Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [89]
BAKED SHEEPSHEAD
Casburgot au Gratin
Clean and wash a 3-pound Sheepshead. Chop one large onion fine and rub the fish with salt and black pepper. Take a large and deep kitchen pan, place within a tablespoonful of butter, the chopped onion, bay leaf and thyme. Place the fish on top and pour over a half bottle of white wine. Cover with another close pan and put the whole on top of the oven. Bake from the bottom. When it begins to boil from below, turn the fish over carefully without breaking, and let it bake on the other side.
In a saucepan, brown without burning a tablespoonful of butter and two tablespoonfuls of flour. Add six fresh tomatoes, skinned and chopped fine, or a half can. Add two dozen cleaned and scalded Lake Shrimp, a half can of mushrooms, salt and pepper to taste. Cook for about five minutes and then water with the gravy in which the fish has been cooking. Mix well and cover the fish with it. Place fish in serving dish and surround with one dozen parboiled oysters on diced toast. Cover the fish with the shrimp. Sprinkle with cracker crumbs, parsley, and small bits of butter. Bake in oven with a quick fire until brown and serve immediately.
This preparation is an exclusive conception of our Creole cuisinieres and cannot be too highly recommended.
—condensed from The Picayune’s Creole Cook Book, 1901
On my first day in New Orleans, I find that in the old French Market, where Twain once saw shellfish, a rainbow of fruit in pyramids, and “everything imaginable in the vegetable line,” produce is now limited to a couple of stalls with bins of bananas, yams, onions, and watermelons. For every lemon there are ten cell-phone chargers; for every paper sack of fried peanuts, a dozen rainbow-reflector sunglasses. The real heir to the French Market of Twain’s day is the Crescent City Farmers Market, which moves between the Warehouse and Garden districts two days a week.
This being early July, it’s not the market’s prime season; there are only about half as many vendors in the small warehouse (they’re expecting rain) as there will be during the late-summer peak. But even now customers wander in the summer heat through baskets of okra, cymblins, and yellow squash, and watermelons piled high in a pickup. There are figs, cakes, towering basil plants, blueberries, peaches, Louisiana eggplants (“almost extinct”), and Creole tomatoes (Mr. B’s Bistro serves a perfect salad: three meaty slices, Vidalia onion, vinaigrette, and that’s it). There’s pesto and chèvre and Creole cream cheese, mushrooms and tamales and New Orleans French bread.
And shrimp. Man, does this place have shrimp. It’s not so much the volume; there are only two stands, both selling shrimp from coolers along with soft-shell crabs on ice and beautiful black drum fillets. But those stands are run by small, independent shrimpers and instantly raise my personal bar for what “fresh” means; the shrimp were swimming yesterday, the day before at the absolute outside, and they gleam. “Plump” is no longer a metaphor; these shrimp are chubby. When stand owner Clara Gerica drags one gloved hand through a bucket, she draws them up by long antennae (a sign of perfect freshness, I later learn—freezing causes the antennae to break off easily). They’re so big that sixteen will make up a pound, which she sells for a jaw-droppingly cheap five dollars.
“These markets are a lifesaver for us,” she says during a brief pause between customers. “Wholesale, we’d be getting maybe two dollars, so this is better than twice as good. And retail would be six, so the customer saves a buck there, too. We only ever sell at the farmers’ markets—it just makes more sense for us, lets us keep on doing what we’re doing.” It sounds like a throwaway line, but the truth is that saying it lets the Gericas keep on doing what they’re doing is saying something enormous. The fact that Clara’s husband, Pete, is shrimping at all now is a bit of a miracle.
All the people I meet in New Orleans—all of them—date their lives by Katrina’s landfall on August 29, 2005. Everything is since Katrina