Acadian Plantation Country Cookbook


Book Description

A historical, pictorial, and gastronomic tour of the plantations west of the Atchafalaya Basin in southern Louisiana introduces traditional recipes from the area that celebrate Louisiana's diverse heritage.




River Road Plantation Country Cookbook


Book Description

This book features cultural information and recipes from plantations and other places within these Louisiana parishes: East Baton Rough Parish, Iberville Parish, Ascension Parish. St. James Parish, St. John the Baptist Parish, St. Charles Parish, Orleans Parish, St. Bernard Parish, Plaquemines Parish.




The Pelican Guide to Plantation Homes of Louisiana


Book Description

The plantation homes of Louisiana were built by wealthy cotton and sugar planters, who vied with one another to create the most splendid residences in the years before the Civil War. This edition of the guide features descriptions of more than 250 significant houses in Louisiana, many dating from the days of French and Spanish rule. Seventy-one photographs highlight the finest structures.




Rice


Book Description

Among the staple foods most welcomed on southern tables—and on tables around the world—rice is without question the most versatile. As Michael W. Twitty observes, depending on regional tastes, rice may be enjoyed at breakfast, lunch, and dinner; as main dish, side dish, and snack; in dishes savory and sweet. Filling and delicious, rice comes in numerous botanical varieties and offers a vast range of scents, tastes, and textures depending on how it is cooked. In some dishes, it is crunchingly crispy; in others, soothingly smooth; in still others, somewhere right in between. Commingled or paired with other foods, rice is indispensable to the foodways of the South. As Twitty's fifty-one recipes deliciously demonstrate, rice stars in Creole, Acadian, soul food, Low Country, and Gulf Coast kitchens, as well as in the kitchens of cooks from around the world who are now at home in the South. Exploring rice's culinary history and African diasporic identity, Twitty shows how to make the southern classics as well as international dishes—everything from Savannah Rice Waffles to Ghanaian Crab Stew. As Twitty gratefully sums up, "Rice connects me to every other person, southern and global, who is nourished by rice's traditions and customs."




Haunted Lafayette, Louisiana


Book Description

Discover this Cajun and Creole city where ghost stories abound . . . photos included! The Hub City boasts a multitude of spirits and specters, from those lost in Civil War skirmishes and fever outbreaks to those souls that simply can’t say goodbye. Today, they wander the halls of bed-and-breakfasts and restaurants and linger along back roads and cemeteries. Pirates are rumored to guard buried treasure, and ancient French legends hide in the swamps, bayous, and woods. Join journalist and ghost seeker Cheré Dastugue Coen as she visits Lafayette’s haunted sites and travels the countryside in search of ghostly legends found only in South Louisiana.




The Great American Cookbook


Book Description

The first and greatest book of regional American cuisine, now revised for today’s home cook. Imagine a person with the culinary acumen of Julia Child, the inquisitiveness of Margaret Mead, and the daring of Amelia Earhart. This is Clementine Paddleford, America’s first food journalist. In the 1930s, Paddleford set out to do something no one had done before: chronicle regional American food. Writing for the New York Herald Tribune, Gourmet, and This Week, she crisscrossed the nation, piloting a propeller plane, to interview real home cooks and discover their local specialties. The Great American Cookbook is the culmination of Paddleford’s career. A best seller when first published in 1960 as How America Eats, this coveted classic has been out of print for thirty years. Here are more than 500 of Paddleford’s best recipes, all adapted for contemporary kitchens. From New England there is Real Clam Chowder; from the South, Fresh Peach Ice Cream; from the Southwest, Albondigas Soup; from California, Arroz con Pollo. Behind all the recipes are extraordinary stories, which make this not just a cookbook but also a portrait of America.




Bayou Sara


Book Description

Anne Butler and Helen Williams uncover nearly two centuries of history on the small Louisiana town of Bayou Sara, a once thriving port and town on the Mississippi River that has disappeared through the ravages of time and nature.




New Orleans Cookbook


Book Description

Two hundred eighty-eight delicious recipes carefully worked out so that you can reproduce, in your own kitchen, the true flavors of Cajun and Creole dishes. The New Orleans cookbook whose authenticity dependability, and wealth of information have made it a classic.




The Control of Nature


Book Description

While John McPhee was working on his previous book, Rising from the Plains, he happened to walk by the engineering building at the University of Wyoming, where words etched in limestone said: "Strive on--the control of Nature is won, not given." In the morning sunlight, that central phrase--"the control of nature"--seemed to sparkle with unintended ambiguity. Bilateral, symmetrical, it could with equal speed travel in opposite directions. For some years, he had been planning a book about places in the world where people have been engaged in all-out battles with nature, about (in the words of the book itself) "any struggle against natural forces--heroic or venal, rash or well advised--when human beings conscript themselves to fight against the earth, to take what is not given, to rout the destroying enemy, to surround the base of Mt. Olympus demanding and expecting the surrender of the gods." His interest had first been sparked when he went into the Atchafalaya--the largest river swamp in North America--and had learned that virtually all of its waters were metered and rationed by a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' project called Old River Control. In the natural cycles of the Mississippi's deltaic plain, the time had come for the Mississippi to change course, to shift its mouth more than a hundred miles and go down the Atchafalaya, one of its distributary branches. The United States could not afford that--for New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and all the industries that lie between would be cut off from river commerce with the rest of the nation. At a place called Old River, the Corps therefore had built a great fortress--part dam, part valve--to restrain the flow of the Atchafalaya and compel the Mississippi to stay where it is. In Iceland, in 1973, an island split open without warning and huge volumes of lava began moving in the direction of a harbor scarcely half a mile away. It was not only Iceland's premier fishing port (accounting for a large percentage of Iceland's export economy) but it was also the only harbor along the nation's southern coast. As the lava threatened to fill the harbor and wipe it out, a physicist named Thorbjorn Sigurgeirsson suggested a way to fight against the flowing red rock--initiating an all-out endeavor unique in human history. On the big island of Hawaii, one of the world's two must eruptive hot spots, people are not unmindful of the Icelandic example. McPhee went to Hawaii to talk with them and to walk beside the edges of a molten lake and incandescent rivers. Some of the more expensive real estate in Los Angeles is up against mountains that are rising and disintegrating as rapidly as any in the world. After a complex coincidence of natural events, boulders will flow out of these mountains like fish eggs, mixed with mud, sand, and smaller rocks in a cascading mass known as debris flow. Plucking up trees and cars, bursting through doors and windows, filling up houses to their eaves, debris flows threaten the lives of people living in and near Los Angeles' famous canyons. At extraordinary expense the city has built a hundred and fifty stadium-like basins in a daring effort to catch the debris. Taking us deep into these contested territories, McPhee details the strategies and tactics through which people attempt to control nature. Most striking in his vivid depiction of the main contestants: nature in complex and awesome guises, and those who would attempt to wrest control from her--stubborn, often ingenious, and always arresting characters.




The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor


Book Description

Charlotte Taylor lived in the front row of history. In 1775, at the young age of twenty, she fled her English country house and boarded a ship to Jamaica with her lover, the family’s black butler. Soon after reaching shore, Charlotte’s lover died of yellow fever, leaving her alone and pregnant in Jamaica. In the sixty-six years that followed, she would find refuge with the Mi’kmaq of what is present-day New Brunswick, have three husbands, nine more children and a lifelong relationship with an aboriginal man. Using a seamless blend of fact and fiction, Charlotte Taylor's great-great-great-granddaughter, Sally Armstrong, reclaims the life of a dauntless and unusual woman and delivers living history with all the drama and sweep of a novel. Excerpt from from The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor: “Every summer of my youth, we would travel from the family cottage at Youghall Beach to visit my mother’s extended clan in Tabusintac near the Miramichi River. And at every gathering, just as much as there would be chickens to chase and newly cut hay to leap in, so there would be an ample serving of stories about Charlotte Taylor. . . She was a woman with a “past.” The potboilers about her ran like serials from summer to summer, at weddings and funerals and whenever the clan came together. She wasn’t exactly presented as a gentlewoman, although it was said that she came from an aristocratic family in England. Nor was there much that seemed genteel about the person they always referred to as “old Charlotte.” Words like “lover” and “land grabber” drifted down from the supper table to where we kids sat on the floor. There were whoops of laughter at her indiscretions, followed by sideways glances at us. But for all the stories passed around, it was clear the family still had a powerful respect for a woman long dead. We owed our very existence to her, and the anecdotes the older generation told suggested that their own fortitude and guile were family traits passed down from the ancestral matriarch. For as long as I can remember, I’ve tried to imagine the real life Charlotte Taylor lived and, more, how she ever survived.”