WHAT the Latin Quarter is to Paris, the Vieux Carre is to New Orleans, a spot unique, distinctive and alluring; and here are to be found the French Market and the many restaurants where, as of old, though not quite the same, one may partake of those dishes which have had almost as much to do with perpetuating the fame of New Orleans as its notable battle, its Mardi Gras or its charming balconies of iron lace. For to the initiated Creole cookery means the best cookery in the world, since the word “Creole” has the same significance to the dweller in Louisiana as the word “Knickerbocker” to the New Yorker. It stands for the best there is in ancestry as well as in foods, and one could wish for no finer feast than a dinner prepared after time-honored Creole recipes from delicious foods obtained in the old French Market.
Sunday morning is the gala time at the market; it is quite the fashion in the Vieux Carre to follow the early church service by a trip to purchase the Sunday dinner, and no one leaves the market or the Vieux Carre without purchasing pralines or calas from one or the other of the picturesque old mammies who, with baskets neatly covered with white cloths, sit on the street corners offering their wares. The calas are strangely delicious little cakes, half fritter, half roll, to be had only in New Orleans, but which might easily become as familiar in the ordinary cuisine as the pan-cake. I obtained the recipe for the making of these little cakes from an old, old woman whose fame for their making once spread far and wide. She made them, so I was told, by the hundreds every morning, and sent them out in their clean white napkins by young colored women, whose tuneful “Belle calas, tout chaud” – fine calas, all hot – was eagerly awaited by the early breakfasters.
The principal ingredient of the calas is rice, and this, the old quadroon told me, she pounded to a powder in a stone mortar; but her recipe for the cakes was as difficult to catch as a wild bird on the wing, for she recognized only the usual old mammy rule-of-thumb method, which she declared was tres difficile – very hard to describe. I finally contrived to secure both recipe and a snapshot of the old mortar which has seen nearly a hundred years of service.
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