Christina Leo
The rooms of Suzanne Poole’s Livonia home flow into one another with nary a dividing wall in sight. From entryway to kitchen to living room to dining nook, walking through the manicured space—lace curtains, long countertops—feels a bit like navigating the broad aisles of a homestead museum: sepia-toned portraits of sisters in sausage curls rest on an antique cupboard, Indian pumpkins cluster below an old brick fireplace, a trio of wooden spinning wheels occupies a windowed corner, and across from them, a fully set dining table sits laden with rose-painted china, gleaming silver trays, and a crystal condiment station made of glass cut so finely, it would just as easily belong in the treasure coves of One Thousand and One Nights as a Southern supper spread. The aesthetic is at once incidental and purposeful, the result of decades spent amassing artifacts honoring the “old ways” of Louisiana living, when hand-stitched clothing lasted several years, furniture pieces bore the individual marks of their craftsmen, and feeding a family required a culmination of a woman’s knowledge of tending plants, identifying medicinal herbs, and perfecting recipes older than the depths of anyone’s Pinterest board. It’s no surprise, then, that Poole has built a reputation for herself as one of the finest preservationists in South Louisiana—and I’m not even talking about the two-hundred-year-old items in her collection.
Poole’s kitchen counter shrinks under the jars, baskets, and bottles holding her latest bounty of food preserves, a display of dried peppers and onions, citric vinegars, pickled cucumbers, berry jams, her pepper jelly specialties, and canned loquats, all clustered beside spires of glass-bottled cherry bounce and cordials made from strawberries, blackberries, apricots, and pears—not to mention the armfuls of green herbs which turn the air soft and minty-fresh in the ninety-degree weather of our visit.
Christina Leo
Once the owner of her own homemade preserves business, Suzanna of Louisiana, these days Poole usually makes preserves solely for friends and family. But this July, as a means to reenter the public sphere, she’ll launch a new website, suzannaoflouisiana.com, a place dedicated to community-shared knowledge about gardening and preserving.
“I’ve always been interested in the way people lived in previous generations, and what they did to get by in their daily life,” said Poole, who, although only sixty-five years old, grew up with grandparents born in the 1880s. “The truth is that you only lived as well as your own ingenuity. Up in Kentucky, where some of my family comes from, the winters were too cold to not have preserved foods at the ready, and in the summer, your mama—and it was the mama who usually did the gardening and sweating in the heat—would stand out over a pot under a shade tree, cooking her jams and jellies.”
“Lots of young people don’t even know what it means to set up a ‘pantry,’” she said. “It’s important to purchase a stash of the basics—flours, cornmeal, certain spices—instead of wasting time and ingredients by grocery shopping for individual recipes.” —Suzanne Poole
As for Poole’s particular methods of canning, bottling, drying, and pickling, she admits that she learned how to make preserves mostly on her own, reading voraciously and cultivating a natural interest in healthy cooking after she and her husband decided to begin eating more health-conscious—but still flavorful and nutritious—meals. With a little practice, Poole assured, preservation can turn out to be one of the most efficient ways to add flavor to meal prep. Lemon vinegar, for instance, can take the fishiness out of filets, herb jellies can add some zing to veggies and meats, and butters can be blended with chive and garlic—all easy tricks that can change the whole palate of a simple dish.
“I talk a lot about the big families being fed and clothed in the 1800s,” she said, “but learning how to preserve foods and herbs is also great for young people living alone or in small apartments. It’s easy to waste fresh ingredients when you’re only buying for one person. This way you can dehydrate a whole bucket of peppers, for example, and fit them into a single bag that you can keep for a long time.”
The art of preserving also comes with a valuable lesson in home economics.
“Lots of young people don’t even know what it means to set up a ‘pantry,’” she said. “It’s important to purchase a stash of the basics—flours, cornmeal, certain spices—instead of wasting time and ingredients by grocery shopping for individual recipes.”
In lieu of relying on Internet recipes from sources like Pinterest, which she says often lack expertise or knowledge about balancing flavor profiles, Poole turns to old Southern Living cookbooks, or else from tried-and-true discoveries she’s made by herself along the way.
Christina Leo
“When you’re making cordials,” she said, pouring small tasting glasses of vaporous cherry bounce fragrant as Christmastime, “you’ve got to use what’s called Saigon cinnamon. Not that powdery store stuff. That, and vanilla bean paste. It’s a bit expensive, but the flavor is like nothing else, and totally worth it.”
Aged for one year in jars packed to the brim with fruit, the liquors are sweet and fiery in their turn, preferred with a vodka base by some, and a brandy base by others, and usually sipped after dinner as a digestif. Anyone familiar with Diana Barry’s accidental imbibing of the raspberry variety in Anne of Green Gables—(even if, okay okay, it turned out to be currant wine)—will know just how quickly these little sugar bombs can actually strike.
“Back in the day, cordial was the only alcohol a woman could drink respectably in public,” said Poole. “Or it might be one of the only forms of medicine you’d have available in the house.”
[Try this recipe: Bread and butter chanterelle pickle]
Before being boiled, fermented, or infused, the ingredients housed in Poole’s jars and bottles and bags begin life in her backyard, a well-groomed jungle of nearly every vegetable, herb, and occasional berry or fruit found in any traditional Louisiana kitchen.
“It’s been a trial by murder over the years,” she said, “but you figure it out eventually.”
Mint grows in tyrannical sprawls, intertwined with its different varieties scented with chocolate, wintergreen, and pineapple. Lemon verbena practically weeps with summertime when snapped in half, sprays of Jamaican Malabar spinach crawl up a gazebo like so many landlocked waterlilies, carrots take the brunt of nematodes to protect the tomatoes, green beans spilleth over, eggplant shines, celery goes to seed, coriander waits to be plucked from cilantro, thornless blackberries crouch in the distance, guava and key limes huddle in the shade by a statue, basil and thyme and rosemary and garlic chives emanate a cologne in the fountain-ruffled air by the pool, lilies make a name as the most resilient of Southern flowers, and the firm leaves of papyrus peep over them all like Nile tourists lost in a crowd. All of it useful, all of it lovely.
In Poole’s words: Like a home-cooked meal, the best plants aren’t necessarily ones you grow from seedlings, but ones you receive as gifts.
“I can’t explain it,” she said, “but they’re always the ones that’ll last you forever.”
