Picayune's Creole Cookbook

Additional Details

Description: In 1900, the New Orleans Picayune commissioned a team of New Orleans ladies to assemble The Picayune's Creole Cook Book, hoping to "preserve to future generations the many excellent and matchless recipes of our New Orleans cuisine...ere Creole cookery, with all its delightful combinations and possibilities, will have become a lost art." The names of those formidable women are long forgotten, but the secrets of the spicy Spanish-, French-, and African-influenced delicacies they divulged have lived on through the decades, in edition after edition of what has become a classic American culinary reference. 

In 1987, in honor of its sesquicentennial, the paper, now called The Times'Picayune, engaged noted food writer and chef Marcelle Bienvenu to update and revise the cookbook. Working primarily from the definitive second edition of 1901, Bienvenu and her dedicated staff sifted through more than a thousand recipes, with an eye toward Creole classics and enduring favorites, especially those that captured the flavor of times gone by. After testing and tasting, researching and retesting, they selected the 800-plus recipes that appear in this volume, from Creole coffee to custards, Jambalaya to Red Beans and Rice, making careful notes of modern measurements and methods, substitutes and suggestions. For ease of use and to preserve the charm of the original text, these annotations appear in the margins, and the result is an entertaining and practical volume that is as gratifying to read as it is to cook from. An added pleasure are the photographs and drawings that grace its pages. 

The introduction to the first edition of The Picayune's Creole Cook Book closed with the wish that the book might "find its way to many hearths and homes, and that the life of the household may be the better, healthier and happier for its advent." That it has already done so is beyond question; we are, therefore, extremely proud to carry on the tradition. 

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Condition: Opening blank page has the word Christmas and a date in ink. Further, good condition.