A tasty treat.
Affectionate portrait of that favorite Cajun comfort food and the tradition from which it came.
Down on the bayou, it’s all about the gumbo, the overstuffed soup that babies eat “as soon as they go off the breast or the bottle.” Now, bayou has a specific meaning, and former Wall Street Journal writer Wells (The Good Pirates of the Forgotten Bayous: Fighting to Save a Way of Life in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina, 2008, etc.) opens with a glossary of key terms, including that one, which describes a riparian ecosystem that “provided habitable high ground in a place where high ground was rare” for the Cajun, or Acadian, French-descended refugees who arrived there after being expelled from British Canada nearly 250 years ago. Gumbo itself derives from an African word for okra, a key ingredient, along with sausage, shrimp, bell peppers, and always rice. Beyond that, there are spices of various sorts, making the gumbo peppery or mild, simple or savory. One is filé, a powder made of ground sassafras leaves, whose “application in gumbo was subject to a rather robust debate even in the deepest part of the Gumbo Belt,” namely whether it goes in while the gumbo is cooking or as it is cooling off. As the author notes, gumbo is not, strictly speaking, a Cajun invention, since it owes so much to West African antecedents, but nowhere has it become quite so elevated than Louisiana. From there, Cajun cooking has spread around the world. For instance, Paul Prudhomme’s concoction of spices for blackened redfish has found a welcome home in Greece. Gumbo allows for experimentation, which “requires confidence and willing guinea pigs,” though traditionalists will argue about that, too. In one cook-off, Wells, who grew up in the bayou, encountered gumbos made with tried-and-true hog lard, duck, and shrimp, with the most exotic thing being rabbit (“My mother would put rabbit in her sauce piquant but would never think of putting it in her gumbo”). The author closes his gently spun tale with a few recipes that foodies will want to test immediately.
A tasty treat.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-393-25483-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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