2013 | No. 91

Classic New Orleans Creole
Commander’s Palace and Galatoire’s

 

By Lolis Eric Elie

Napoleon Bonaparte died in exile on the island of Saint Helena, but it didn’t have to be that way. Nicholas Girod, a former mayor of New Orleans, offered the defeated emperor lodging at the Napoleon House (today a French Quarter bar of some renown) — such was the level of Francophile fervor in old New Orleans as late as 1821, 18 years after the Louisiana Purchase.

He would not have been so welcome, however, in uptown New Orleans, the newer area of the city settled largely by immigrants from the American states and by Irish and German immigrants coming straight from their home countries. In his 1953 history Creole City, Edward Larocque Tinker chose “Racial Rancor” as the title for a chapter about the early discord between white Creole New Orleanians, who had been resident in the city prior to the Louisiana Purchase, and their new white American rulers. But the superiority of Creole cuisine remained unchallenged. Tinker wrote:

It is of the union of Marianne and Uncle Sam — the strange shotgun marriage between an utterly foreign population and our American people, which took place in 1803 — that I shall try to tell you, and of their early marital squabbles, the emotions that rent them, of the intellectual children they have begotten, of the way in which each has modified the thoughts and habits of the other, of the new manner of life they have evolved, even of how Marianne, drawing on the memories of her mother’s kitchen, feeds her family, and finally of how, after a hundred years, they have settled down to a perfect union.

This notion of “Marianne, drawing on the memories of her mother’s kitchen,” is a stylized version of the usual misconception that Creole cuisine is almost exclusively French in origin. I’ve been on a personal mission to expand the meaning of the word “Creole” beyond the often-repeated formula of 75 percent French, 20 percent combined Spanish, Italian, German, and Irish, and 5 percent Indian and African. Almost without exception, New Orleans cookbooks and chefs define Creole cuisine as the food of French people attempting to recreate the tastes of their homeland in the bayous and swamps of Louisiana. They acknowledge the influence of other groups, namely the Spanish, Italians, Irish, and Germans, with the “Negro mammy” always mentioned last, almost as an afterthought.

But if you define Creole cuisine by its emblematic dishes — red beans and rice, gumbo, jambalaya, fish court bouillon, chicken and shrimp étouffée, shrimp Creole, shrimp rémoulade, smothered okra and crawfish bisque, to name the most prominent — well, most of these have no direct parallels in Europe, though they have plenty of siblings and cousins in the integrated cuisines of the Americas, not only Francophone portions but Hispanophone ones as well. Whether you’re in Haiti, Puerto Rico, or Louisiana, shrimp Creole contains shrimp, tomato sauce, and rice. Beans and rice is standard in the Creole world but not the French one. And although jambalaya is often compared with paella, the method of preparation has more in common with Jollof rice, thiebudjen, and other composed rice dishes of West Africa.

More enlightened attempts to broaden the list of influences on Creole cuisine mention the African influence apparently without noticing that Africa is a large continent whose cuisines vary greatly. Indeed, in the various composed-rice dishes, tomato sauces, and okra soups of the Senegambia region, as in the soupy stews of Nigeria and Cameroon, it’s easy to see the antecedents of gumbos, jambalayas, and étouffées. African slaves did much if not most of the cooking during the formative years of New Orleans Creole cuisine. Their tastes had to have exerted a powerful influence. Moreover, recent scholarship by Gwendolyn Midlo Hall and others has detailed the specific precolonial African nations from which these cooks hailed. It’s increasingly clear that additional scholarship will enhance our knowledge of their contributions to Creole cuisine.

Definitions of Creole cuisine generally allude to the influence of Native Americans but say little beyond noting that filé powder (ground sassafras leaves), a traditional Indian ingredient, became a favored thickener and flavoring, particularly in gumbo. Because the early French colony in New Orleans often found itself short of food, it would seem likely that cooks sought nutritional and culinary guidance from the Coushattas, Chitimachas, Attakapas, Choctaws, and other groups native to the area.

Justin Wilson gives such credit in his 1990 book Home Grown Louisiana Cookin’, when he calls Madame Langlois, housekeeper for Governor Jean-Baptiste LeMoyne (1680–1767), founder of New Orleans, “the first great cook in Louisiana.” He goes on to say that “Madame Langlois learned her skills from the Indians, the first inhabitants of Louisiana…. The Indians gave us filé powder for flavoring and made hominy.” But how did Madame Langlois get to be the first great Louisiana cook and not the Indian teachers from whom she “learned her skills”?

Perhaps we can define Creole cuisine as the food of Africans and Europeans attempting to recreate the tastes of their homelands with the guidance and influence of the Native Americans who knew the New World foods best.

(I should probably add that Cajun cuisine, which developed in rural southwest Louisiana, today about two hours drive from New Orleans, shares most of its major dishes with the Creole kitchen. But Cajun roux are darker, Cajun gumbos are more apt to be poultry- and sausage- rather than seafood-based, and Cajun dishes use tasso and andouille as opposed to the pickled pork and chaurice of the Creole pantry. Those distinctions, however, have become blurred as New Orleans chefs have incorporated more and more Cajun influence.)

Two restaurants, perhaps above all others, represent the disparate poles of Creole cuisine as it is served today. Commander’s Palace was built in 1880 by Emile Commander, a veteran of Delmonico’s, the venerable New York restaurant. And Galatoire’s was founded in 1905 by Jean Galatoire, an immigrant from Pardies, a small village near Pau in the French Pyrenees. Neither restaurant existed during the height of the rancor Tinker described, but in a strange way, their menus and approaches mirror the old Creole versus American divide.

Galatoire’s is arguably the last bulwark of civility on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter. Until recently, the seediness began literally next door, with the adjoining sex shop. That property has now been acquired by Galatoire’s and will soon become a bar and private dining space.

“At Galatoire’s we celebrate the Creole culinary style and its heritage while remaining true to our French roots,” Jyl Benson and Melvin Rodrigue wrote a few years ago in Galatoire’s Cookbook. “Thus we have coined the term ‘French Creole.’” Indeed, much of the restaurant’s menu reads as though it came from an old French one: sautéed sweetbreads with Champagne and caper beurre blanc; shrimp rémoulade; fish court bouillon; trout meunière amandine; crabmeat au gratin; sirloin marchand du vin; chicken bonne femme; chicken financière; Lyonnaise potatoes. Local adjustments have been made. For instance, in addition to the trout, on most days you can order the non-French redfish, pompano, and drum. And the trout is floured and fried meunière-style and then topped with toasted almonds amandine-style. The rémoulade is red not white, owing to its ketchup-tomato purée-Creole mustard base. Truer to their Old World origins are the sauces to go with your steaks, lamb chops, and veal chops: Hollandaise, Mushroom Bordelaise, Béarnaise, and Marchand du Vin.

Galatoire’s current chef, Michael Sichel, was hired in the fall of 2011 and would seem an unlikely choice. He arrived in New Orleans only in 2005, and the menus at his three previous restaurants here were anything but traditional. Yet he has embraced Galatoire’s discipline. “Our chefs understand, through lots of philosophical discussions with me, that the classic is the root of what we do and it’s the foundation of what other people do down the street,” Rodrigue said in an interview. “Nothing’s bigger than the establishment here. Myself included.”

To taste more unusual food at Galatoire’s, you have to attend a wine dinner or other special occasion for which a special menu is prepared. Offerings at such a dinner not long ago included “Entrecote Beef Deconstructed Chop Salad,” crispy-skin redfish with roasted red pepper piperade and basil oil, and bacon-wrapped pork tenderloin. But the lamb chop bonne femme, for example, was a riff on the restaurant’s chicken entrée of similar name.

Galatoire’s is known for its seafood, especially finfish. Whether sautéed, broiled, fried, or poached, the fish is always fresh and cooked to perfection. The stuffed eggplant probably contains far more lump crabmeat, shrimp, and béchamel sauce than actual eggplant, and the taste justifies the indulgence. (A friend of mine found a month-old doggie bag of the stuffed eggplant in my freezer. He swooned over the warmed-up dish as much as I had when I originally ate it.) What I hadn’t expected at a restaurant where I always order seafood was that the quality of the lamb chops I recently ordered would rival that of the fish. Prepared simply and impeccably, they were as good as you’d find at a first-rate steakhouse. Everything at Galatoire’s is fully à la carte. Except for a few composed dishes like the shrimp étouffée, shrimp or chicken Clemenceau, and bouillabaisse, you must order your potatoes, asparagus, creamed spinach, onion rings, or broiled tomatoes separately.

Galatoire’s gumbo is one of the best in the city and one of a declining number that feature okra, the original basis of the dish. (Gumbo comes from a Bantu word for okra.) Perhaps hewing more to the French than the Creole side of its culinary equation, Galatoire’s falls woefully short in its choice of rice. Louisiana, unlike France, is rice country, yet the restaurant serves stiff, seemingly factory-parboiled rice, which, though always separate grain for grain and never mushy, lacks the flavor and texture of rice that has not undergone that processing.

Of all the city’s venerable Creole restaurants — Galatoire’s, Brennan’s, Arnaud’s, Tujague’s, Antoine’s, the Court of Two Sisters — only Commander’s Palace is outside the French Quarter. But it has its roots there, at Brennan’s on Royal Street. In 1969, when a permanent breach split the Brennan family, Ella Brennan and one of her late brothers, Dick, bought Commander’s Palace. (The various progeny of the Commander’s Palace Brennans now own a small empire of more than a half dozen Crescent City eateries.)

In their 1984 Commander’s Palace New Orleans Cookbook, Ella and Dick Brennan referred to their food as “haute Creole,” by which they meant not merely to separate down-home Creole from fancy-restaurant Creole, but to separate their evolving dishes from the old ones of the classic Creole canon.

Since the American settlers of New Orleans were seen to be brash interlopers, unbound by tradition, it’s appropriate that Commander’s Palace is situated on the American side of town. Of the old Creole restaurants, it is the only one where the menu changes often and the chef is celebrated by name in the modern manner. “We kind of went through this drill after Hurricane Katrina,” said Ti Martin, Ella Brennan’s daughter. “We were closed 13 months, and everybody would say, ‘Are you going to have the same classic dishes on the menu? And I would say, ‘Name ’em.’ And nobody could name more than four dishes. We even change the rémoulade all the time. We are on like the fifth rémoulade and somehow people don’t freak out anymore.”

At Commander’s, the menu features composed plates, not à la carte selections, and the chef is constantly presenting new combinations of ingredients. The savory dishes that don’t change are the garlic bread, Commander’s salad (mixed greens with bacon, Parmesan cheese, croûtons and raw egg dressing flavored by vinegar, minced onion, and cracked black pepper), turtle soup, and the shrimp-and-tasso Henican (with pepper jelly, pickled okra, and a hot-sauce beurre blanc). The haute Creole options can range from the rice fritters and red beans accompanying the poached eggs in Eggs Basin Street to the shoestring potato-crusted Lyonnaise fish.

“We are about evolving Creole cuisine,” Martin said. “There’s no moment in time where the clock stopped and that was the end of it. The additions to the cuisine to me are going to be endless. The history and the depths of Creole cooking are endless.”

On the Commander’s Palace dinner menu, a section called “The Chef’s Playground” once featured “The Five Hour Egg,” which was cooked sous vide at 141 degrees F (60 degrees C) and served with shiitake mushrooms, truffled crispy potatoes, and a brown butter vinaigrette. That was the highlight of my meal at the Chef’s Table, a four-top located in the kitchen for which Chef Tory McPhail cooks personally. The first half of the menu was far from the beaten path and featured a tasting of stone fruit infused with Creole Shrub (an orange liqueur) and Phizzi Powder, which, though not nearly as explosive as you remember Pop Rocks being when you tasted them in childhood, added an electric fizzy crunch to the ripe fruit. The Creole tomato salad with lemon oil and Tabasco-infused consommé was simple and elegant. “Foie Gras du Monde” was composed of beignets infused with peaches, topped with seared foie gras, and accompanied by foie gras-infused chicory-coffee café au lait. The rest of the menu, though excellent, was much more like the restaurant’s standard fare: soft-shell crab with grits, succotash and smoked jalapeño ravigote, duck breast with pork belly boudin and Bourbon-braised figs, and the “dessert bomb” combination of the restaurant’s signature sweets, including Creole cream-cheese cake, pecan pie, and bread-pudding soufflé.

The line between the early dishes at the chef’s table and the later ones was also visual. The first group arrived glossy-magazine-photo-ready, while the second, like most of the restaurant’s presentations, consisted mostly of meat placed neatly atop starches and vegetables. At Commander’s, Galatoire’s, and almost every other fine-dining restaurant in New Orleans, the plating is normally plain and straightforward compared with what you might find in New York or San Francisco. Similarly, New Orleans restaurant service as exemplified by these two places is friendly and efficient but not formal, despite the tuxedo-looking uniforms that the waiters wear at both places.

When I try to place these two restaurants in the national context of fine dining, I often think of a meal I had in Atlanta with my then-girlfriend in the mid-90s. The place, 103 West (housed in what was previously Brennan’s of Atlanta), had been a favorite of mine when I lived in that city, and I was looking forward to sharing the culinary joy I’d experienced there. The service had always been starched and precise. When I went back, the food was as precise as the service, and just as soulless. The waiter intimidated me into ordering a flinty bottle of white Burgundy when at the time my taste leaned more toward California Chardonnay. Maybe the restaurant was having an off night. Maybe it was only my youthful inexperience that had led me to be impressed previously. But that night I remember thinking as I left the restaurant: There may not be a restaurant in New Orleans with such polished service, but when it comes to the taste of the food, this place can’t hold a candle to Commander’s or Galatoire’s. ●

Commander’s Palace
1403 Washington Avenue (Garden District)
New Orleans
tel 504.899.8221, commanderspalace.com
$35 and up for lunch, $50 and up for dinner, before wine
open for lunch Monday through Friday and for dinner every day

Galatoire’s
209 Bourbon Street (French Quarter)
New Orleans
tel 504.525.2021, galatoires.com
$50 and up for lunch or dinner, before wine
closed Monday

From issue 91

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