New Orleans recipes lost and found

Right about now, everything we love about Louisiana is on the brain, what with Mardi Gras wrapping up. It’s a great time to check out, Cooking up a Storm: Recipes Lost and Found from the Times-Picayune of New Orleans.

One of the consequences of Katrina was the destruction of personal recipe collections, those yellowed, dog-eared, stained family favorites we all have tucked away. A few months after the storm, Picayune Food Editor Judy Walker, at the request of a reader, devoted space in her column to helping storm victims find lost recipes. The project morphed into something huge, with hundreds of readers asking for this gumbo or that bread pudding, with Walker and colleague Marcelle Bienvenu hunting each one down. They found all but two in the paper’s archives, or from other readers whose collections were intact. When I interviewed Walker this week she marveled at the book’s success. It’s already in its third printing, saying, “This was really a community cookbook. It all came from the readers.”

I must admit, reading the intro and flipping through the recipes made me tear up thinking about how sad it was to see so many people lose so much. A recipe is such a simple thing, but man, does it represent a trove of memories and emotions. Unlike many cookbooks, this one is sans glitzy photos and celebrity shots. It’s a rich collection of classics that, one by one, brought comfort to someone who had lost the way to prepare it. Check out Crabmeat Remick , a local favorite made famous by the Pontchartrain Hotel, which opened in New Orleans in the 1920s.