After Katrina, Cookbooks Top the Best-Seller List

By Julia Cass
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, March 22, 2006

NEW ORLEANS -- When the city's bookstores began opening after Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters receded, the first volumes residents bought to replace their waterlogged, moldy collections were often beloved cookbooks.

Philipe LaMancusa, owner of the Kitchen Witch bookstore in the French Quarter, said that 70 percent of his sales since reopening in November have come from customers whose recipe books were among Katrina's casualties.

"People are replacing their cookbooks first," agreed Tom Lowenberg, owner of Octavia Books. "Cooking is so tied in with people's comfort and quality of life, especially in New Orleans. I think making familiar food helps people with the heartbreak of loss."

Cookbooks are the top replacement books at the city's other independent book stores as well, and requests sometimes are urgent. "In December, a man came in with a soggy cookbook and put it on the counter," said Ted O'Brien, an employee at the Garden District Book Shop. "He said, 'I need this.' " O'Brien doesn't remember which cookbook it was, except that it was out of print and he couldn't help the customer.

Cooks settling back into their kitchens also call the archive at Tulane University's Newcomb College Center for Research on Women for recipes from its collection of 1,000 cookbooks. They contact the United Way for copies of a book of popular recipes that were once stuffed into envelopes with electric bills. And they e-mail the food section of the Times-Picayune, asking the newspaper to reprint favorite recipes that perished in the flooding.

Every Thursday, the newspaper publishes their pleas:

"I am trying to locate 'Aunt May's Eggplant Fritters' published in the Times-Picayune more than 15 years ago. . . . I lost it in my Lakeview home. All of my family members who had this recipe lost it, too. If anyone has this recipe, I would be very grateful if they would pass it on."

"I spent hours trying to separate drowned and dried recipes. . . . The ones I did save stunk to high heaven and I had to copy them. Unfortunately, many of my favorite [Times-Picayune] ones did not make it. . . . One was called 'Best Cornbread Recipe.' It truly is the best cornbread recipe I've used, and I would love to have it again."

"I hope you can help me locate a recipe I lost in the floodwaters of Katrina. . . . I used to make it for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners, and my family is begging for it. It was called Island Rum Sweet Potatoes. I have tried to duplicate it from memory, but I cannot get it right."

Judy Walker, the food editor, isn't surprised by this longing for beloved recipes by people who have lost so much more. "There's no stronger attachment than to food except to family, and cooking is part of family," she said. She searches in the newspaper's archives, which go back to the 1980s, and if she can't find the recipe, she asks readers to help. She calls the effort "Rebuilding New Orleans One Recipe at a Time" and views it a form of disaster relief.

Susan Tucker, a curator of the Tulane archive, considers recipe restoration a means of "getting our old lives back." In addition, she pointed out, "cookbooks are utilitarian. There's a reason to have them. You refer to them."

According to the booksellers, the most popular replacement cookbooks are not new, trendy offerings but classics such as the "Joy of Cooking," along with several local books with recipes from home cooks such as "River Road Recipes," a 1959 collection gathered by the Junior League of Baton Rouge, and "The Plantation Cookbook," compiled by the Junior League of New Orleans.

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.