The Great American Cookbook by Clementine Paddleford

Author:Clementine Paddleford [Paddleford, Clementine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8478-3747-2
Publisher: Rizzoli
Published: 2011-10-10T16:00:00+00:00

SINCE GUMBO SUGGESTS SHRIMP we might as well finish off now with that succulent subject. For here in the queen city of the Mississippi, shrimp is king. It is omnipotent, omnipresent. Shrimp wiggles into every course of the menu. It swims in the soup, parades in an appetizer, stars in main dishes and salads. It is the backbone of innumerable sauces.

A magnificent morning. The sun and the moon both hung in the sky. The car rolled down the planked gangway to Louisiana Avenue’s wobbly little ferry. With a chuck, chuck, chuck, it plowed straight across the Mississippi’s dark oily water to the town of Harvey.

Here I went to see the shrimp canned, visiting the plant of the Southern Shellfish Company, one of many such canneries scattered along the waterfront from Florida to Texas. From these coastal waters come 90 percent of all shrimp caught, and of this, 35 percent go to market in cans. Now these plants freeze shrimp in vast quantities.

Smell of shrimp, of steam, of water-drenched wharf greets me. Hum of voices, rasp of shovels, mark the unloading of ice boats that bring the catch to the plant direct from the shrimp fleet.

The day is full blown. We recross the big river headed for a late-afternoon party being catered by Marie Natalie Therese Paola Castanedo Copeland Grafton of an old French-Spanish family, meaning Creole. One of the many small tidbits she served was this shrimp canapé, which we have met nowhere else than in New Orleans.

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