Nancy Brewer, owner and baker of the Kitchen Shop in Grand Coteau, La., had a quiet epiphany in culinary school. While practicing pâte sucrée, she realized it was nearly the same dough her grandmother in Louisiana used for her sweet pies, a crumb and texture that isn’t quite a short crust and also isn’t quite a pie dough but its own thing all at once.
Nostalgia, in my experience, is the inspiration behind so many good decisions in kitchens and bake shops. The other important choices, in my opinion, are almost entirely based on your ingredients.
Recipe: Gâteau Nana
Years ago, I worked in a restaurant that had a hard rule: If it didn’t come from within 50 miles of our kitchen, we didn’t serve it. This, of course, created some obstacles — the South isn’t known for its wine, olive oil or vanilla beans. But the ideology was meant to support local vendors and was dedicated — as much as it could possibly be — to creating demand, and in turn, supply. (Eventually, if I remember correctly, we softened “50 miles” to simply “the South,” which allowed for much more diversity and exchange.)
Cornmeal, sorghum (both syrup and grain), pawpaws, pecans, buttermilk, sassafras, sweet potatoes: These became the engines that pushed all of that classic French technique to a purpose on my menus.
Where food leads you is what makes cooking worthwhile.
Like so many parts of the world, the South is full of cooks and chefs who get excited about what is grown and produced close by. One chef will whisper to another, for example, that there is a cane syrup being perfectly boiled to a flawless amber in a man’s backyard in Youngsville, La., right outside Lafayette, and they’ll make a pilgrimage to meet this man. There, they’ll find Charles Poirier in the house where he grew up. They’ll buy his syrup, made out back with his sugar-cane mill and cast-iron cauldron. He’ll take them into his daddy’s old barn — the one Charles hasn’t touched since his death — and rev up his old tractor, which makes a beautiful noise. He’ll even tell you about how it was the state’s first mechanical tractor, delivered by boat.
These are the reasons to cook, in my estimation: meeting the people who grew or made these ingredients, then using those ingredients to prepare food that will lead you to others. It’s this path that led me to Melissa M. Martin, chef and owner of Mosquito Supper Club in New Orleans, and I’m going to go out on a short limb and guess that it’s what led her to Brewer’s gâteau Nana. In Martin’s newest book, “Bayou: Feasting Through the Seasons of a Cajun Life,” she spotlights the cake, one influenced by French traditions like the beautiful, gently elegant gâteaus of Brittany and Breton and the galettes des rois that inspire king cakes. “Nostalgia,” she writes, “drives those of us chasing a specific flavor.”
This important alchemy is the pivotal moment where we, as chefs, employ nostalgia and regional reverence, like simply using nearby pecans rather than far-flung almonds, and step into that space of innovation. To live and work long enough as a cook to witness those successes, and taste the rewards, is a gift indeed.
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