Tom Fitzmorris's New Orleans Food (Revised and Expanded Edition)

More Than 250 of the City's Best Recipes to Cook at Home

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• Publisher: Abrams
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781683352259
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Culinary Arts

Tom Fitzmorris is uniquely qualified to write about the food of New Orleans. Born in the Crescent City on Mardi Gras, he has been eating, celebrating, and writing about the city's cuisine for more than 30 years. Now Fitzmorris is refreshing his bestselling cookbook New Orleans Food. The book features all of the favorite recipes, steeped in the town's Creole and Cajun traditions, but is updated to include a 16-page color insert with gorgeous food photography and an updated introduction. From small plates (Shrimp Remoulade with Two Sauces) to main courses (Redfish Herbsaint, Creole Lamb Shanks) to desserts and drinks (Bananas Foster, Beignets, and Cafe au Lait), these dishes are elegant and casual, traditional, and evolved.

Appetizers

Crabmeat St. Francis

Crabmeat Ravigote

Crabmeat West Indies

Crabmeat Cannelloni

Deviled Crab

Oysters Rockefeller

Oysters Rockefeller Flan

Oysters Bienville

Creole-Italian Oysters

Oysters Dunbar

Oysters Jaubert

Oysters Polo

Oysters Roland

Oysters au Poivre

Oysters en Brochette

Shrimp Limone

Shrimp with Fennel and Herbs

Spicy Garlic Shrimp

Tasso Shrimp

Crawfish Boulettes

Crawfish with Morel Mushrooms

Gratin of Crawfish Tails

Asparagus and Crawfish with Glazed Hollandaise

Seared Scallops with Artichokes

Chicken Livers with Bacon and Pepper Jelly

Natchitoches Spicy Meat Pies

Frogs’ Legs Persillés

Abita Springs Stuffed Quail

Mirliton and Root Vegetable Gratin

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In too many restaurants, the appetizers are dramatically better than the much more expensive entrées. Here’s why I think this is: most chefs make up their menus from the top down. By the time they get to the main courses, they often have used up all their inspirations on the first courses. And they revert to mere trend-following when they get to the steaks, chicken, and fish. The best chefs have enough in their heads to devise menus full of interesting food. But the less-than-best chefs are also out there, working.

Also, chefs like to play around with very expensive ingredients. You can make a legitimate dish of mostly jumbo lump crabmeat if the serving is appetizer size. It’s quite another matter when you need to put a half-pound of crabmeat on the plate.

Finally, appetizers must be brilliant. A meal that starts with a hit has a man on base, and you can figure out the rest of this metaphor. A spectacular first course often casts a glow on an underperforming entrée that might disguise its shortcomings. At least in the mind of the beholder.

No course lends itself more readily to invention and rule breaking than the appetizer. You can go hot or cold or in between. Use any method of cooking any ingredient in any presentation. Your guests may well be turned on by some fantastic creation. But even if they aren’t, the risk to their appetites is small. You have the entire remainder of the meal to make up for it with safer dishes. So go nuts on the first course.

Beyond Shellfish

The most pervasive appetizer tradition is to center it on seafood. There is a logic to this: Seafood is light, much of it can be served cold, and you can use intense, palate-perking sauces.

Louisiana seafood is a great resource for creating appetizers. The number of oyster dishes alone is dizzying (as I will prove shortly). The local crabmeat is almost absurdly delectable, even when eaten straight out of the container. The three major varieties of shrimp are all the equals of any other in the world.

When seafood will be the entrée, the meal is more interesting when it starts with something else. So we welcome duck breasts, sausages, sweetbreads, meat-filled dumplings, and other light meat dishes into the appetizer universe.

Hot and Cold, Soft and Crunchy, Mild and Spicy

A chef I know uses a predictable pattern in all his wine-dinner menus. He starts with something cold, then serves a hot dish, then another cold item, followed by another hot item. If he could get away with it, he’d keep the pattern going all the way through the dessert.

My suspicion is that he does this mainly for logistical reasons. A cold dish can be prepared in advance, shoved into the refrigerator, and pulled out when it’s time to send it out. This gives him more time to get the hot dishes ready. But there’s a good taste reason for the strategy: contrast. Creating contrasts among flavors, spice levels, textures, colors, temperatures, and ingredients is a fine art. It’s one of the things that separates the great chefs from the ordinary ones.

Since you have much more latitude in the appetizer course than in any other, think about what will follow it and create an appetizer that will force a gustatory shift when you and your guests move on.

Crabmeat St. Francis

Crabmeat St. Francis was created by the legendary New Orleans chef Warren Leruth, whose restaurant in Gretna was the premier haute-Creole place to eat in the 1960s and 1970s. Warren once told me that the biggest thing he missed about not having the restaurant anymore was that he couldn’t eat crabmeat St. Francis whenever he wanted to. It was one of the most celebrated of his dishes—fantastic appetizer.

4 cups heavy whipping cream

2 cups crab stock (see recipe, this page)

¼ cup dry white wine

4 bay leaves

1½ sticks (12 Tbsp.) butter

1 large green onion, finely chopped

2 large cloves garlic, chopped

¼ cup chopped white onion

¾ cup hearts of celery, chopped

½ tsp. thyme

Generous pinch of celery seed

1¼ tsp. salt

¼ tsp. cayenne

¼ tsp. ground white pepper

½ cup flour

1 Tbsp. chopped flat-leaf parsley leaves

4 egg yolks

2 lb. fresh jumbo lump crabmeat

½ cup bread crumbs

1. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F. In a saucepan, bring the cream, crab stock, wine, and bay leaves to a simmer and hold there.

2. Melt the butter in a medium skillet over medium heat. Add the remaining ingredients up to (but not including) the flour and sauté until the vegetables are translucent.

3. Make a blond roux by adding the flour to the vegetables and cook, stirring often, for about 5 minutes, or until the flour is no longer raw and just starting to brown.

4. Whisk in the cream-and-stock mixture. Lower the heat, add the parsley, and gently simmer for about 15 minutes. Remove and discard the bay leaves.

5. Remove the skillet from the heat and whisk in the egg yolks, one at a time.

6. Place 2 oz. of the lump crabmeat in each of 16 ramekins or baking shells. Top each with a ½ cup of the sauce, sprinkle lightly with the bread crumbs, and bake until the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• Foreword by Emeril Lagasse
• Introduction
• Amuse-Bouche
• Appetizers
• Gumbos, Bisques, and Other Soups
• Shellfish Entrées
• Finfish Entrées
• Meat
• Chicken, Duck, and Other Birds
• Outdoor Grill
• Red Beans, Rice, Vegetables, and Pasta
• Salads
• Casual Food
• Breakfast
• Desserts and Baked Goods
• Drinks
• Roux, Seasonings, Sauces, and Other Building Blocks
• Ingredients Notes
• Index of Searchable Terms