Gumbo, funeral potatoes, and heavy metal Philly cheesesteaks

Thinking about why we eat what we eat where we eat it

“A gumbo cook-off and plenty of costumes, including Sandy Matte in her chicken outfit, are a standard part of Mardi Gras, a Cowboy Mardi Gras, in little Bandera, the ‘Cowboy Capital of Texas,’ west of San Antonio, Texas.” via Library of Congress

My first exposure to Southern food was Emeril Lagasse’s cooking show. During one episode, I watched him whirr an entire stick of butter into a batch of mashed potatoes. Perhaps anticipating the shocked response from your average American food puritan, he looked up at the camera and belligerently explained: “Because it’s Christmas!”

Eventually I became decently acquainted with Cajun food and culture, via an ex-boyfriend. The relationship didn’t work out, but the experience changed my perception of food forever. One afternoon, I stood in my grandmother’s kitchen watching him make gumbo. He became very frustrated as the roux burned and clotted, no matter how fast or slow he stirred. Eventually, he realized he’d always made gumbo in New Orleans — Washington Square is 24 feet about sea level — and that roux doesn’t like being cooked at 4,206 feet.

He hated that gumbo, pronoucing it far below his standards. My grandfather, a South Dakota native who’d never had gumbo, loved it and went back for seconds.

And y’know, I liked it better than any restaurant gumbo I’d had in Utah: the rule there seemed to favor a flavorless, often-slimy brown soup with rice in it. The best gumbo I’ve had in NOLA so far, Jacque-Imo’s duck gumbo, was sublime. (I have word that Jacque-Imo’s sister restaurant, Crabby Jack’s, knocks gumbo out of the stratosphere, too.)

When in Utah, eat funeral potatoes, even if you’re not going to a funeral

Don’t get me wrong, though! I’m not throwing shade at Utah — until late December, I was writing about food for the Salt Lake Tribune, and I’ll be the first to say its foodways are underappreciated and unjustly mocked. (It turns out the LDS green Jell-o stereotype was put out there by a poet. Figures.)

One of the last chefs I interviewed, Tyson Peterson, cooked all over the U.S. before moving back to Salt Lake to head up Mar | Muntanya, the new restaurant in the downtown Hyatt hotel. He loves Basque and Catalan food, so that’s the basis for his menu, but it also draws on his LDS heritage. He’s using preserved food and elk and venision. And he’s making funeral potato croquettas (!!!) without apology or embarassment.

At one of his prior restaurants, Peterson caught the attention of Food & Wine, who described his version of Mormon funeral potatoes as an American classic, and the dish as one of the “most oddly satisfying creations that exists in America — nay, the world.” Growing up in Utah, I ate many, many versions of funeral potatoes — yes, at funerals, including some in Provo, Utah, which is 88% LDS— and can attest that despite the fact it’s made with a lot of butter, like Emeril’s Christmas potatoes, it’s a magical, grief-healing elixir.

There’s a thousand chefs in New Orleans skilled enough to make a bitchin’ batch of funeral potatoes. (NOLA just landed in the No. 1 spot as America’s top food destination.) No doubt they’d be sublime, too, but seems like some regional dishes lose their power and coherence when they’re taken out of context. King Cake makes sense in Catholic cities, and because it’s charged with meaning, people make it with intention and love and you can taste the difference. Postum and giant pink-frosted sugar cookies make sense in Mormon cities, so when in the intermoutain west: eat some cookies.

Neutral Ground Lounge, a NOLA-inspired restaurant that opened in Salt Lake last spring, has a new chef, Cosette Moss, who smartly avoids replicating New Orleans dishes outright but focuses on the Cajun holy trinity of onion, peppers and celery. Fun fact: when Neutral Ground opened, its most-ordered dish was Cajun Pasta. Which is not traditional NOLA fare. In fact, it seems to have originated in Salt Lake’s now-shuttered Al Forno’s Ristorante sometime during the ‘70s or ‘80s and is actually considered a Salt Lake thing. Makes sense to me. Okra doesn’t grow in Utah, and roux is never quite roux in the mountains. If you’re a NOLA-phile, put a little NOLA flourish on something you can do well.

I didn’t try the Cajun pasta at Neutral Ground, and never found it on a menu anywhere else. Speaking of mixy-matchy regional food misses, I was really, really sad to pull up to this place in Provo only to see that it’d just closed:

For the full story, check out this amazing Twitter thread from Desert Prophet, who snagged this image of one of the restaurant’s advertising flyers, and noted it was right next to a bougie pizza chain:

My tragic cheesesteak miss was balanced out by encounteres with interesting regional food and drink, including beer made with wild hops harvested around the ruins of German miners’ cabins in Park City, Navajo Hogan’s fry bread, and cider made with battered-looking apples gleaned from Salt Lake backyard orchards. Before we moved to NOLA, I snagged some prickly pear jelly and Cactus Candy. Glad I did, because people do try to grow cacti in NOLA, but because of the high rainfall, they’re overwatered and end up drooping over the side of the pot like flaccid, deflated balloons.

It’s Grits

So: lesson number two, cacti gardens, and cacti candy, are southwestern arts, not southern ones.

While I know that obvious fact, I have a general learning curve with Southern regional food, and am still very much in student/observer mode. To that end, I need to give a shout-out to Hanna Raskin’s own Substack The Food Section. I subscribed last year at the Trib because it sets such a high standard for food journalism, but its focus on the South is fully relevant now that we’re in New Orleans.

Another nifty look at Southern food is Stan Woodward’s 1978 film, It’s Grits. From the Folkstreams site (where you can watch it in its entirety):

With all the native wit, rib tickling humor and ability to see what makes the South the South found in the literary classics of Southern writers like Mark Twain, documentary filmmaker Stan Woodward helps us discover the common thread that connects the South’s people across all social, economic, political and racial boundaries – Grits! “Grits is us” - or, if we are to be grammatically correct, “Grits are us” - could easily be the title of this uproariously funny and at the same time insightful and poignant personal documentary.

The fried grits at Jacque-Imo’s, by the by, are also sublime. And I’m looking forward to learning more about southern food in the best way a person can: by eating it.

…A round of thanks (and swag)

Thanks to everyone who threw in for a paid sub to the newsletter! I’ve sent out a round of thank-you emails and a heads up that you will soon be getting paper ephemera in the mail, including vintage postcards and vernacular photos (see above) scooped up at local spots like Junk’s Above. Finally got the proper mailing envelopes, so those will go out on Monday.

Eventually, the goal is to put together a hard copy post that’ll go out through the USPS once a month. But one thing at a time. Lost some writing time Friday morning due to Substack going down for a bit, so this is coming to you today. Historiola! will be back to its regularly scheduled rotation next week for sure (Wed/Fri) with an additional Monday post coming along within the next month or so.

Until then, cheers to whatever’s on your plate, be it funeral potatoes, grits, or heavy metal Philly cheesesteaks.