Three Pounds of Turtle Meat and a Can-Do Attitude

The best ideas should make people say, “I can’t believe no one thought of that before.” So it is with the cookbook A Confederacy of Dunces Cookbook: Recipes from Ignatius J. Reilly’s New Orleans, published recently by LSU Press. One of the world’s great food-obsessed cities and one of the great gluttons of literature are paired in this new book by Louisiana food writer Cynthia LeJeune Nobles. Nobles has collected recipes for the dishes presented in John Kennedy Toole’s classic novel, dressed them in local history, and served up a fun and readable cookbook I’m glad to have on my shelf.

Nobles unapologetically takes any opportunity from the text of Dunces to inspire a recipe: I barely remembered the character Mrs. Levy, but at one point in the novel she holds a box of “Dutch cookies” on her lap. For that passage we are awarded a recipe for stroopwaffels, which are a kind of Dutch cookie, and for Danish butter cookies (the blue-tin kind that everyone loves and to which Mrs. Levy or John Kennedy Toole might have actually been referring). Nobles also plumbs the less celebrated corners of the city’s rich food heritage; there are plenty of the classic “Louisiana dishes,” but they share space with Italian, Irish, and Caribbean dishes eaten among various immigrant communities as well as older, more obscure treats unique to New Orleans, like “nectar,” a cherry-almond flavor once prized at local soda shops.

Most of the recipes are completely accessible to anyone who, broadly put, “knows how to cook” and represent a good mix of dishes you might actually make for dinner, foods you might prepare if you were feeling ambitious, and a few examples of pipe-dream cuisine you know, on some level, you’ll never attempt but enjoy reading about. (The best cookbooks always seem to combine practical-instruction-manual with culinary fairy tale.)

Nobles also thoughtfully includes a number of classic recipes that might not yet be in your repertoire:  remoulade, étouffée, and fried catfish for instance. In so doing, she risks alienating somebody, somewhere; but if Nobles wants to put sour cream but no vinegar in her deviled eggs, I suppose that’s between her, her guests, and the Lord. She more than makes up for these infractions with the inclusion of several recipes that improve on dishes you already cook. Anyone can smother a pork chop in some Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom and be content, but the recipe for Pork Chops with Brandy Mustard Sauce makes me want to go the grocery store on an ingredient run now. 

This book also takes the prize for best ingredients: “three pounds of turtle meat” sounds like something you might have to buy from a trench-coated man in an alley as does “1 75–100-pound dressed hog, cleaned, gutted, and hair removed from the skin.” (Somewhere, someone’s job is to depilate dead hundred-pound hogs; and before saying “there but for the grace of God,” think about how hard that would be to outsource.) My favorite, though, is the otherwise tempting recipe for an alcoholic milkshake that measures the booze in tablespoons. Granted, it’s four tablespoons; but in a cookbook that celebrates New Orleans, it might be more authentic to write, “glug some crème de cacao in there, you know, to taste …”

The background information isn’t always totally clear: a paragraph about Louisiana’s 2004 same-sex-marriage ban appears in the introduction to a chapter on 1960s-era party food, presumably because Ignatius goes to a party hosted by a gay man, and speaking of gay people … This is occasionally distracting, but overall, the historical asides add to the book, making it almost fit for the coffee table … if the recipes didn’t look so good. 

Lagniappe: A few months ago, I reviewed The Holy Mark, a small-press book about a fallen priest that Anne Rice and I both loved. An audio version of The Holy Mark has been released read by local voice-actor Rene Maggio. Maggio strikes a good balance between reading and performance, and, as a native of the areav, sounds just right.