Cooking Up a Storm: Recipes Lost and Found {Product Review}

For New Orleanians, evacuating is just something that we do. If there is one good thing about a hurricane, it is the ability to track it days before it makes landfall. It gives you the time to get your things together and get out of town. Every time I have ever evacuated the first thing I go for is my pictures. Second, is insurance documents and important papers. After those things, the list starts to get fuzzy. One of the things that I never thought to grab is my recipe binder. Think about the homes lost after a hurricane and how many family recipes were destroyed. There is something very special about a recipe handed down from one generation to the next. In mere moments, those were gone. A friend of mine, who had 10 feet of water in her home, which had 8 foot ceilings, said she didn’t even realize her recipes were gone until Thanksgiving of 2005 when she went to get her grandmother’s stuffing recipe and then it hit her that she no longer had it.

The Times-Picayune, New Orleans’ newspaper, began compiling recipes soon after the storm and eventually this cookbook came to be. I am recommending this cookbook because the 250 recipes are delicious and because each recipe tells a story. It is hard to describe how New Orleans cuisine is so intertwined in the city’s culture. No matter the occasion, there is food and not just any food, really good food. Food with flavor, spice, and stories!

 Cooking Up a Storm includes the very best of classic and contemporary New Orleans cuisine, from seafood and meat to desserts and cocktails. But it also tells the story, recipe by recipe, of one of the great food cities in the world, and the determination of its citizens to preserve and safeguard their culinary legacy.