Ten New Orleans Cookbooks

My New Orleans by John Besh is a fairly interesting, if massive, compendium of cajun/creole and modern recipes. Each chapter focuses on a particular ingredient season (crawfish, crab, tomatoes) or holiday (mardi gras, new years). Recipes range from the creole traditional to modern takes which are remarkably similar to California cookbooks.  The book is full of beautiful pictures and cultural tidbits, and would make a good (if expensive) gift for people who like glossy cookbooks.  Otherwise, check it out of the library.

Paul Prudhomme's Louisana Tastes: Paul may be the grandfather of New Orleans cuisine as most of us know it, but his recipes haven't aged well. Despite being published in 2000, the cookbook feels more like 1980. Recipes are uninteresting, surprisingly underseasoned, and over-reliant on heavy sauces. Not recommended.

Crescent City Farmer's Market Cookbook: unlike the rest of the cookbooks in this list, here's one which is intended to be sold in NOLA rather than outside it. Recipes in general are based on fresh and seasonal, but are uneven in quality as you'd expect from recipes contributed by a variety of vendors and restaurant owners. Don't expect traditional Cajun/Creole standards.  Still, there's some useful stuff in there, and I copied a few recipes down. Recommended as a bargain buy.

Emeril's Creole Christmas is a slim seasonal volume from the famous Cajun TV star.  The book is organized into four complete menus for Christmas Eve through New Year's Day.   While a bunch of the recipes are things you'd see elsewhere, there are several interesting Emeril originals (such as Jiffy Pop Shrimp) which make the book a worthwhile bargain purchase (I bought it for $5), especially if you want to do Cajun cooking around midwinter.

In a Cajun Kitchen is an all-around volume covering the most common and basic dishes in the Cajun repetoire, plus some which are peculiar to area where the author grew up.  The 150 or so recipes tend towards the simple, basic, easily prepared and boldly flavored, such as a shrimp and corn boil.  This is easily believable as someone's Cajun family cookbook, and is full of humorous little stories about the author's family to give it color.  Recommended.

Commander's Wild Side is an interesting special cookbook, narrowly focused on recipes for wild game, with a little seafood, at the famous restaurant.  Since I don't care for meat, I didn't get much out of it, but if you or someone you know hunts, this would be a perfect cookbook for them.

Recipes and Reminices of New Orleans is not a cookbook you're likely to find by title, but one whose type you will find in used bookstores and library sales.  It's a Junior League cookbook, an invaluable as a glimpse of what recipes genuine New Orleans matrons would have used before Paul Prudhomme got a TV show.  I picked this one up at a library sale for $1.  It was published in 1976.   Few recipes can be followed without some judgement on your part, but whenever I wonder what real traditional Creole home cooking is, I check this one.

William-Sonoma New Orleans was one their extensive, but out of print, Foods Of The World series, which feels like a revival of the old Time-Life ethnic cookbooks.   More than half the book is devoted to glossy photos and essays about New Orleans ingredients, cooking techniques, and culture; the list of actual recipes is quite short (no more than 40).  The recipes also feel a bit like New Orleans food as prepared by Californians; for example, the photo of seafood gumbo most decidedly has dungeness crab in it.  Still, some of the recipes are quite good, including the mandarin-pecan salad which I prepared from it.  Recommended if you can find it cheaply used.

While Tom Fitzmorris's New Orleans Food has a terrible title, it is probably the single most generally useful New Orleans cookbook I checked out.  Half my initial pool of possible recipes came from this book, and when I had to fall back because of the crab shortage, this is the book which came to my rescue.  Containing both basic standards and techniques as well as unique dishes, the over 250 recipes in this book will cover most of what you want in Cajun/Creole sophisticated urban food.  Combine this with In A Cajun Kitchen, and you pretty much have all NOLA cuisine covered in two books.

Of course, it wouldn't be a New Orleans meal without dessert, so there's DamGoodSweet.  Kris made the double-chocolate bread pudding from here which was excellent.  The rest of the book was full of classic Creole dessert recipes, but she hasn't read it cover-to-cover yet, so refuses to give me a review for this post. She did like it enough to buy it though.

Hopefully that'll help you with your New Orleans cookbook shopping for this holiday season. Enjoy!