Kevin Belton’s Big Flavors of New Orleans
Digital Edition 1.0
Text © 2016 Kevin Belton with Rhonda K. Findley
Photographs © 2016 Denny Culbert
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except brief portions quoted for purpose of review.
Gibbs Smith
P.O. Box 667
Layton, Utah 84041
Orders: 1.800.835.4993
www.gibbs-smith.com
ISBN: 978-1-4236-4158-2
For my mother, Sarah; Nan, Aunt Dorothy, and all my family, past, present, and future.
Table of Contents
It was a complete joy working on this book with my friend Rhonda. Getting the voices in my head all together, I am sure, was like herding cats for her. We spent many hours eating and laughing at ourselves.
Thanks to Monica. She was able to keep us in line and on schedule so she could edit all our screw ups.
My cousin Lorna enabled me to recall memories and thoughts accurately. Many thanks to Austin, Cabral, and Packy for the work they put in prepping and organizing so all I had to do was walk in and not mess it up. With Denny’s amazing eye, he was able to bring our creations alive on the plate. So not only did they taste wonderful, they looked wonderful as well.
It was a pleasure working with Terri, Dawn, and Jim and the entire staff at WYES (PBS New Orleans) in being able to share New Orleans’ food and culture with others.
The New Orleans School of Cooking was founded in 1980 by Joe Cahn because there was nowhere people could go to learn about New Orleans’ cuisine. Thanks to the efforts of Greg and Suzanne, the school is still a family-run business. We get to introduce New Orleans’ food and culture to people around the world. Bruce Trascher was not only a fellow chef and business partner, but most of all, he was my friend and I miss him very much.
—Kevin
Thank you Kevin, for believing in our partnership and trusting me with your family memories and food secrets. Because of you and your family, this book is filled with love. Monica, you make us all look good. Carlos Leon, your support means the sky is the limit. Thank you Fatma for letting us sit for hours on end in Fatoush while we wrote and ate your amazing food.
—Rhonda
I grew up at 2719 Valence Street in Uptown New Orleans. That makes me an Uptown New Orleans boy. My parents, Sarah and Oscar Belton, along with my Grandmother Nan, created a true, comfortable home where family, food, and love were the main ingredients. That’s actually a New Orleans home to me. Looking back now, I’ve come to realize that our household truly reflected the values and the personality of what it means to be from New Orleans.
Our house was in the New Orleans style called a double shotgun, with a few minor architectural changes à la Miss Magnolia Battle’s discretion. That’s my Grandmother Nan for ya.
Shotgun style means the rooms in a house line up one after another with no hallway and are pretty open for everyone to know everybody’s secrets. So you get pretty close. And, we liked it like that. Up until I was six or seven years old, Nan and I were roommates. She was my best friend, mentor, teacher, and overall life coach. It was by her suggestion that my parents added on the upstairs addition called a camelback that became my childhood oasis.
The kitchen was the heart and soul of our house. The rich yellow walls were offset with white trim. The shiny, white porcelain sink was perfection, not a scratch on it. The appliances sparkled. You could eat off my mom’s kitchen floor. We gathered together around the kitchen table everyday for almost every meal.
I was ringside for all family discussions that took place at that table. Whether we were talking about current events or work issues or the needs of family and friends, those issues were taken up usually over shelling pecans, stirring the gumbo pot, cooking rice, or peeling shrimp.
I suppose that’s why I feel most comfortable in the kitchen. Any kitchen. Your kitchen. My kitchen. That’s what comfort is to me. Laughter. Tears. The smell of gumbo cooking. And, love. Lot’s of love. And lots of food.
My parents were adventurous and weren’t shy about getting out in the city. Intrinsically, New Orleanians are very neighborhood-centric. That’s still true to this day. Not the Belton clan. We were out and about all over town in search of great food and, of course, family visits. We had family and friends all over the city—the 7th Ward, New Orleans East, Westbank, the French Quarter, where my dad lived until about age 10. I mean all over. So I like to say that I experienced New Orleans from the backseat of a blue 1960 Dodge Dart. And, those experiences with my family made me the person and the chef I am today.
As an only child, I shared the backseat of the Dart, driven by my mother, with the bounty of fresh ingredients from markets, grocers, and butchers from across the city. My mom knew the very best spots to shop for the freshest ingredients city-wide.
We would get fresh shrimp from the seafood lot over in Westwego. Mom would drive across the Mississippi River Bridge back in those days when there was only one bridge downtown. Often times, I hit the open lot market with her. And, other times, she would drop me off at Sid Goodreaux’s house to socialize while she ran to the market. Mom was not afraid to power over to the Westbank if that meant getting fresh-caught seafood. I shared the backseat with shrimp that was still wiggling fresh from the water or blue crabs packed in ice. On the way back, she would stop at Don’s Seafood on Broad Street for fresh oysters. They’d come along for the ride in the backseat, too.
Mom was committed to fresh food. I realize this now because of how she managed the kitchen and me and Dad as well. It wasn’t unusual for Mom to be cooking dinner and turning on her heels and saying, “Can you run over and get some French bread?” She only had to ask once. Dad and I were up and out the door for a quick run up Freret Street and over to Simon Bolivar to the front door of Leidenheimer’s bakery for fresh French bread. It seemed like they never turned off the ovens there. I remember the little retail store. And, the flashing red light indicating that a new, fresh batch of bread was just out of the oven.
Getting fresh bread was that quick in New Orleans. That easy. And, I just always thought that’s what everybody else did. We never went for just one loaf, it was always two. The Belton men would snack on one on the way home.
Trips to see my Grandma Emily and Grandpa Oscar along with Uncle Norman and Aunt Marion in the 7th Ward usually were intertwined with a visit to the butcher for the best Creole sausage in New Orleans. For me, the 7th Ward was all about butchered meats and handmade sausages as well as the best fried-oyster po’boy in the city. Again, Mom had figured out who did the best and I’m grateful that she always took me along to experience these places first hand.
Not 10 minutes from the house, in front of the seminary on Carrollton Avenue, the produce man parked on the side of the street advertising his fresh produce. Mom and I were regulars. Over the years, I learned about Louisiana seasonal produce and how to choose ripe fruits and vegetables. Snapping. Thumping. Smelling. Inspecting. All skills my mother possessed and passed along to me in subtle ways right there in the middle of the bustling traffic. I can still see her face as she took great joy visiting and shopping.
Around the corner from the house on Freret Street was our local bakery, Long’s. I loved their donuts. The glazed and jelly were my two favorites. When Mom was running her errands and we were close to Toledano around Washington in Central City, a stop at Gambino’s for Doberge and rum cake was always on her list.
It was rare that we ate out in restaurants. Mom had mastered most of the dishes that make New Orleans cuisine remarkable. I guess she, Dad, and Nan figured why go out and be disappointed when Mom was the master of all the New Orleans foods we loved.
With that being said, there were a few spots that got my mother’s attention. Dooky Chase, ground zero for Creole cuisine, created by Chef Leah Chase, being one of those spots. I remember going to Dooky Chase with Mom, Dad, Aunt Dorothy, Lorna, and Chet. Things that stood out to me as a kid were Chef Leah’s stuffed shrimp and gumbo. Eddie’s on Law Street also made the list of restaurants my Mom enjoyed with us. We ordered their seafood dishes. And, of course, Chez Helene, off St. Bernard Avenue around North Robertson and Laharpe, for the fried chicken and stuffed bell peppers by Chef Austin Leslie. Eating Chef Austin’s food is one of my favorite food memories of all time.
Today, my mantra about New Orleans is the one my parents and grandparents taught me as a child. When you live in a city, use the whole city. The Beltons were not afraid to venture out for the best food and the best ingredients. The butchers. The oyster shuckers. The seafood vendors. The department managers at Schwegmanns. These were important people in our lives.
I raised my two sons, Kevin and Jonathan, the same way my parents and grandparents raised me, around the table. I wanted them to understand how special New Orleans is and show them the places where we shopped and the neighborhoods where our families lived. And, that meant going all over and eating everything in sight. We went across the lake on big food adventures. A lot of times they would ask me, “Why are we going to the grocery store across the river?” I’d say, “Well, its part of our city, too.”
I think Kevin channels my Uncle Chet for sure. My Uncle Chet was Mom’s fresh fish provider. Today, Kevin is known for dropping a line every chance he gets, just like Uncle Chet did. And, Kevin often cooks at home with his wife, Christina. It is such a joy for me to visit with them and my grandson Carter in Lafayette, Louisiana, and watch them in the kitchen. I feel so proud. It takes me back to the kitchen on Valence Street.
Jonathan is my roommate these days. And, I feel so lucky for that. He brings groceries home and the bags seem to always be from different stores, just like my mother shopped. So all the influences I conveyed seemed to rub off on them. These little actions keep our family culinary traditions alive, and at the same time, New Orleans culinary traditions alive and well, too.
Kevin’s favorite dish of mine is gumbo and that means with potato salad. Jonathan is a fan of my alligator sauce piquante. He actually asked me to cook a huge batch of it for his friends as a high school graduation present. That pretty much sums up how we Beltons feel about food. I’m proud of the fact that they both are pretty good cooks, too.
I shop from the Westbank to Metairie. I eat Uptown, Downtown, and everywhere in between. I shop in New Orleans East at the Vietnamese Market and the Holly Grove Farmers Market. I’m not shy about pulling over on Claiborne Avenue to buy a fresh melon off the back of a truck. I will drive thirty minutes to try a new restaurant. I’m thrilled when a new chef arrives in New Orleans and receives national acclaim for using New Orleans ingredients in a different way. And, I continue to thrive on teaching daily classes on gumbo, jambalaya, and roux techniques to the thousands of students who attend The New Orleans School of Cooking classes in the heart of the French Quarter. We did the math the other day and figured I have taught over 500,000 students to this day and counting. That’s a lot of people getting the good word on the hallmark dishes of New Orleans. Every time I think about it, I’m just so proud.
I’ve come to realize New Orleans is just one big neighborhood. Lots of cities in the United States have history. Here in New Orleans, we’ve kept our history alive. Our food and recipes stayed the same over time. There aren’t many places that have embraced and kept their history alive in the same way we have here. I’m proud to be a Creole New Orleanian. I’m certainly proud of my culinary heritage. Life here truly revolves around the table.
Little did I know that all of the food adventures and the neighborhood adventures my family took me on were preparing me for life as a chef and an educator. Those same ingredients I shared the backseat with as a child have become the key ingredients in my life and my career.
It’s R-O-U-X, not rue as in a New Orleans street name. A roux is one of the fundamental cooking elements of New Orleans cuisine.
The French roux was butter and flour cooked for about five minutes or so just to get rid of the flour taste. That’s called a blonde roux. This blonde roux is the base for many of the French sauces like a Béchamel, the mother of all classic sauces.
Here in New Orleans, someone made a decision in a Creole kitchen to go past the five minutes to see what happened to the roux. And, the result was one of the distinctive flavor elements for our cooking techniques in the Crescent City.
How do you make a roux? Well, that’s both an easy and complicated question. A roux can be what you want it to be or even what you simply need it to be to reach your flavor expectation.
For instance, think about a piece of bread toasting in the same way as cooking a roux. As bread toasts it gets to different stages of flavor. Cooks realized the longer the roux was stirred over the heat it took on different stages of flavor as well.
The most important thing about cooking a roux is that it is tended constantly. By tending constantly, I mean you stir the entire pan, not particularly fast, just consistently, and you incorporate the entire contents of the pan from the bottom up.
Simply put, the roux has to be stirred. And every nook and cranny in the pan needs to be stirred. Oh, and you cannot walk away. Trust me. I know. Which leads me to a funny story.
As a child growing up in New Orleans, you had time to get away with whatever you wanted to do when Mom was making a roux. She couldn’t walk away from the roux for at least 10 minutes. Not having anyone to chase or run from, as an only child, my choice of shenanigans while Mom was stirring the roux was bed jumping. A past time, by the way, I gave up when I started breaking the slats at about eight years old. True story—I knew how much I could get away with by smelling the roux cooking. As soon as I knew Mom started the roux, off I’d run to my makeshift trampoline. I would smell the roux cooking and could tell when she was almost finished by the nutty aroma. The smell was my cue. I learned to smell when a roux was done, well before I learned the visual cue of a finished roux.
So you ask what does a perfect roux look like? Well, I’m going to tell you that it depends. Pretty crazy, huh? Because, that is one of the beautiful things about a roux. It’s truly personal. Think of gravy. Your grandma makes a light gravy for mashed potatoes. But your mom makes a brown gravy for her mashed potatoes. They both taste amazing. But they looked completely different. So apply that same perspective to gumbo. I make dark, chocolate-colored roux for gumbo. It doesn’t matter if it’s delicate seafood or duck with andouille sausage. My gumbo is dark because my flour and oil combination is cooked completely toasted, if you will. The color change comes from the flour actually cooking. Flour only cooks in a fat. So butter or oil is the fat you need to make a roux. If you like a very dark roux then you have to use a high heat oil that can withstand the cooking time. If you are going for a lighter roux then butter is what you use.
Yes. New Orleans flavors come from fat. Accept it. Embrace it. And, enjoy the flavor. The color changes the longer you cook the roux over the heat. Of course, the darker the roux, the more intense and complex the flavor and the longer you have to stir. From a light blonde-colored roux or a peanut butter colored-roux to a dark, chocolate-colored roux, these are the color ranges you pass through during the process. Remove your roux from the heat, and it basically stops cooking. You decide.
Also, the pan you cook the roux in matters, too. No Teflon coated pans. You can’t tell if the roux scorches. It’s better to toss a burnt roux and start over than toss out a pot of gumbo.
So my advice is to practice. Experiment. Enjoy. And, turn off your phone. Put the dog out. Give your kids something to do and make your roux.
When you are looking for the main flavor in New Orleans cooking, you won’t find it in a shaker, a container, a bottle, or a box. The flavor is actually from the moisture that comes from cooking with onions, celery, and green bell pepper.
Classical French cooking relies on the use of a mire poix which is two parts onion, one part celery, and one part carrot. The problem was there were no carrots in south Louisiana 300 years ago. What we had here in New Orleans were plenty of bell peppers.
So the onions, celery, and bell peppers became the New World mire poix ingredient combination that is the foundation of most of New Orleans signature dishes—soups, sauces, stocks, and main dishes. All of them rely on the Creole mire poix to build the flavor. A general mire poix can be different depending on the culture. And, as one can surmise, here in New Orleans, our cuisine referred to French techniques because that’s who settled here first. The industrious settlers and cooks in Louisiana incorporated the bell pepper out of necessity and created a unique flavor profile that is recognized as the only non-Native American indigenous cuisine in the United States—Creole cooking.
The addition of the bell pepper adds a third vegetable that sweats just like the onion and celery and adds even more moisture when cooked in the oil. Carrots are a dryer ingredient and more subtle in complexity. The bell pepper is so in your face. And, more moisture, in this case, with the ingredient tweak means more flavor. That flavor is completely different and extraordinarily unique from classic French cooking. The new combination was created out of necessity, but is now integral to the flavor profile of New Orleans cuisine.
Being a predominately Catholic settlement, whether under French rule or Spanish, it is interesting to note that the same religion, Catholicism, guided the city for so many years under the concept of the Holy Trinity, the big three of the Catholics. The name stuck for the big three of New Orleans cuisine. It would be sacrilege not to cook with the traditional three: onions, celery, and bell pepper.
Because the trinity is such a foundation of New Orleans cooking, Mom often would start sautéing onions, celery, and bell pepper before she decided what she was actually cooking for dinner.
When you are going for true Creole flavor, be sure to invite the trinity into the pot. Onions, celery, and bell pepper, because you can’t cook New Orleans food without them.