A Boise Co-op Culinary Class Review by Michael Lazare
Here are two opinions which I hold strongly. First, of all the major American cities New Orleans has the most character and personality. There may be two that possibly rival the Big Easy. I leave it to you to name them; I know which two I’m thinking of. Second, New Orleans has the most individualistic cuisine of any American city, bar none.
Put those two ideas together, and you have the theme for the Boise Co-op culinary class on April 21, when the brilliant Sylvie Ryan put aside most, but not all, of her Alsatian heritage and treated 20 lucky people to “A Taste of New Orleans!.” (I leave in the exclamation point, which is richly deserved.)
The population of New Orleans has changed over the decades, of course, but it retains the core which defines it – Créoles and Cajuns. Créole technically means people descended from the settlers and traders who lived in what is now Louisiana before the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 – French, Spanish, German, African-Americans, West Indians and American Indians.
Cajun, on the other hand, is a linguistic shortening of Acadian, the French settlers who were displaced by the British from Acadia, or Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and what is now the State of Maine in the middle of the 18th century. They made their way to Louisiana, which had a very strong French personality. Surely you remember the poem “Evangeline” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow?
Each of those ethnic groups had, and has, its own tastes. Mix them all together and add food readily grown, fished and hunted in the American South, and you get something that can only be called a taste of New Orleans. It is a cuisine like no other. I have eaten at Galatoire’s and at Brennan’s and at the Court of the Two Sisters. I have bought a po’boy from a street vendor. I have consumed a dozen or two dozen oysters while standing at a counter. I repeat: New Orleans’s cuisine is like no other.
And so our anticipation ran high when my wife, Pat, and I arrived at the Pottery Gourmet Teaching Kitchen that evening. I knew that Sylvie never disappoints, but this time she outdid herself. My seventh-grade English teacher, Miss Nora Deaver, taught me to go easy on the adjectives. I’ll try.
We had an appetizer and a dessert, sure, but the centerpiece of the evening was a sublime, fantastic, unimaginably delicious, magnificent, superb (sorry, Miss Deaver) etouffée de crevettes. Etouffée in French for stuffed or smothered. Crevettes are crawfish, for which Sylvie substituted shrimp. With it we were treated to Aunt Sally’s Black-Eyed Peas and smothered collard greens, with a Co-op-made boudin (pork sausage with rice). More about those three later, but first I can’t stop thinking about that etouffée.
Sylvie began by making a roux of oil and flour, to which she added the three basic ingredients of Louisiana cooking – onion, green pepper and celery. But that was only the beginning. Do you like your food spicy? Welcome. In addition to the chopped green pepper, Sylvie spiced up the dish with no less than six other peppers – Poblano, Jalapeño, white pepper, regular old black pepper, red pepper flakes and Cayenne pepper. Then she added Cajun seasoning and Louisiana hot sauce. I don’t know what’s in the latter two, but I insisted on tasting the Cajun seasoning au naturel, just a pinch on my tongue. At first I was afraid I was going to die. A few seconds later I was afraid I wasn’t going to die. It was hot, let me tell you. The spices and seasoning and hot sauce joined clam juice, diced tomatoes, and butter to make the perfect receptacles for shrimp, all on a bed of rice. The Co-op was able to come up with a few crawfish, which Sylvie scattered on top.
You may have gathered that the etouffée was spicy. Yes siree-Bob, it was spicy. But now we come to the side dishes. The black-eyed peas are prepared with garlic, Cayenne pepper (call the fire department), yellow onion and smoked bacon. The thing about these peas is that they make an ideal base for, or companion to, any other food, and because of their starchiness they serve to neutralize some of the spiciness in other foods, without affecting the taste. So does the rice. Collard greens are by nature somewhat bitter. Sylvie makes them with onion, garlic, a small amount of black pepper, a few dashes of hot salt, cider vinegar, water and – here’s the secret – sugar. And the boudin, specially prepared by the Co-op’ admirable meat department, provided just the proper meat-and-rice counterbalance.
So then, you take the four basic tastes that the human tongue recognizes – bitterness, saltiness, sourness, and sweetness – and they interact with each other in a way that enhances the effect of each ingredient, magnifies each taste and creates a sensation that greatly surpasses the sum of its parts. It was a meal we will long remember.
I mentioned appetizer and dessert. If you’ve been to New Orleans you have eaten beignets, which are described as doughnuts but are in reality more versatile. They can be sweet or savory and have a variety of ingredients added to the dough, but they are usually square and invariably deep-fried. Sylvie made and served Suzanne’s beignet de carnaval, Suzanne being her mother. To the basic dough she added cinnamon and kirsch to give the beignet enough of a bite to wake up the appetite. For dessert she returned to her Alsatian roots with Gran’ma Hélène’s apple beignets which are apple slices dipped in batter and deep fried.
The wines were a delicately spicy and fruity Argentinian white, Jelu Torrontes 2009, and a complex yet easily accessible Faugères Les Petites Mains 2007 from the Languedoc region of France.
Food is one part of a dining experience. People are the other. What can you say about Sylvie? She is enthusiastic, personable, obviously in love with cooking, altogether the perfect host. Add assistants Linda Ledbetter and Aaron Barnett, and you have an unmatched dining experience.
If you have not yet been to one of these sessions, sign up by calling 472-4500. Upcoming sessions include the Boise Co-op Pastry Party!, May 19; and Perfect Wine Parings!, May 26.
