Gumbo Life by Ken Wells

Author:Ken Wells
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

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GUMBO HUNTING IN TREME

You can’t go gumbo-sampling in New Orleans without dining in the Treme. Sprawling roughly west and north of the French Quarter, Treme is the oldest African American neighborhood in America and the first place in the country where freed slaves and free people of color could own property. It’s here, in the colorful shotgun houses that still line many streets, where generations of Creole cooks honed recipes that have greatly influenced the evolution of New Orleans cuisine. And it’s also here where the city’s first black-owned restaurants cropped up: Dooky Chase’s, where Leah Chase’s spirit still guides the kitchen, is one prominent example.

I’ve come on a pristine fall day to Li’l Dizzy’s Cafe on the leafy ramparts of Esplanade Avenue to talk gumbo with Wayne Baquet Sr., Li’l Dizzy’s laid-back founder, owner, and spiritual chef. Baquet hails from a storied New Orleans Creole family that traces its Crescent City roots back more than two hundred years. The Baquet family (pronounced bah-KAY) came, Wayne will tell me, with French colonials and free people of color fleeing the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), an uprising in the French colony then known as Saint-Domingue. “The free people of color and the French people had to get out or get killed,” says Baquet, who has done serious research on the family’s genealogy. The revolution culminated in the elimination of slavery and the creation of modern-day Haiti.

It inadvertently proved a gift to New Orleans. The Baquets stopped briefly in Cuba before settling permanently in the city, which has been richer for their presence. The first generations of New Orleans Baquets were cigar makers, cobblers, and carpenters but the family clearly carried a creative gene. Two of Wayne’s great uncles, George and Achille Baquet, were among the founding gentry of New Orleans jazz. Accomplished clarinetists, George played with the likes of Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton.

Achille not only mastered the clarinet but, before moving out West and later to Europe to earn fame and fortune, was musical mentor to Sidney Bechet, the iconic jazz saxophonist whose bust earns a billing with Louis Armstrong’s statue in Treme’s Louis Armstrong Park. Meanwhile, other Baquets have found high posts in journalism. As of this writing, Dean Baquet, Wayne’s brother, is executive editor of the New York Times, and Terry Baquet, another brother, is director of community engagement for the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

And then there are the notable Baquet cooks and restaurateurs. Wayne’s aunt, Ada Baquet Gross, with her husband, Paul Gross, started an eatery in 1947 called the Paul Gross’ Chicken Coop. It was the city’s first twenty-four-hour fried chicken joint, Wayne tells me, “at a time when nobody else was really doing chicken.” The Chicken Coop was regularly packed and its fried chicken recipes provided inspiration for the spicy fried chicken that is a signature dish, along with gumbo, red beans and rice, and Trout Baquet on the Li’l Dizzy’s menu today.

Wayne’s father, Eddie, was a onetime mail carrier who got the restaurant bug from Aunt Ada and who honed his skills working in her restaurant.

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