Photo By Elsa Hahne

When we came back after Katrina, we decided that we needed some social life. The city was so dead. Nine of us, all relatives, decided we’d buy Saints season tickets once the Saints were coming back, and then we started a poker group because we all played poker. My parents played poker. My mom was in several clubs, my dad ran the poker at the Wonderful Boys Club, and at the Autocrat Club my uncle ran it, so there’s history. We learned young. So the Friday night poker group kind of got revisited. It’s all cousins and a couple of friends in the neighborhood. We alternate houses and we fix nice dinners and play cards. We play dealer’s choice, wild cards up the yang yang, I mean just having as much fun as you can.

After I found out yesterday that the meeting was here at my house, my sister had bought shrimp—we’re Catholic, so we don’t eat meat in Lent on Friday–and she said she felt like stewed shrimp, shrimp Creole as people call it. And then our youngest sister, she’s flying in as we speak, she always likes boiled crawfish, she’s spoiled, she’s the youngest. Every time she comes in we have to have what she wants. And I said, let me pick up a couple of cans of crab meat, so I just made a crabmeat casserole, and a potato salad. You can’t have shrimp and crab without potato salad, that just goes with it, and green peas and carrots and my sister is making a fresh green lettuce and tomato salad. And bread pudding! my idea of dessert.

The harder and staler and crustier the bread is, the better. Nutmeg is the favorite of all my spices. I use lots of nutmeg. I love to cook. I can be exhausted when I come in from teaching all day, and I’m going to cook. It’s relaxing to me. In my next life and maybe even in this one, when I retire from teaching, I’ve always wanted to become a chef.

We came from a cooking family, of course. My father was the main chef. He cooked almost all Sunday meals, all special occasion meals. So I would always be in the kitchen with him, making sure I always got the best parts and then of course I started chopping seasonings and making gravies. My first gravy was a white gravy that was supposed to be a brown gravy, but I didn’t brown my roux enough. But it tasted good, so I learned. I love gravies, over some rice with some veal or stewed chicken or hen, and I love stuffings. I love oyster dressing, just love making it and it always goes.

I’m known for the savory dishes, not the sweets. I like to cook the long gravies, and my gumbo’ll make you hurt yourself. Long dishes, as we call them. Pot food.

I started learning from my daddy, watching him, and the neighbors. You were everybody’s child. The lady across the street, Ms. Leda, would always be cooking something. She was one of the elders in the Boutte family, Lilian and John and all of them. She was one of the good old Creole cooks. My aunt made a fried potato po-boy to die for! These were the old-time dishes. My daddy made an oyster soup, and my momma made codfish balls. And we always had boiled spaghetti with a nice tomato gravy, and always lettuce, tomato, avocado, cucumber salad, almost every day of our lives. We grew up eating good food, poor man’s food, and every Good Friday my daddy took us either crabbing or crawfishing and we’d come back and sit up underneath the carport and boil crabs, boil crawfish, whatever we had, a seafood boil. When he went hunting we had duck, rabbit, nutria and coon. My sister didn’t eat that, but I ate everything. He’d cook all that wild stuff. Cowan [turtle], he’d go clean the cowan in the backyard and come in and cook that.

I’m a fanatic about cooking clean. I hate to come behind people and my daddy was a terrible dirty cook, he didn’t clean nothing, he left it all for his daughters and his wife. So I’m a clean cook. By the time I’m finished, my counters are clean.”

Wanda’s Condensed Milk Bread Pudding

Photo By Elsa Hahne

4 eggs
1 (12-ounce) can evaporated milk
1 cup milk
2 teaspoons vanilla
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon allspice
2 cups light brown sugar
1 stale loaf French bread, sliced
1 (14-ounce) can condensed milk
1 stick butter
1 (1.5-ounce) small box raisins

In a bowl, mix eggs, evaporated and regular milk with a fork. Add vanilla, salt, spices and brown sugar. Place bread into a deep 9×13-inch pan. Melt 3/4 of the butter and pour over bread along with 3/4 can condensed milk. Add raisins. Pour milk mixture over bread. Set aside in refrigerator for 1 hour. Add remaining butter in small clumps on top, along with the last of the condensed milk. Bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes.