimp, rice, beans, and spices will go far when cooking from this book.”  —Epicurious, The 10 Restaurant Cookbooks to Buy Now “Martin shares the history, traditions, and customs surrounding Cajun cuisine and offers a tantalizing slew of classic dishes.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review For anyone who loves Cajun food or is interested in American cooking or wants to discover a distinct and engaging new female voice—or just wants to make the very best duck gumbo, shrimp jambalaya, she-crab soup, crawfish étouffée, smothered chicken, fried okra, oyster bisque, and sweet potato pie—comes Mosquito Supper Club.   Named after her restaurant in New Orleans, chef Melissa M. Martin’s debut cookbook shares her inspired and reverent interpretations of the traditional Cajun recipes she grew up eating on the Louisiana bayou, with a generous helping of stories about her community and its cooking. Every hour, Louisiana loses a football field’s worth of land to the Gulf of Mexico. Too soon, Martin’s hometown of Chauvin will be gone, along with the way of life it sustained. Before it disappears, Martin wants to document and share the recipes, ingredients, and customs of the Cajun people.   Illustrated throughout with dazzling color photographs of food and place, the book is divided into chapters by ingredient—from shrimp and oysters to poultry, rice, and sugarcane. Each begins with an essay explaining the ingredient and its context, including traditions like putting up blackberries each February, shrimping every August, and the many ways to make an authentic Cajun gumbo. Martin is a gifted cook who brings a female perspective to a world we’ve only heard about from men. The stories she tells come straight from her own life, and yet in this age of climate change and erasure of local cultures, they feel universal, moving, and urgent.

Genres: Cookbooks, Cooking, Food, Nonfiction, Food and Drink, Foodie, Culinary

496 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 14, 2020

Reviews

[Denver Public Library · Rating 4 out of 5]

So far my adventures in gumbo and jambalaya have left my heart and belly full, may my kitchen forever smell like caramelized onions. Safe to say Original Louisiana Hot Sauce has taken up permanent residence in my fridge. Although some of the involved skill set featured in this delectable cookbook is out of my city-dwelling landlocked wheel house (finding an old hen to make for the best chicken gumbo, cutting open live crabs with scissors, etc.), I appreciate the level of authenticity to Martin’s recipes, even if I cannot always accommodate them. Martin is generous with her culture and her roots—sharing her bayou upbringing, current challenges caused by climate change, and her most beloved recipes. Put Mosquito Supper Club on your list of books to read, things to cook, and places to visit.

[Kyra Leseberg (Roots & Reads) · Rating 4 out of 5]

New favorite cookbook!
Review to follow this summer

[Redsteve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very well-done book about traditional Cajun (the author was born and raised in Cocodrie Louisiana) by Melissa Martin, founder and chef of the Mosquito Supper Club in New Orleans. The recipes are very authentic - not "dressed up" and usually with a small number of ingredients. In addition, there are numerous side bars about specific ingredients, various food industries (especially shrimping, crabbing, fishing, crawfish, oystering, etc.), the Gulf Coast, and coastal erosion. Beautiful photographs. The entire book is well written, but the author obviously has an ax to grind about a number of issues (popular perceptions of Cajuns, city vs. country food, the oil industry, et al.) and isn't shy about saying so.

[Alicia Bayer]

This is another book that I can't assign a star rating to, as I'm so conflicted about how I'd possibly rate it. I had to stop reading it halfway through, as Martin was detailing how to cut up a live softshell crab with scissors, starting by first cutting off its face before moving on to the other parts. She writes about how hard this is, especially since "the bigger guys try to attach themselves to our hands" as she and her partner dismember them despite calling them "alive and defenseless in your hands" and saying that they apologize over and over to them as they do it. Earlier, she described the process of saying a prayer and then dropping in hardshell crabs alive into boiling water. I'm sorry, but I cannot read any more of it.

All that said, this is a book that desperately needed to be written and desperately needs to be read. Martin grew up in the bayou and has lived in this industry all her life, and she is a witness to losing a football field's worth of land in Louisiana every hour due to rising tides, disappearing wetlands and global warming. In addition, this way of life is disappearing because Americans would rather pay cheap prices for seafood caught on the other side of the world than support the people who barely scrape a living out of doing this as a second job all night long.

Chapters teach traditional recipes to make all kinds of bayou seafood from shrimp to oysters to sweets and breads. I may skip ahead to the vegetables later to see if there are any recipes I want to try, but for now I'm putting aside this book to look for something a little lighter and brighter.

I read a temporary digital ARC of this book for the purpose of review.

[Liz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chef Melissa M. Martin’s debut cookbook is comforting for those of us that were born in Louisiana, but find ourselves far removed from the food and culture we love so much. The recipes are traditionally Cajun and I found my mouth watering up on several occasions throughout the book. The stories she weaves throughout the book of the Cajun south are informative and entertaining, particularly to those unfamiliar with sugarcane and satsumas or how to pronounce "courtbouillon." She touches on Acadia and the history of Cajuns and Creoles, and her introduction is heartfelt as she covers both that she is proud of on the bayou and the environmental dangers seeping in. It is an absolutely necessary cookbook for any lover of Cajun cuisine and culture.

[Brei · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely adore this cookbook. The photos by Denny Culbert are gorgeous. You feel like you are actually in South Louisiana. They create a great atmosphere.

Melissa's origin stories also give you a great feel for the area and what her food is about. The recipes sound delicious and fairly easy to read. This may be my favorite cookbook of the year.

I can't wait for quarantine to be over so I can attend Mosquito Supper Club myself.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

I normally wouldn’t add a cookbook here, but I read this one like I would a novel. I love New Orleans. I went for my first visit with one of my dearest friends when we turned 30, and I have been lucky enough to visit 7 more times in the last 9 years. It’s truly one of my very favorite places in the world. I cannot wait until things are safer for travel again and hope to eat at the Mosquito Supper Club. This book was a wonderful substitute for the time being.

[Jenn Adams · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was really wonderful. From the beginning, I learned SO much about not just the author's personal bayou upbringing, but about the culinary history, threats to its future, and so much more. Everything looked and sounded amazing, and it was clear that every recipe has been made time and time again with love.
4.25

[Sean · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am new to reading cookbooks for anything other than a recipe. It seems weird to rate them...but I suppose there are really good ones (like this one) and there are others. I love cooking, and I love eating...thus, I love food. It seemed logical to set a goal for myself in 2021 a few of the many cookbooks that fill my kitchen shelves. Melissa Martin's was the first. I have followed Martin and the Mosquito Supper Club on various social media platforms for a while now; however I have never been to the famed New Orleans establishment (despite eating in New Orleans every couple of weeks for many years, prior to the pandemic.) I will fix that. Martin's restaurant, and book, centers around the food of her childhood near Bayou Petit Caillou in Chauvin, Louisiana. Interwoven with her recipes are stories of the bayou, of family, of eating, of sustainable gardening and fishing, and of the environmental apocalypse currently taking place in the Louisiana marsh. It's a sobering read. Martin weaves recipes for smothered okra and gumbo and lagniappe bread with history lessons on Cajun-America. As for the recipes: I've made a few of them so far and my family loved me for it...I still have many more to cook, and can't wait. Do not read this book if you are looking for "bam!" You won't find it.

[Carrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've never read a cookbook for the culture/commentary before but this was great. I wasn't aware quite the level of loss of land Louisiana has experienced recently ☹️

While this isn't a -happy- book (culture and land and livelihoods and traditions and people lost) it is obvious our author is such a genuinely lovely human which made it worth the read.

[Keith · Rating 5 out of 5]

So much more than a cook book. Memoir, history, eco-activist, recipes, coffee-table photo book... Beautiful photography. Clean design. Melissa's stories brought back so many memories of my own. Love her approach to cooking. Just like the gumbo I cook for my family, it's taken from bits and pieces I've learned from family, friends, and acquaintances. Recipes are a guide, but sometimes you need to find your own way, and I'll definitely take lessons from Melissa. If you love Louisiana, and the foods of Louisiana, I highly recommend giving this book a go.

[Lauren Green · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great look into historical Cajun life!

This book was so much more than I expected. As a Louisiana creole, I grew up on my grandma’s classic creole cooking. I didn’t realize how different creole and Cajun cooking are! I’m excited to try out the different ways of cooking jambalaya and gumbo. I loved the lessons at the beginning of the chapters on the origins of the dishes, as well as the history and the changes of the seafood industry. I hope everyone reads this book

[Bethany · Rating 3 out of 5]

We used this cookbook for our Feb 2024 Cookbook Club.

This cookbook needs reviewed, did the author actually cook these?

Group feedback:
-The shrimp gumbo and duck gumbo recipe are copy & paste of each other and you simply cannot cook duck like shrimp. Further, both gumbo recipes were BLAND.
-We were appalled to see 1/8 of a tsp of cayenne as "the spice" in a dish. My measuring spoons don't even go that small!
-Overall, the recipes are the basics, you NEED to add more to the recipes or they just don't work

Dishes we made:
Smothered Okra with shrimp & tomatoes
And
Trout meniere

Both came out ok, after we generously added SPICE!

[Elaine · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have learned enough about cajun and creole cooking from this book to know that I do not have the patience or the stamina to make most of the dishes included. But they all sound spicy and delicious. I just can't imagine standing at the stove all day to make a dish. I will definitely need to eat out for these flavors.

[Margery Gerard · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think if a person writes a recipe book the person is in love, with the food, the place, the people. And so it is with Mosquito Supper Club. Cajun is Louisianna country through and through. This book brings these stories through recipes to the table.

[Mary Cosper · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautifully written book. The recipes are true to the Cajun culture and the photos are beautiful. It's more than a cookbook.

[Barbara Wade · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book that will probably be on my shelves soon. Loved the stories which made me so homesick and the recipes that made you believe you could smell and see all the folks sitting around the table.

[Anne Morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every hour, Louisiana loses a football field's worth of land to the Gold of Mexico. Soon, the people and culture of South Louisiana, where chef Melissa Martin was born and raised, will disappear. In Mosquito Supper Club (named after Martin's restaurant in New Orleans) Martin combines traditional Cajun recipes with explanations of ingredients and the traditions behind them.

This book was a delight from start to finish. A combination of gorgeous photographs, easy to understand recipes, and stories of the people and traditions behind the food, "Mosquito Supper Club" takes 'cookbook' to a whole new level. From how to properly clean a crab to shucking oysters, from dancing the shrimp to the story behind gumbo, readers will learn the truth behind the Cajun traditional way of life. Melissa Martin gives readers unfamiliar with the land, culture, and people of South Louisiana a perfect introduction to her home and the ways it has both changed and stayed the same over the generations. She encourages you- as a reader and a cook- to think about your ingredients and where they come from, to question the impact they have on the farmers, and fishermen. As a novice cook, I greatly appreciated how her recipes sounded like she was standing right there, talking to me about what to look for in a pot- from the color of the onion to the texture of a dough, these descriptions took the guess work out of what to look for and how to tell when something was ready. As a native of New Orleans, I greatly appreciated her discussions of the impact humans have had on the environment and how that has changed the resources and culture people experience today. Anyone who glances as just one photograph in this book will be drawn to discover more, and before you know it you'll be both reading and cooking while enjoying a whole new world.


I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

[Shruts · Rating 5 out of 5]

Starting in the late '70's for almost 15 years I was solidly immersed in the gas processing industry, much of it in coastal Louisiana. There I learned of a fascinating culture totally foreign to me, wet behind the ears in my 20's, never having traveled very far from my home in Maryland.

I came to appreciate the food, a lot! I do love to eat! Primarily seafood of all types, with local vegetables like onion, peppers, celery, and of course rice. Lots of rice.

But more importantly I learned of the history of the Cajuns, a mixture of exiled French Canadians, Spanish and French settlers, and native Americans. I learned to decipher the hybrid language, a mish-mash of primarily French, but with Indian, English and Spanish thrown in when French just wasn't quite exact enough. My fave was "Mais yeah" meaning "of course", of course.

The music at Fais Do Do's ('Nite Nite' to the kids) was entrancing, two-steps and waltzes, played on squeeze box, fiddle and guitar.

So back to Mosquito Supper Club. This is not merely a cook book, albeit an excellent one. Yes, it contains scores of recipes, but the accompanying text is a treatise on Why and How these recipes evolved, how they glued families together, and how integral they were to the sustainable livelihood of the watermen for generations.

And yes, the book is also a commentary of how the petroleum industry that I participated in has contributed to the decline of those fisheries and the way of life.

Read for the fabulous recipes, Mais Yeah. But also as an elegy for a past quickly disappearing.

[Kristin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This Northern Girl adores Southern food and this cookbook was quite enjoyable to read. Like many cookbooks today, there is a story behind the recipes. This one captures a slice of Southern history, life on the bayou, and touches on the fragile ecosystem and environmentalism of Coastal activities.

I thought *most* of the recipes were fairly approachable, well written and flexible with ingredients and "how to". If you live in a coastal area, you will have better access to seafood options than say, someone who lives near the Canadian border in the middle of the continent (like me). For the non-seafood recipes, I noticed could get the majority of the ingredients at my local grocery store (I don't live in a major metropolitan area) and substitute what I couldn't.

I also noted the chef used both volume and weights (ie, cups and ounces). I really like that approach to cooking these days.

I was able to make the poached fish dish before I had to return the book to the library (could only check it out for two weeks - new release). It was probably the best poached fish I have ever made. So simple, so flavorful, so easy.

Bottom line - I am still on the fence about purchasing a copy. I would LOVE to try several more recipes, it's a gorgeous book, but the inability to get the recommended seafood, or even a close substitute, has me holding off. Might be a good option for a Holiday gift or Birthday idea tho.

[Lea · Rating 3 out of 5]

I do not like cooking but I love reading cookbooks. This one is part cookbook with recipes, part history/love letter to the Louisiana bayou and part memoir/family story.
I usually gauge a cookbook by the ingredients list, if I can’t find most things at my local market, I form opinions pretty fast.
My unpopular opinion - this was really uppidy for a “we cooked with whatever we had, seasonally, locally” but by all means order hand ground flour meal and ship yourself some specialty seafood and salt pork. (Let’s not make a connection between LA losing land, climate change, and shipping speciality ingredients to yourself.)
I would make zero things in this cookbook but the stories and photos were lovely, a tad pretentious for being about fisherfolk’s on the bayou but I am apparently the only one who got that vibe.

[Lindsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

A love letter to Cajun cuisine and traditionally ways of harvesting, storing, and preparing these foods. This book alternates between narratives about prepared foods, fishing and harvesting, family stories, celebrations of women in kitchens, alongside rich discussions of changing conditions in the Louisiana Bayou. As rising sea levels, rising foreign seafood importation, changes in the Mississippi River, and oil production decimate bayou lands and water, the bayou's longtime residents have had to change their ways of life. As she celebrates these stories and these foods, she also calls us to action to fight for greater protections for this ecosystem. Filled with beautiful photos and beautiful stories.

[Mallory · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very easily the best Cajun cookbook that I’ve ever read. It deserves a place right next to my great-grandmother’s handwritten spiral notebooks of recipes - that’s how much I treasure this book.

Taking all of the oral traditions of Cajun culture and putting them into these recipes was so obviously a labor of love for Melissa.

It was so moving to read about the rhythms and seasons of our beloved Louisiana.

I’m excited to experiment with Melissa’s takes on some of our favorite dishes.

[Shelby Lau · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this cookbook was like coming home! The stories of my culture told here were familiar and reminded me of the deep roots I have to this beautiful piece of the earth. I felt like I was sitting in my grandmother's living room in Chauvin listening to her talk. At the risk of sounding dramatic, this book has changed my life. It has made cooking the way I grew up eating accessible to me. It has given me resources to stock my cajun kitchen. It has awakened a soft spot in my heart for my heritage and for the disappearing bayou that will always be my home ❤️

[L Mick · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a woman with Cajun roots I found this cookbook to be so accurate and heartwarming. The photos of her food look just like my Granny’s cooking—even down to the same magnelite pot! Each recipe seems to have a meaningful story drenched in deep southern Louisiana culture. I took my time reading through this book and was genuinely sad when I realized I had read it all. Have yet to find a cookbook that makes me feel the way this one did.

[Carmencitas Cookbooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing cookbook with tons of history and explanations.

🎬 Here is my video review of this cookbook:
https://youtu.be/iZQK1uHfNGM

The recipes are so good! It feels genuine and authentic just like the Author.
I live in Sweden and its sometimes hard to get some of the ingredients, but I think the accesibility of ingredients is possible in most countries.

My score:
🍤 Ingredient accesibility: 3
🍤 Cultural sesitivity:5
🍤 Originality: 4

🤔 Would I buy this for a friend? YES!

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this cookbook- gorgeous color photos throughout and the storytelling alone is well worth the purchase price. Ms. Martin writes of the disappearing historic Cajun lifestyle and the precarious state of Louisiana's wildlife. Although I have not tried to make any of the recipes yet, they look delicious!

[Allison Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow, this is not your average cookbook. Great Creole and Cajun recipes. It also has beautifully written educational tidbits on Louisiana, Creole and Cajun history, the American seafood industry, recipe ingredients, hurricane season, and on and on. I have a newfound understanding and interest in a number of topics thanks to this book.

[Noel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Recipes look amazing!! The stories about the disappearing bayou from the perspective of Melissa Martin provides a depth of color that is often overlooked by other commercial recipe books. As the chef of the restaurant with the same name in NOLA, I can see why MSC was named as 2022 James Beard Award Finalist.

Looking forward to trying out the recipes!!!

[Jenny D · Rating 5 out of 5]

This cookbook is so damn good. The stories woven between the recipes captivated me, immersing me in the vibrant Cajun culture. I've returned to this book countless times, always learning something new—most recently upon my return from a road trip to Louisiana. The recipes are not only stunning and intricate yet also approachable if you take the time to enjoy the process.