The Food Section

The Rings of Saturn

The Ninth Ward neighborhood in New Orleans has been on the tip of many tongues over the course of the past two weeks. This area, also known as the Bywater, is the part of the city that has been under the most water since Katrina hit and the levee broke.  Just down-river from the French Quarter, this is an historical neighborhood that many famous residents have called home: trumpeter Kermit Ruffins, the musical Lastie family, poet and author Kalamu ya Salaam, and rock-and-roll legend Fats Domino, who was rescued from his house in the Ninth Ward just last week. But on the corner of Saint Claude Avenue and Clouet Street, there is another star in this neighborhood’s galaxy.

The Saturn Bar is a humble little building with a small sign and a few bits of neon lighting the way to the corner door.  Inside, the light from the neon soon reveals an array of treasures from wall to wall and ceiling to floor. O’Neil Broyard is the caretaker of its contents; he is a native of the city and has been at the helm of this neighborhood joint for more than forty years. When his regulars come calling, you’ll find him behind the bar, popping the cap off of an Abita or pouring a little Wild Turkey. But if it’s slow, he’ll be busying himself somewhere among his vast collection of baseball caps and garage sale paintings, tending to his flock of animals, or fiddling with his urban garden. With the time Broyard spends cultivating seeds, he could garnish more cocktails than he cares to even sell. He has a collection of fruit trees, a few vegetables and dozens of tomato plants. There have actually been times that Broyard has reaped such a harvest that he would share the bounty with his customers, regulars and tourists alike. He even grows mirlitons, a squash that’s used regularly in Creole cooking and a vegetable that is celebrated each year with the community-wide Mirliton Festival.

What constitutes the fabric of a community? The streets? The buildings? The businesses? The people? These things are certainly part of the warp and woof of any neighborhood. But what about the corner bar? Clouet Street is under water, but The Saturn Bar beckons to all of us as a reminder of the small treasures tucked in and around a city like New Orleans and the role that they can play in a neighborhood like the Ninth Ward. It’s not Galatoire’s or Commander’s Palace. It’s a little brown building with a door that opens to a community. It’s the thing that connects that community to the rest of us—and to the rings of Saturn.

While there have been so very many losses to mourn these last two weeks, we can now allow ourselves a hint of celebration: O’Neil Broyard and his beloved Saturn Bar have survived the storm. Now, he and his flock wait for the streets to dry up and for their neighbors to return.

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Find out how the Southern Foodways Alliance and other organizations are helping those in need in the wake of Hurricane Katrina

Again and again, many thanks to Josh Friedland for the invitation to contribute to The Food Section.

Amy Evans, acevans@olemiss.edu
Oral Historian, Southern Foodways Alliance
Oxford, Mississippi

In Her Own Words

“Because, as I say again, [when you make a drink,] if you don’t put the love and tenderness in there with that, it’s not going to taste good.” – Floria Woodard

Originally from Mississippi, Floria Woodard headed to New Orleans seeking opportunity. She found it as server at The Court of Two Sisters (the first African-American server at that), but she eventually set her sights on the bar. Thirty-eight years later, Miss Flo is still behind that bar, serving cocktails to the locals and returning tourists who seek her out at this well-known French Quarter restaurant.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Miss Flo’s story resonates. Hers is the story of an African-American woman from Mississippi, who set out on her own to find a job and make a new life for herself. She ended up in New Orleans, and the service industry answered her call. The state she left—the state of Mississippi—is where I live today. It might also be the state that Miss Flo returned to in order to escape New Orleans and Katrina. We can only hope.

In honor of Miss Flo and the thousands like her, her own words are offered here. Let them remind us all about the lives of the people we interact with, standing just on the other side of the bar.

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Floria Woodard, bartender
The Court of Two Sisters
New Orleans, LA

[This is an edited version of an interview that was conducted by Amy Evans for the Southern Foodways Alliance on March 31, 2005. Read the entire transcript.]

My name is Floria Woodard, and I’m old as dirt. [Laughs] My birthday is June 6, 1938.

I understand you’ve been working here at The Court of Two Sisters for forty years or some such thing.

It’s close to forty. It’s thirty-eight years this February seventh, two thousand five…And I’ve enjoyed it ever since I’ve been here. I’ve been—I started out here as a bus person and a server for so many years. And then I moved up to seating captain, from seating captain to receiving at the front door, and then one day they decided they [were] going to give me a bartender’s job. [Short laugh]

[Y]ou were the first black server here at The Court of Two Sisters?

In the evening, yes…And that was starting back in sixty-eight. And even though it was integrated—they was integrated like in the daytime—at nighttime it wasn’t. Or they couldn’t get [black] servers, I’m not sure what the cause was. But I had no problem getting acceptance. They accepted me with open arms. And I came in, and I liked the place, and I decided to stay for a little while.

Just to back up a little bit, you said [that] you’re from Mississippi, originally.

Yes, born and raised in Tylertown, Mississippi. Uh, I come from a large family. Uh, from eleven siblings that’s alive, that I’m the youngest of all.

And what brought you to New Orleans?

Survival. [Laughs] You know, survival? That’s what it was. It was nothing in Mississippi to do as far as work-wise, and if you couldn’t farm you couldn’t—you wasn’t making anything. It was really tough for the people of color in Mississippi. Mm-hmm. It’s tough.

Was the job here the first job you had in New Orleans, or did you work other places?

No, it wasn’t. I did other jobs. I worked, um, as a home keeper for children for a while, and then I did hotel maid service for a while, and I did healthcare for a little while. But then I decided none of those was for me.

Did they just throw you into the fire?

Yeah, they just threw me into the fire. Into the—into the lake and said swim! No—no paddle either! [W]hen they put me in over here they hadn’t [had] anyone at all to train me. I really had to train myself. I had to learn everything back here, and I had a lot of reading to do. I had a lot bar-guide books. And there—they have a recipe book themselves [The Court of two Sisters], so I don’t make the drinks the way I want to drink—to make them. I make them the way they want them made…So that means I follow their recipe. So if you have a drink from me today that you’d enjoy, tomorrow or next month or two years from now, when you return, it will be the same because you use the same recipe.

[A]nd so what is it about your job that keeps you here?

I think it’s the stress. [Laughing] That’s a joke. Well, I enjoy it, sweetie. I don’t think it’s no one thing, but I always feel like what keep[s] me going, I’m not a lazy person. I like to work. As long as I’m working, I’m happy. Because I know I’m gonna get paid. And as I tell all the young people that come through here, you know, you’re looking at thirty-eight years, and I can’t remember one payday [that] I didn’t get a check. You know? And that’s what work is all about. It’s a shame to say it, but we’re working until we get paid, because we can’t survive without it…So that’s—that’s what it is again. I stay here for survival! [Laughs]

What do you think it takes to make a good bartender?

Well, you have to like people, you have to have a cool personality, and you have to be patient. You cannot be [short pause] a chip on your shoulder that you have, you leave it at home. You can’t bring it in because [if] someone make[s] a statement to you that you don’t like, you can’t be touchy about things. See I’ve had people sit here at the bar and speak up [about] different things that’s going on, and black people are involved—it doesn’t affect me. Because that’s news. But you’ll find some people—people of color would get offended. You’ll find the gay part of the industry. You’re speaking of the gay people, they’ll get affected. But no, you can’t—you can’t do that. You’ve got to be open when you [are] tending bar. The only thing that I don’t do is—like I say earlier—I don’t have stories to tell. I tell stories, but they’re the truth[.]

Basilica Casamento and The Patron Saint of Oysters

The city of New Orleans has long been compared to the Italian city of Venice. Both places were built on watery slabs, defying common sense, yet stimulating our imaginations. Still reeling from the storm, I am forced to think of New Orleans’ sister city and of the power of water meeting stone.

The Basilica San Marco is the jewel of Venice, but its arches and domes weigh heavily on the piazza, tons of marble and bronze slowly sinking into the canals. Inside the basilica, hundreds of years of floods and high tides have left their mark. Watery forces have pushed on these floors so regularly and for so long that you feel drunk just walking through the door, solid waves of marbled mosaic fooling your eyes and feet with each step. Perhaps the waves have tired of Venice, and they have finally come to push against New Orleans.

Waves of immigration have brought scores of Italians to the Crescent City and other parts of the South for generations, and New Orleans was where a good many of them decided to put down roots. The Casamento family was one of those families. In the early part of the twentieth century, Joe Casamento arrived in New Orleans and opened a restaurant on Magazine Street, putting his family name above the door. Serving fresh seafood and above all, fresh oysters, Mr. Casamento quickly established a reputation for serving some of the best seafood in town.

My recent trek to New Orleans to document bar and cocktail culture happened to fall near the end of oyster season. Naturally, I wanted to get my hands on some while the getting was good, so I headed straight for Casamento’s. This is the kind of place that is so serious about oysters, it closes its doors during the summer months -- those dangerously hot months without “R”s -- signaling the temporary hiatus of the ritualistic union of shellfish, hot sauce, crackers and beer. That fine New Orleans day, I savored half-a-dozen raw oysters and contemplated my mission. Even then, I wrestled with the fact that here I was in New Orleans to document bartenders, but what about this joint?  What about all of this decorative tile covering practically every square inch of the place? What about that man in the corner, shucking oyster after oyster all the day long? What about the woman who so carefully delivered that gloriously shiny plate of rawness to my table? What about Joe Casamento, who came to New Orleans from his native Italy and opened a café? What about his family who is continuing the tradition that he started so many decades ago? Who installed all of this tile? All of this tile! Imagine: the Basilica Casamento right there on Magazine Street in New Orleans.

Unfortunately, I had to move on. But I made mental notes: the pattern in the floor, the stacks of candy bars behind the register, the stunted wall in the middle of the room, the tiny kitchen, the sound of oysters being shucked. All of this, thinking that I would be back. That it would all still be there. Today, I don’t know how high the water rose on this particular part of Magazine Street; I don’t know if the tiled floor has been bent and twisted into a solid current of stylized flowers. I pray, though, let Joe Casamento’s monument to his life in this New World stand intact. There may not be any oysters to serve for a while, but services can still be held in the Basilica Casamento.

In the decades since Joe Casamento first arrived in New Orleans, many more have followed, making this unique place their adopted home. It is, indeed, the most European of American cities, and that is certainly part of its appeal. It is also a city whose economy is based in tourism, so there is usually a service industry job to be had -- a shift to pick up, a new trade to learn, an opportunity to move up through the ranks. Paul Gustings landed in New Orleans almost by accident, and he became a bartender -- one of the best.

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PAUL GUSTINGS, bartender
The Napoleon House & Tujague’s
New Orleans, LA

Originally from the Netherlands, Paul Gustings flipped a coin one day, headed to the United States, made his way to New Orleans for a visit, and ended up staying. Twenty-three years later, his bartending resume includes some time spent behind the bar at places like the Clubhouse of the Galloping Gooses and Brennan’s Restaurant. Paul’s prickly personality eventually found the right fit at two bars in the French Quarter: Tujague’s and the Napoleon House. While he appreciates a good cocktail, he also appreciates the cocktail connoisseur and hasn’t much patience for less. He’ll take the time to make traditional cocktails the right way and will appreciate you for knowing enough about cocktails to order them. So belly up to the bar, serve Paul a smile, and he’ll serve you a well-made drink.

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Find out how the Southern Foodways Alliance and other organizations are reaching out to service industry workers in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Amy Evans, acevans@olemiss.edu
Oral Historian, Southern Foodways Alliance
Oxford, Mississippi

No Money, No Eggs

Each day as I walk out my front door, my gaze is forced upon a small painting that proclaims "NO MONEY, NO EGGS." Between the words is an amoebic blob of white paint, holding a round yellow center: a perfect egg, sunny-side up. The artist, seventy-one-year-old Alfred "Big Al" Taplet, is a native of New Orleans. Or was. The wrath that Hurricane Katrina wrought on the Crescent City has left behind so much heartbreak; I can only hope that Big Al is not among the many human casualties left in Katrina's wake. What’s certain, though, is while we mourn the lives of so many, we are also beginning to realize the cultural casualties washed away by the storm. For me, this one painting is a symbol of so much—so much that we are only beginning to let ourselves acknowledge.

As a documentarian, it is my job to seek people out and listen to their stories. As a documentarian of the foodways of the American South, it is my job to visit with the people of this region who grow, cook, and serve food and drink. Big Al's painting is a reminder of how food is so relevant to the culture of New Orleans—in art, in music, in daily life—and of the continued heartbreak the world will experience as these losses are laid bare. Of course, as the citizens of New Orleans try to find shelter across this great country, they are seeking shelter for their culture as well, bringing New Orleans to all of us. In this we can certainly celebrate. But for now, we are forced to consider the losses.

There is never any time like the present in the life of a documentarian; stories are everywhere, and they are always relevant, no matter what the time or place or circumstance. But how was I to know that the ten days I spent in New Orleans four months ago would ring with such consequence today. I went in search of beverages and bartenders, hot on the trail of the city's long history with the cocktail. But now, what has become of the man who made the best Sazerac in town? Or the woman who put everyone else’s Ramos Gin Fizz to shame (a drink which happens to be made using the white of an egg)? Right now, there is a displaced population of survivors without homes, without jobs, with no money and no eggs.

In honor of some of the people and places of New Orleans, The Food Section is featuring profiles of the bartenders and bar owners who were interviewed for the Southern Foodways Alliance's Bartenders of New Orleans Oral History Project.

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MARTIN SAWYER, bartender
The Rib Room, Omni Royal Orleans Hotel
New Orleans, LA

With almost fifty years of bartending under his belt and thirty-four years working at the Rib Room alone, eighty-four-year-old Martin Sawyer has seen it all. He got his first job as a barback at the infamous 500 Club. A bartender friend recruited him for the job so Martin could help him make out drink orders, as Martin was one of the few young men in his circle of friends who could read. With the nickname "Professor," Martin studied up on cocktails and quickly became a fixture on the French Quarter bar scene. He had his picture taken with Louis Armstrong and served champagne to General De Gaul. With all that time tending bar, it is easy to believe that he would have had a few brushes with celebrity. What's hard to believe, though, is the number of cocktails this man has mixed over the years. With time, care, and a painstaking attention to detail, he has made mixing drinks a high art. All of these years later, Martin still makes his famous Mint Julep with the care and attention he did when he first mixed the drink almost five decades ago.

Each fall, the Southern Foodways Alliance (with support from the Fertel Foundation) honors an unsung hero or heroine, a foodways tradition bearer of note, with the Ruth Fertel Keeper of the Flame Award. The SFA pays homage in two ways: we commission a documentary film and we make a monetary contribution. Months before Hurricane Katrina made landfall, Martin Sawyer knew he was this year's recipient, and the documentary film about his life and work is now in post-production. While we are not aware of Mr. Sawyer's fate at present, our thoughts and prayers are with him and the countless others who are part of the service industry in New Orleans.

* * *

Find out how the Southern Foodways Alliance and other organizations are reaching out to service industry workers in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Many thanks to Josh Friedland for the invitation to contribute to The Food Section.

Amy Evans, acevans@olemiss.edu
Oral Historian, Southern Foodways Alliance
Oxford, Mississippi

The Toll, in Lives and Culture

The scale of the wreckage caused by Hurricane Katrina is immeasurable -- at least for now. While the official death toll stands at 59 according to the New York Times, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin has warned that as many as 10,000 people may have died. Add to this tragedy the huge refugee crisis, and the enormity of the event becomes difficult to wrap one's head around. The least that can be done right now is to help support the relief effort, and I have added links to the right to make online contributions to the Red Cross and America's Second Harvest.

Amid this enormous human upheaval, what happens to the culture of New Orleans? It's too soon to make a realistic assessment, but one must assume that a great deal of it has been permanently lost, submerged under so much dirty water.

This being a food blog, I have asked oral historian, photographer, and painter Amy Evans to contribute to The Food Section as a guest editor and provide some insights into the gastronomy of New Orleans and also consider what is now at stake at this dire moment in the city's history.

As the resident oral historian for the Southern Foodways Alliance (SFA), Evans has created a number of fascinating documentary projects exploring Southern food culture. She recently produced a project on the "Bartenders of New Orleans," which included her interviews and photographs. Based in Oxford, Mississippi, Evans has also created oral history projects on Memphis and Tennessee barbecue, among other regional food traditions and folkways, for the SFA Oral History Initiative. In recognition of her documentary work, she was recently nominated to SouthernArtistry.org by the Mississippi Arts Commission and named one of the "most fearsome talents" in the food world by Food & Wine magazine in 2004.

I'm very much looking forward to reading Amy Evans' posts to The Food Section in the coming days, and I want to express my deep appreciation to her for generously agreeing to guest-edit this site.

Photo: Carl Mydans, Marketplace in the French quarters of New Orleans, June 1936 (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection).

The Museum as Edible Complex

We paid the teenage girl three dollars for the audio tour, slipped the little listening devices around our necks, and we were off to explore the place. This familiar scene could have played out at the Met or any other traditional museum, but instead we were about to tour the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, a sort of living museum and monument to sustainable food production.

Approximately 30 miles away from New York City, and just north of Sleepy Hollow and Tarrytown, the Stone Barns Center sits on 80 acres of property donated by David Rockefeller and his daughter, Peggy Dulany. The Center, which opened to the public on May 2, is set within Pocantico, the 4,000 acre country estate established by oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, Sr.

The focal point of the Center, amid a sweeping landscape of fields, woods, and gardens, is a complex of beautiful stone buildings built in the Norman style, dating from the 1930s. The buildings surround a wide courtyard that is entered through a dramatic, peaked archway. Directly across from the entrance is the restaurant, Blue Hill at Stone Barns, housed in a former cow barn. To the right is a café, also operated by Blue Hill. On the left, what was once the hay barn now serves as an educational center where lectures and workshops will be held. Two massive silos made of stone rise up just beyond the far end of the educational center.

We had dinner reservations at the restaurant, but we came a few hours early to explore the Center and the grounds. Before we started on the audio tour, we stopped into the café (also operated by Blue Hill), which sells soups, sandwiches, and snacks, as well as a selection of jarred seasonal vegetables and preserves. We sat outside, where there are tables in a long breezeway facing the courtyard, and cooled off with a cold, creamy asparagus soup and iced tea.

The tour has about thirteen stops. We were warned before we started that not everything narrated on the recording was yet in place, so we followed it loosely, exploring the grounds at our own pace and punching up codes for narration here and there.

The Center has plans to raise a variety of heritage breed and commercial livestock, including Berkshire pigs, Bourbon Red and White turkeys, Cotswold sheep, Rhode Island Red Cross laying hens, Cornish/White Rock Chickens, Holstein calves, and Simmental and White Park cattle.

The first animals we encountered were along the main drive as you first enter the Center’s grounds. Along the side of the road, behind an electric fence, a small flock of sheep gathered inside and around a modern-looking canopy shielding them from the sun. In the distance we made out some chickens.

As we walked on one of the dirt paths and spotted some cows grazing, the audio tour kicked in with a description of the philosophy of the Center’s livestock program, which is based on letting the animals roam free and feed on a “salad bar” of grass. As the pasture is slowly consumed, the animals are rotated to different areas on the farm to continue feeding.

Departing from the script, we ambled up a path behind the main outdoor growing fields over to the calving barn, eagerly anticipating a view of calves and “Mom.” “'Mom' is something called a mob feeder,” promised the Stone Barns Center Web site, “a 15-gallon barrel with nipples around the circumference. There are two placed in the pasture, where the calves can nurse.”

This sounded like a must-have photo opportunity, but to our dismay, not only was the barn blocked off with a “not open to the public” sign, but when we snuck over anyway for a closer look, there didn’t seem to be anything going on. When we got back to the Center, a member of the staff duly informed us that the calves had not yet arrived, but would be coming in the next couple of weeks.

Heading back towards the main complex, we passed through the courtyard again and then headed down to the greenhouse, which was one of the highlights of the visit. Located at the foot of a sloping hill below the main entrance of the Center, the greenhouse is a 22,000 square foot facility that is designed to grow up to 35 varieties of fresh produce. The soil was woven with strips of various shades of green, from bright green curly endive to darker baby arugula and huge blossom-like heads of radicchio with wide green leaves and purple veins.

It was near five o'clock, and this was starting to make us hungry. We wrapped up our tour here, returned our listening devices, and headed out to Tarrytown to kill some time before our dinner reservation. Coming soon, a report on our dinner at Blue Hill at Stone Barns.

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A Slice of Belgium, West of the Hudson

Cooperstown, New York, is a mecca for baseball fans, but there is another, albeit less-traveled, destination only a short drive away from the Baseball Hall of Fame. Just a few miles from the center of town, but 3,624 miles away from Brussels, is the Brewery Ommegang, an outpost of artisanal Belgian beer making that bills itself as “the only brewery in America dedicated to producing all bottle-conditioned Belgian style ales.”

Ommegang, a Flemish word meaning “to walk about," refers to the Ommegang Pageant, an annual celebration in Belgium that commemorates a festival held in the 16th century by the Magistrate of Brussels in honor of King Charles V.

A wide archway at the entrance to the brewery, a pristine white oblong building located on a 136-acre former hops farm, marks two dates: 1549, the year of the first Ommegang Pageant, and 1997, the year that the brewery was founded by its original owners, Don Feinberg and Wendy Littlefield, who have operated a business importing Belgian beers into the United States since 1982. They selected the location in part because of Otsego County's history as a major center for hops farming. During the 1800s, as much as 80 percent of the hops produced in the United States came from farms in and around Cooperstown.

Brewery Ommegang is modeled on Belgian farmstead breweries, which, in addition to brewing and selling beer, sell agricultural products as well as breads and cheeses based on ingredients used in the brewing process. The Brasserie DuPont in Tourpes, Belgium, is an example of the typical Belgian farmstead brewery. Brewery Ommegang does not produce any of its own bread or cheese, but shares its spent grains with local artisan bakers and cheese makers.

Unlike German beers, which are made strictly with malted grain, water, hops, and yeast, according to a German Purity Law dating back to 1519, Belgian Beers are typically infused with spices during the brewing process. Orange peel, star anise, ginger, coriander, and other spices provide a complex balance of peppery, sweet, and citrus flavors to the beers produced at the Brewery Ommegang.

The brewery produces three styles of beer (Ommegang Abbey Ale, Hennepin Farmhouse Ale, and Rare Vos Brabant Style Ale), all of which are bottle conditioned, which means they undergo two fermentations, the second taking place in the bottle, so that the flavor of the beer continues to develop well after it leaves Cooperstown. In fact, the brewery suggests cellaring the beer as one would store and age wine.

The brewery is committed to Belgian culture, as well as beer making, and sponsors events throughout the year, from a "Waffles and Puppets" celebration in October to an annual evocation of the Ommegang Pageant in July. Tours and tastings are offered throughout regular business hours.

Brewery Ommegang, 656 County Highway 33, Cooperstown, New York (800.544.1809).

Chop Suey Sundae, Anyone?

The menu for The Chocolate Garden, a dessert parlor that was located in Venice, California, circa 1920s, is one of many historic restaurant menus that can be found at the Menu Collection at the Los Angeles Public Library. The collection is searchable online by keyword, restaurant name, cuisine, and year. Many of the menus contain fascinating cover artwork reflecting the graphic design sensibilities of the periods in which these restaurants once existed. They also offer a unique window on the palates of the past. On the menu at The Chocolate Garden: "Chop Suey Sundae," 20 cents. According to the following recipe from the National Soda Fountain Guide, the concoction included raisins, dates, vanilla ice cream, flaked coconut, and chow mein noodles. More historic soda fountain recipes from the 1920s.

Ode to Pork

The Southern Foodways Alliance, an affiliated institute of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi, has put together a website documenting, in images and words, 16 barbecue joints in and around Memphis, entitled Memphis Bar-B-Q: A Collection of Photographs & Essays by Amy Evans and Joe York. Photo by Amy Evans.