One Year Later

Categories: Cookbooks

It might seem frivolous to write about cookbooks for the anniversary of the Katrina disaster but for many survivors of the storm, finding their favorite recipes is a way to reconnect with family memories and local culture.

To lose one's collection of recipes, whether from cookbooks, church notebooks, recipe cards, or newspaper clippings, is to lose your family history.  Where do you find Grandma's recipe for potato salad or your child's favorite cookie dough? 

People in New Orleans, a city where food is more integral to the culture than perhaps any other city in the country, have turned to university archives, libraries and used book shops to make some attempt to replace their lost treasures.

Many libraries were destroyed by Katrina and not all books can be found in used book stores.  Local Gulf Coast newspapers run columns where people can write in for favorites published years earlier and some folks painstakingly have copied recipes from moldy, smelly books they unearthed when they returned to their homes (if there was a house to come back to).

There's a reason people call certain dishes comfort food.  Cooking up some gumbo or red beans and rice was solace to many Katrina victims when they got hold of a stove and could recreate a sense of the past and maybe the future. Those recipes they knew from memory. But they can't salvage all their memories.

 I haven't talked about any specific books in this posting.  I welcome comments from anyone who wants to discuss the one cookbook they would save if disaster struck.  I'll talk about mine next time.