Museum Muses: Chef Colt Patin

For this series, local Louisiana creative types—chefs, artists, politicos, and entrepreneurs—are invited to the LSU Museum of Art to choose a work of art from its vault that both inspires them and somehow speaks to the work they do in the state.

Chef Colt Patin of the Louisiana Culinary Institute has won countless awards for his sophisticated take on traditional Cajun and Creole cuisine. But his own culinary roots, he tells me, were decidedly more humble.

I come from a family of backwater cooks from Breaux Bridge. When I was young, I remember cooking with my grandmother. We made the most basic food. Nothing was glorified or beautiful, but we cooked from the heart. Everything my grandmother cooked was pretty much the same color, but there wasn’t anything she’d make where you wouldn’t want seconds. You felt her food when you ate it.

When Chef Colt looks at a painting, he doesn’t see oil on canvas. He sees coffee- smoked duck breast, blood orange sauce piquante, and roasted root vegetables. He looks through the museum’s collection and chooses Louisiana painter Ed Smith’s 2009 painting Weight of the World as much for the recipe it inspires as the way it looks.

The thing you have to understand is that when you are a chef, pretty much anything you might want to make has already been cooked or eaten before. I look at art to help me put my own spin on things. I mean, I look at this painting and I see duck, I see quail, I see Cornish game hen. I see smothered chicken in gravy like my grandmother would cook, where she’d go outside and grab a hen and cook it until the meat fell off the bone. You’ve got the color orange, so you’ve got citrus, maybe something with a blood orange sauce. This painting is no plain old grilled chicken breast, let’s just put it that way.

After our interview, Chef Colt heads to his kitchen to spin off a series of recipes inspired by the painting and sends me mouthwatering images of crispy fried chicken gizzards with sweet and sour plum pepper glaze and seared duck salad with blood orange pomegranate vinaigrette. But a dish of roasted Cornish game hen, he decides, does the painting the most justice.

Recipes: Roasted Cornish Game Hen; Wild Mushroom and Roasted Vegetable Ragout; Chicken Wild Dirty Rice