By CHRIS SHERMAN, Times Food Critic
Published September 4, 2005
The party's over. No more nail-polish-red Hurricanes in Pat O'Brien glasses. Katrina sobered us up faster than the vice squad at a juke joint.
Two kinds of rum, passionfruit juice and grenadine were hazard enough; broken glass and contaminated water are lethal.
The recipe, the silly glass and the "hurricane party" spirit of drunken bravado all come from a city that will never use the word so lightly again.
Hurricane drinks aren't the only New Orleans caricatures that have lost their punch. "Let the good times roll" is pure nostalgia or remakable optimism. "The City That Care Forgot" woe did not. "Bam" happened.
New Orleans and Louisiana told us all along that they never worried. There was plenty to worry about, too much: endless bugs and potholes, stifling humidity, Third World poverty, public corruption, twisted racism, not to mention a location between two major bodies of water - and below sea level.
No, mah fran, let's have a drink, listen to the squeezebox and have a fat muffuletta while the crawfish boil.
We loved that and came to stare at people who had good times on Tuesday afternoons and made a party out of breakfast.
It is not that we are complicit in New Orleans' disaster, but we have lost something, too, a wickedly delicious morsel of innocence. It's nothing compared with losing a home, loved ones or years in the life of a city, yet still something real.
If food is a trivial lens on tragedy, it is one we understand. The victims in the 9/11 attacks were exemplified by the dishwashers and chefs in Windows on the World on top of the twin towers. After the tsunami, Thai and Indian restaurants and coffee bars moved quickly to remind us of our connections.
In New Orleans, the significance of food is inescapable as symbol and substance. When California rediscovered the thrill of mixing local ingredients and heritages, Cajuns and Creoles had been doing it for a century. They plucked crawfish from the bayou, sassafras from the backwoods and okra from slave gardens, seasoned with flavors of Africa, Italy and Spain and cooked them all with the polish of la Belle France and a world of spices.
From them, the rest of America and its restaurants got muffies and beignets, po' boys and gumbo, Paul Prudhomme and Emeril Lagasse, Popeye's Chicken and Ruth's Chris' steaks, Tabasco and Pernod, chicory and jazz brunches.
Don't think of retiring these or suspending them in memory of the dead and the devastated.
We can't.
Louisiana saturates our cooking and dining with its true flavors and cheap imitations, too. Our menus would be much poorer without them.
Instead, everytime you bite into a po' boy, pour a cup of cafe du Monde, blacken a grouper, boil a mess of crawfish or lift a Hurricane, remember that jar on the bar for Katrina relief.
Drop in a buck as a royalty, from diners and from restaurateurs, for all the good tastes and good times.
With effort, they'll roll again.
Chris Sherman, who writes about food and wine for the St. Petersburg Times, is the author of The Buzz on Wine Lebhar-Friedman Books, $16.95. He can be reached at (727) 893-8585 or sherman@sptimes.com
