Du Jour: Poppy Tooker

Last Saturday, food personality Poppy Tooker’s radio show Louisiana Eats! began airing in Baton Rouge. It’s a program that explores farms, restaurants and home kitchens awash in native ingredients as well as culinary innovations. Tooker has been a constant fixture in celebrating Louisiana foodways for the last few decades. She helped found the Slow Foods New Orleans chapter, the first in the state; she serves on the board of directors for the Crescent City Farmers Market, and she wrote the Crescent City Farmers Market cookbook, which documented recipes created with indigenous produce and told the heroic, and sometimes tragic, stories of market vendors who lost it all after Hurricane Katrina. Tooker is also known for pushing awareness about Creole cream cheese, a regional dish that nearly met its demise after the state dairies that produced it were bought by national conglomerates. Thankfully, a handful of small dairies have brought it back in the last decade, in part because of activists like Tooker. She herself perfected a recipe and has demonstrated to countless audiences how to make it at home. Click here to read more.To read previous Du Jour features on local chefs and other culinary experts, click here.