Cookaholics Bulletin Board

Foods of the World: American Cooking: Creole and Acadian -- Peter S. Feibleman - author, James Beard and Michael Field - recipes.

Feibleman is the same guy who wrote Spain and Portugal and he's just as flowery in New Orleans as he is in Barcelona. But if you are longing for an ode to the homey joys of capturing crabs with your school chum and talking your respective domestics into a cook-off, if you are longing for a primer on wooing teenage girls with the magic of a crayfish boil, if you just can't get enough second-person narratives -- this is the cookbook for you.

I made Duck and Sausage Gumbo and Bread Pudding with Whiskey Sauce. I changed the gumbo recipe slightly by rendering the duck fat before I started so that I could make the roux with it. The dish was very good -- rich and spicy and very satisfying -- a great gumbo for cold nights.

The bread pudding was just okay. It was super easy to make, but it mostly tasted of vanilla and bourbon and not much else. It was pleasant, but not very complex, and it was too sweet. If bread pudding and bourbon sound good to you, I'd suggest the version that CC did in 2006.

JB,

Oooh, I have that one, but I haven't read it. Sounds like fun breakfast reading.

I wanted to subtitle the chapters -- "Coming of Age in Louisiana -- In Which Feibleman Catches Crabs."