After Katrina, Cookbooks Top the Best-Seller List

At the Kitchen Witch store, which sells both new and used cookbooks, some customers "zoom right in on the 'Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook,' " LaMancusa said. "Everybody had that -- that and 'Joy.' They recognize the cover from across the room, run to it and hug it to their chests. Sometimes the husbands roll their eyes and say, 'Her favorite book.' "

"Just as many men come in here and hold onto it for dear life," LaMancusa's partner, Debbie Lindsey, added.

Deb McDonald, manager of the Garden District Book Shop, said she's gotten orders for cookbooks containing New Orleans recipes not only from flooded residents but also from people who had moved away long before the storm. "I think they feel that if they ate some New Orleans food, they'd feel better, or they wanted some connection with the city," she said.

Walker said that the first thing she and other residents did when they had been evacuated and had landed with friends or relatives was to cook some gumbo, jambalaya or red beans and rice -- traditional dishes they know how to make by heart.

Another favorite book contains recipes that New Orleans Public Service Inc. (now Entergy) sent out inside electric bills and posted in streetcars beginning in the 1940s and continuing for the next two decades. The recipes, gathered and tested by a group of home economists in the utility's demonstration kitchen, include New Orleans signature dishes such as Creole bread pudding, mirliton (chayote) casserole and red velvet cake.

A book of these recipes, first published in 1952, was reprinted pre-Katrina by the United Way of Greater New Orleans, which was given the rights to the book to use as a fundraiser. "We lost a lot of the books in the flood," said Terry Westerfield, the organization's vice president of marketing and public relations. After Katrina, she said, people who lost their books or favorite recipes that were saved from their electric bills began trying to get in touch with the organization. "Our phone didn't work, but they tracked us down by e-mail. We went into the building, found the computer disk and printed another edition," she said. "It is doing very well."

Cookbooks and recipes tied to personal history or family heritage seem to be the most mourned. Paula McKenna, 55, who now lives in Houston, has been cooking and collecting cookbooks and recipes since she was 15. "Anything you could send in for on the back of a box or I could buy with my $5 allowance, I got," she said. "I always thought I would pass them on to my daughters." She feels worse about losing her mother's recipes. "She's got Alzheimer's now. I know a lot of her recipes, but I'd give anything to have her handwriting."

Mary Abdel-Ra'oof, 57, misses the cookbook her husband brought her from Rome; the five volumes of recipes by the Bell South Pioneers, her colleagues at the phone company; and her mother's recipes for oyster pie and oyster cobbler. "I just can't remember all the seasonings and ingredients," she said from her new home in Denham Springs near Baton Rouge, La.

Said Geraldine Reed: "I am 84 years old, and I lost all my recipes." Reed and her two displaced daughters now live in Wisconsin, near her son. The accomplished cook and baker has found some solace in food. "On New Year's, I had my son and his family over," she said. "I made pork roast, baked macaroni, sweet potatoes, black-eyed peas, cornbread and doberge cake." Reed's version of this eight-layer white or yellow cake alternates chocolate and vanilla custard between the layers, with vanilla frosting on top and chocolate frosting around the sides.

"It's been such a traumatic experience," she said. On New Year's, at least, "We all had a good day."

Julia Cass, a freelance writer living in New Orleans, finds that she has been cooking and eating more since Hurricane Katrina.