Southern Slumber: Coffee and the Creole Kitchen

Tonight, we wander into the warmth of a New Orleans kitchen, where coffee simmers slowly and the rhythm of the day has not yet begun. 

In this episode of Southern Slumber, we'll settle into New Orleans, the same city that inspired writers like Tennessee Williams and musicians like Louis Armstrong. We'll settle into a a quieter, more intimate rhythm as I'll read you selections from The Picayune Creole Cookbook. I will begin with the cook book introduction and move slowly to the first chapter on coffee. Along the way, we drift through the rich traditions of Creole cooking -- where simple ingredients, careful preparation, and time itself create something deeply comforting. 

The quiet rituals of the kitchen, the soft clink of cups and the slow brewing of coffee invite the mind to settle and the body to rest. 

So dim the lights, get comfortable, and let yourself be carried into a peaceful Southern evening. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Welcome to Southern Slumber Bedtime Stories for Sleep I'm glad you're here tonight. I'm Holly, and each week we visit a corner of the American South, where the air is warm, the sweet aroma of gardenias linger from the garden, and everything moves in slow motion. You can simply drift in and out, letting the sound of my voice carry you. If sleep comes, let it. So close your eyes if you haven't already, take a slow breath in and let it fall away. New Orleans, Louisiana. It's a place where words have lingered in the air long after they were first written, where Tennessee Williams once wandered down the narrow streets where he wrote three plays, one being my personal favorite, a streetcar named Desire. The play debuted on Broadway in nineteen forty-eight and won Williams a Pulitzer Prize for Best Drama. It starred Jessica Tandy, think Fried Green Tomatoes forty years later, Kim Hunter, and Marlon Brando. It was made into a movie in nineteen fifty-one, starring the beautiful Vivian Lee as Blanche Dubois and Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowowski. After losing her family home, Blanche Dubois travels from Laurel, Mississippi to the French Quarter in New Orleans to live with her sister Stella and Stella's husband Stanley. Blanche is mentally fragile and has created her own world of illusion that is eventually crushed by the coarse, brutish Stanley. She ends up being carted away after a mental breakdown and tells the doctor taking her to a mental hospital, really in a complete split with reality. Whoever you are, I've always depended on the kindness of strangers. The play is so legendary that every year in the French Quarter there's a Stella Yelling contest at the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival. The list of other literary giants of New Orleans is endless. From Anne Rice, who imagined entire vampire worlds being shuttered windows behind shuttered windows and wrought iron balconies, to Truman Capote, to the more contemporary James Lee Burke, the prolific detective writer. New Orleans is a city where stories are not just told, but they are lived big. The city is famous for so many things. Hall, quiet facades, ironwork cutting like vines, balconies leaning gently over streets worn smooth by years and years of passing footsteps. The music, the birthplace of jazz, with Louis Armstrong at the helm and one of the most influential of all jazz musicians. Tonight we begin to step away from it all, away from the music, the literature, the architecture, the history. Imagine it's early evening. The light is turning golden, spilling softly across wrought iron balconies and narrow streets worn by smooth centuries. Somewhere nearby a screen door opens, then closes again, and from the inside you hear the quiet rhythm of a kitchen at work, a wooden spoon against a heavy pot, the gentle crackle of something cooking low and slow. We move down the southern street, past glowing windows and flickering lanterns, where music drifts lazily through the air, not loud, not demanding. A French horn, soft and distant, as if it care was carried by the breeze itself. In the city called the Big Easy, food isn't rushed, and neither is time. Recipes are remembered, told in stories passed from one generation to the next. Tonight we step into one of those kitchens. A kitchen with a mix of French, Spanish, and African cultures. This is the world of the Picayoon Creole Cook. The Picayoon Creole Cookbook was published in nineteen oh one in New Orleans by the city's newspaper, which was the Picayune. The newspaper wanted to preserve the rich Creole cooking tradition before it was lost and forgotten. The recipes were gathered directly from the local cooks and housekeepers who would pass them down verbally for generations. The cookbook is the Bible of culinary tradition that is unmatched with any cuisine in the world. So as you settle deeper down, letting the day drift away, we'll begin gently with the simple, quiet beauty of southern cooking. I'm going to read to you the introduction to the Pikayun's Creole Cookbook. After the introduction, I'll turn the pages to chapter one Creole Coffee. In presenting to the public this Creole Cookbook, the Picayune is actuated by the desire to fill a want that has long been felt, not only in New Orleans, where the art of good cooking was long ago reduced to a positive science, but in many sections of the country where the fame of our creole cuisine has spread, and with slight modification incident to local supplies of food articles, many of our most delightful recipes may be adapted by the intelligent housekeeper with profit and pleasure. Time was when the question of a Creole cookbook would have been, as far as New Orleans is concerned, as useless an addition to our local literature as it is now a necessity for the Creole Negro cooks of nearly two hundred years ago, carefully instructed and directed by their white Creole mistresses, who received their inheritance of gastronomic lore from France, where the art of good cooking first had birth, faithfully transmitted their knowledge to their progens, and these, quick to appreciate and understand, and with a keen intelligence and zeal born of the desire to please, improvised and improved upon the products of the cuisine of Louisiana's mother country. Then came the Spanish domination with its influx of rich and stately dishes brought over by the grand dames of Spain of a century and a half ago. After that came the gradual amalgamation of the two races on Louisiana soil, and with this was evolved a new school of cookery, partaking of the best elements of the French and Spanish cuisines, and yet peculiarly distinct from either, a system of cookery that has held its own through succeeding generations and which drew from even such a learned authority as Thackeray, that noted tribute to New Orleans, where of all the cities in the world you can eat the most and suffer the least, where claret is as good as at Bordeaux, and where a rag out and a boule bay can be had, the like of which was never eaten in Marseille or Paris. The Picayun in compiling this book has been animated by the laudable desire to teach the great mass of the public how to live cheaply and well. There's an old saying that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach. Every housewife knows the importance of setting a well cooked meal before her husband if she wishes him to preserve his equanimity of temper. Every mother should know the importance of preparing good nutritious dishes for her children in the most palatable and appetizing manner, if she would give them that most precious of all gifts, a healthy mind and a healthy body. People are the better, the happier, and the longer lived for the good, wholesome, well cooked daily meal. It is proposed in this book to assist the housekeepers generally to set a dainty and appetizing table at a moderate outlay, to give recipes clearly and accurately with simplicity and exactness, so that the problem of how to live may become easier of solution, and even the most ignorant and inexperienced cook may be able to prepare a toothsome and nutritious meal with success. The housekeeper is not told to take some of this, a little of that, and a pinch of some other ingredient. She is not left to the chance of going accidentally at the proper proportions of components, parts of any dish, but the relative proportions of all ingredients are given with accuracy, proper length of time required for cooking different dishes. In all the recipes, the quantics are given for a family of six. The intelligent housekeeper will thus be able to form a happy medium and increase or reduce proportionately according to the size of her family, the number of invited guests, etc. The Picayun's Creel Cookbook is not designed for chefs of cuisines. It has been prepared with special appreciation of the wants of the household and of that immense class of housekeepers who, thrown upon their own resources and anxious to learn, are yet ignorant of the simplest details of good cooking for young housekeepers who are left to experience for a teacher, and who often learn only after many disheartening failures and a great outlay and waste of good material, and for the public generally who, as a rule, have yet to learn that in a well regulated kitchen nothing is ever wasted, but with careful preparation, even the rough ends of a beefsteak may be made into a wholesome, tender, and appetizing dish. That stale bread may be used in the most delicious desserts and varses and leftover food from the day before need not be thrown in the trash box, but may be made into an endless variety of wholesome and nutritious dishes. Hence, special care has been taken to rescue from oblivion many fine old fashioned dishes and bring them back into general use, dishes whose places can never be equaled by elegant novelties or fancifully extravagant recipes. Special attention has been given to the simple, everyday home dishes of the Creole homehold. While those that tempted the gourmet and epicurean in the palmiest days of old Creole cookery have not been omitted. The Picaune points with pride to the famous soups, gumbos, ragouts, hors d'oeuvres, jambalayas, and dessert that in turn receive particular attention. A special chapter has been devoted to the silence of making good coffee, a lacriole, and one to the modes of cooking Louisiana rice. The consumption of rice has increased enormously of late, and it will continue to become more and more popular as an article of food when the people in the North and West learn how to cook it, and when they understand how largely it enters into a variety of delightful and dainty combinations. Throughout this work, the Picayune has had but one desire at heart, and that is to reach the wants of every household in our cosmetolitan community to show the earnest housekeeper how the best food may be prepared at the least cost, and how it is possible for every family from the palace to the cottage to keep a good table and the same table and at the same time an economical one. Whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well. If this is true of other things, how many how much more of cooking, of which the life and health of the family depend? The kindness should not be looked upon as a place of drudgery. A poet once sung, if making a drudgery divine who sweeps a room as to God's laws, makes that and the action fine. The benefits that will ultimately accrue to every family morally and physically from paying greater attention to the proper preparation of food cannot be overestimated. The fact that good cooking operates to the greatest extent to the preservation of the domestic peace and happiness of a family cannot be gainsaid. That this creole book may find its way to man's hearth and homes, and that the life of the household may be the better, healthier, and happier for its advent is the wish of the Picky.

SPEAKER_00 18:17

Next I'm going to read the chapter on coffee A good cup of Creole coffee.

SPEAKER_01 18:35

Is there anything in the whole range of food substances to be compared with it? And is there any city in the world where coffee is so delightfully concocted as in New Orleans? Travelers the world over unite in praise of Creole coffee or coffee la Creole, as they are fond of putting it. The Creole cuisineers succeed far beyond even the famous chefs of France in discovering the secret of good coffee making, and they have never yielded the palm of victory. There is no place in the world in which the use of coffee is more general than in the old Creole city of New Orleans, where from the famous French market with its world renowned coffee stands to the old homes on Bayo Bayou Saint John from Lake Enchatrain to the verge of Southport, the cup of cafe noir or cafe au lait at morning, at noon, and at night has become a necessary and delightful part of the life of the people and the wonder and the joy of visitors. The morning cup of cafe noir is an integral part of the life of a Creole household. The Creoles hold as a physiological fact that this custom contributes to longevity, and they point day after day to examples of old men and women of fourscore and over who attest to the powerful aid they have received through life from a good, fragrant cup of coffee, even in the early morning. The ancient residents hold too that after a hearty meal, a cup of coffee noir or black coffee will relieve the sense of oppression so apt to be experienced and enables the stomach to perform its functions with greater facility. Cafe noir is known too as one of the best preventives of infectious diseases, and the ancient Creole physicians never used any other deodorizer that than passing a shafing dish with burning grains of coffee through the room. As an antidote for poison, the uses of coffee are too well known to be dilated upon. Coffee is also the greatest brain food and stimulant known. Coffee supported the old age of Voltaire and enabled Fontenelle to reach his one hundredth birthday. Charles Good Pierre, the illustrious Louisiana historian at the advanced age of eighty, paid tribute to the Creole Cup of Cafe Noir. Among advanced scientists, it is rapidly taking the place of digitalis in the treatment of certain cardiac affections. And the basis of black coffee, caffeine enters largely into medicinal compositions. Coffee is now classified by physicians as an auxiliary foodstuff substance, retarding the waste of the nerve tissue and acting with peculiar peculiar strengthening effect upon the nervous and vascular system. How important then is the art of making good coffee, entering as it does, so largely into the daily life of the American people? There is no reason why the secret should be confined to any section of city, but with a little care and attention, every household in this land may enjoy its morning or after dinner cup of coffee with as much real pleasure as the Creoles of New Orleans and the thousands of visitors who yearly migrate to this old Franco Spanish city. It is, therefore, with pardonable pride that the Picaune begins this Creole cookbook by introducing its readers into a typical Creole, the best ingredients and in the proper making. By the best ingredients she means those delightful coffees grown on well watered mountain slopes, such as the famous Java and Mocha coffees. It must be of the best quality. The mocha and java mixed producing a concoction of a most delightful aroma and stimulating effect. She will tell you too that one of the first essentials is to parch the coffee grains just before making the coffee, because coffee that has been long parched and left with standing loses its flavor and strength. The coffee grains should be roasted to a rich brown and never allowed to scorch or burn, otherwise the flavor of the coffee is at once affected or destroyed. Good coffee should never be boiled. Bear this in mind that the good Creole cook never boils coffee, but insist on dripping a covered strainer slowly, slowly drip, drip, drip until all the flavor is extracted. To reach this desired end, immediately after the coffee has been roasted and allowed to cool in a covered dish so that none of the flavor will escape. The coffee is ground, neither too fine, for that will make the coffee dreggy. Not too coarse, for that prevents the escape of the full strength of the coffee juice. But a careful medium proportion which will not allow the hot water pouring to run rapidly through, but which will admit of the water percolating slowly through and through the grounds, extracting every bit of the strength and aroma and falling steadily with a drip into the coffee pot. To make good coffee, the water must be freshly boiled and must never be poured upon the grounds until it has reached the good boiling point. Otherwise the flavor is destroyed. And subsequent pourings of boiling water never quite succeeded in extracting the superb strength and aroma which distinguish the good cup of coffee. It is of the greatest importance that the coffee be kept perfectly clean, and the good cook will bear in mind that absolute cleanliness is as necessary for the interior of a coffee pot as for the shining exterior. The fact is one too commonly overlooked, and yet the coffee pot requires more than that. Ordinary care for that reason that the chemical action of the coffee upon the tin or agate tends to create a substance which collects and clings to every crevice and seam, and naturally in the course of time will affect the flavor of the coffee most peculiarly and unpleasantly. Very often the fact that the coffee tastes bitter or muddy arises from this fact. The inside of the coffee pot should therefore be washed carefully every day. Having observed these conditions, proceed to make the coffee according to the following unfailing Creole rule. Have the water heated to a good boil. Set the coffee pot in front of the stove, never on top, as the coffee will boil, and then the taste is destroyed. Allow one cup for the ordinary mill of coffee to make four good cups of the liquid. Pour first about two tablespoons of the boiling water on the coffee grounds, or according to the quality of coffee used, just sufficient to settle the grounds. Wait about five minutes, then pour a little more water and allow it to drip slowly through, but never pour water the second time until the grounds have ceased to puff or bubble, as this is an indication that the grounds have settled. Keep pouring slowly at intervals a little boiling water at a time until the delightful aroma of the coffee begins to escape from the closed spout of the coffee pot. If the coffee stains the cup, it is a little too strong, but do not go far beyond this, or the coffee will be too weak when you have produced a rich, fragrant concoction whose delightful aroma fills the room and is a constant tempting invitation to taste it, serve in China cups with sugar or sweetening.

SPEAKER_00 30:33

With the ending of chapter two, I'm going to wind it down for the night. The last cup of coffee has been poured, but the kitchen has grown still.

SPEAKER_01 30:49

Somewhere in New Orleans, long after the clatter of dishes and the warmth of conversation, the night settles in. The air is soft, a little heavy with the memory of coffee, dark, rich and comforting. The lamps are low now. Shadow stretch gently across wooden floors, and the recipes once read, once stirred to life rest quietly on their pages again. There is nothing left to prepare, there is nothing left to do. Only the quiet remains. Perhaps somewhere not too far away, a quiet streetcar named Desire comes along the tracks, an echo lingering like a memory in the night, and in the distance a French horn plays low and warm, the unmistakable sound of Louis Armstrong drifting through the warm air, a slow wandering melody like a lullaby meant just for you. The city, with all its stories, its music, its voices, grows quieter now.

SPEAKER_00 32:26

Let your thoughts soften like steam rising from a cup, then disappearing into the night. Let your breathing slow, steady and easy.

SPEAKER_01 32:45

You've traveled through old kitchens, through the gentle ritual of coffee, through a place where time moves just a little slower, and now you can rest. Drift down deeper and deeper still. Sleep comes easily here, and it will stay with you through the quiet hours of the night. Thank you for spending this quiet time with me. I'll be here again soon with another story to help you rest. Good night for now.