STORY OF NEW ORLEANS CREOLE COOKING - SHORT

[Applause] [Music] [Music] the story of your audience Creole cooking the black hand in the pot unveils the untold stories of new aliens black chefs cooks street food vendors grocers and butchers from 1718 to the present [Music] we're the Creoles as they call it the Creoles do curly the Creoles of color then you had the other Creole that's a totally different so but even in their kitchens they had black people cooking all the time so you got that influence that big African influence the African influence on New Orleans food it's the first it comes before the Spanish in the French because the African slaves are the ones in the kitchen cooking for my people and they brought their style they brought their seasonings they brought their vegetables to the kitchens and that became the Creole food of New Orleans [Music] [Music] see with a new orleans or option in the country the people who run those pitches were black people and you see in the literature this even example Charles Barry I think it was a crime son of in the warning first the Unrated sugar in Louisiana and he what about those black cooks equal them apron GERD apron girl some Bose who but some who would cook that food right if the right seasoning and things like that in the past was recognized I don't know why sometimes that memory was almost wiped out you know Jim Crow did a lot of harm to our knowledge of the past Jim Crow was also designed to erase that past and we need our memories him and also most of that memories was born with the creole language but I'm telling you in New Orleans or here in the country if you look at the inventory of those properties in New Orleans and here the people in the kitchen are always black people there were different classes of crayon people there were first the elite class if you will and they call themselves the ASEAN population or the ancient population or the Oceania epitome and they were the people who descended from under the large-scale indigo planters and also later the large scale sugar planters then you had the biggie DeVito the BT DeVito were those people who had small farms who raised vegetable crops poultry and who sold their their crops and poultry and beef in the markets in the islands then of course the original Africans who came here were enslaved principally from the western coast of Africa but the Cornwall which the Spaniards maintained and renamed the Clio Negril the corn wad provided for the manumission of slaves that owners could free their slaves all that slaves could purchase their freedom and from this group of people emerged there's John Keeler leave the free people of color and they were an extraordinary group of people they became skilled cabinet makers seamstresses cooks businessmen builders they were so very important to John Carroll evil to the very fabric of 18th century and 19th century Louisiana and the audience those places would not exist without them and then of course later on as slavery persisted in the 19th century there were the slaves who came here from Virginia and from other parts of the East Coast with principally from Virginia and they also ultimately had to adapt to this Creole culture but all of these people ultimately became creolized meaning that whether they were German or French or Spanish African or Native American they all learned to speak some form of the French language that was perhaps the greatest unifying element in the Creole identity but then and this is a close second is the food well do I remember my talking as saying that she would not serve anything in the house but by all food and if you didn't eat her food there was something wrong with many of the people who made these lives possible never had the portrait painted or the photograph taken and we'd like to give voice to these people who put so much of themselves in this house and in this life whether by choice or by circumstance so it's the people that made this luxury happen people who cooked the food tended to fire washed the clothes not the people who necessarily played the piano or learn to speak French but the people who made sure that all of the hard work was done that we were able to give a voice and a face to the people who really are invisible in this house so it wasn't just the faces in the wards here on the wall there were a lot of people who lived and worked and died here then we would when my children were young we would go on the streets you go to Seychelles Avenue no we weren't that welcome there but we never went in crowds if you did go and crowd you up if you like gonna be rejected I remember one experience when we were teenagers the first year we could go downtown without our parents we must have been about 15 or so we went to Canal Street which is where the big crowd gathers and then we dared to go up and say Charles Avenue which is the big Avenue where the mayor told us and so forth and the policeman told us to get out get out you don't belong here go where you belong and so we we left but we knew it wasn't right and my parents always kept hope alive is it or one day it's going to change and so we always knew that but we always knew our place because you didn't want to be embarrassed and sometimes it could be putting them in jail for stepping out of line so it was a it was a hard life but my parents and many parents created this little cocoon where you know we had family relationships and lots of families and yet family picnics and you know we did lots of things we enjoyed the cultural things at Dillon University enslaves University so we had a nice world that offered us opportunities but only in our world we were not allowed although we certainly didn't work in all of the upscale white established restaurants hotels and nightclubs we did the cooking we did the serving and the preparation but we wasn't allowed in those places we created our own Society I just remember distinctly that in the culture I grew up in which was Creole seventh Ward uptown downtown culture because my mother was from uptown my father was from down less and a blending of the African and Creole and the French and the Haitian people getting up in the morning the women who stayed at home and cooked and took care of the children and did the laundry they would get up and cook a big breakfast but a major portion of the day was planning dinner going out to the grocery store to the market to the neighborhood stores to buy the stuff that they wanted or having the man who did the steal a get the feeling and to bring bring us some fresh female go to get the hot sausage at the place that somebody made it and then waiting for the rabbit man to come around and and with this we had a managed to sell rabbits and he'd come around he had a horse and buggy and I'm not that old you know this was the 1940s and then you know the man coming around with fruit and those were all people that we knew they were neighbors they were fault as they were family members the milkman to Duprees Creole founded another dairy follow about where the airport is and those young men would come in their white uniforms and their white trucks and bring bottled milk and put it on your porch and glass jars but the [Music] cardboard cap and the cream with rise and have to go get that note before it pops the top off you know so we had all of that input and and food was a central portion of everything the other thing I liked about growing up was wherever you were if you were visiting friends or you stopped in to see someone or you were playing with kids in the block and then we all call them and she may come out of the Sun and have something cool to drink everybody was treated the same way they didn't send you home and go home and eat at your mama's house know if you were playing with your friends everybody came into that house whether it was dinner lunch or break or snack everybody came in and did it so and you didn't have to make an appointment to drop in on people if you were home and somebody pass by just passing by in the kitchen watching the cook cook heaven beans having rice having meatballs having fish having Creole food and seafood or whatever that's the way it was [Music] but years ago we were at the dinner table and people could talk to ones that that that did the table they then you were using one spoon to you you know what form to use you table was set you know on Sundays you didn't have any money now sometimes how older do we get on your table all cause like you have plastic tonight but on Sundays you had that starched and ironed tablecloth could be made out of flour sacks that you bleached and watched it me to look like a linen and involved in encroaching but you see that the culture that told you you're too different you live good sometime and you appreciate thing but you don't have that anymore if you ask your mother well what do we have for dinner today you know she would tell you we have green beans and rice and there was no meat involved because you didn't have any you know maybe you had the meat that season the beans with maybe and that was your dinner but just sat at the table and that would you dinner today people want I want baked macaroni every day you can okay that was Sunday as Sunday was something to look forward to because when you had money you had what we called panda meat it's what we call breaded veal today you bet you got to round steaks and you breaded them and you have that polyamide could you baked macaroni and that was Sunday and you and there's nothing like potty meat let's get them good be around the brennaman fine and it's so different and you had your fried chicken and just do chicken over Sunday we were Catholic we celebrated first communion which we called little communion and then we had big chameleon and we had Mardi Gras we have carnival was referred to as carnival and we had collabs and on those special occasions we had colostrum breakfast first communion was class and when you woke up when you heard the Indians on carnival day and you heard the cry of the wild man you knew it was time to get up and you in took our lives and you went and followed the Indians and we all went from st. Bernard ever knew so our leaders having them all didn't and at the time they were beautiful oak trees that made a canopy over the neutral ground which I think you call a median elsewhere and and they would you know people would bring picnics watches they would you know picnic all day on this big median and Zulu parade did come it wasn't as as lovely as it is now but you saw everybody you landed you all at ease because you need to belong there and of course when they took the trees down and put them up the expressway up there many of those businesses are north great to have and who died that was a bustling black business Avenue and the other interstate just killed many of those businesses when I was growing up at that time you could have my poultry in your yard so my grandmother had chickens and she had ducks but when you went to the grocery store my cup on the Saturday was to go to Steve's on Claiborne Avenue to buy a lot of chickens so I had to go there and I wouldn't want to describe how to kill the chickens but I had to wait me for them to kill the chickens oh it was so good it was so good to taste the fresh meat it's very very very very different now but you could go to the store at the same time and get a chicken it will cut it up for you free of charge anything you wanted your brown to brown me they would do that for you anything you wanted and it will give you an old Latin yeah you know sometimes the butcher put throwing up extra little piece of meat or something they would say Danny huh so I'm giving you something a little extra under the extra special I went in the store not long ago and I saw a chicken a size of a smiler turkey and I asked them I asked the man is that a chicken or is that a small turkey because that is a chicken or steroids [Music] vii Moriches I call the mecca of Creole culture now it's being challenged because we're the seventh Ward is is the object of gentrification what goes around comes around history repeats itself that's why we have to learn so we don't make the same mistakes several what is being gentrified and now you're having this interest in New Orleans because of after Katrina because of the opportunities and yet so many people who are not from a moving in and because certain areas are being gentrified and people see the investment in New Orleans in terms of living here owning property putting things for Airbnb or for rentals or because of the different places that are being developed in certain parts of City we have the hospital complex which is adjacent to the seventh Ward Tulane and and different things that are being developed a quarter and the value of the property on the periphery of the court and how valuable is becoming and so the separate Ward is right on that next level of periphery well now people are moving in and what are you seeing from gentrification property values rising property taxes rising insurance rising to the point where Creoles have covered with their generationally won't be able to afford to live there and you're starting to see that change over and if we allow identification to happen in the model in which it's happened all over the world historically potentially the Creole culture in that area could be wiped out because the people that lived there won't really understanding they may take pieces of it to popularize it whether it's a food it might open a restaurant say they cook cooking in a civil war in the creole community community or you might hear something else but the the totality of the history and everything about it over time will be misinterpreted misrepresented eventually could be lost so the importance of Creole culture is history and making sure that we are stakeholders come back my vision I'm not fully back in I'm working out of another person's processing facility to make profit we have other people who there's only two Creole butchers that I know who are still traditionally still making product it's myself in the - we make sauce to make hot sauce - two different things and we've served our Creole community over the years but we're at risk of losing those traditions because that's Brett Anderson one of the food critic sometimes begin said the best sausage makers in the city were the Creole butchers they made the best hot sausages they made the best sausages they made the best they were the best purveyors of meat and it's a part of our culture that we would lose so for me I have to then stake my claim and say I need to not only educate myself on my culture and my food history about what we're about I have to also move forward respecting it authenticating it and then developing my business so that it's a representation of what is truly Creole of color tradition [Music] you

Channel: DURCP FILMS

Views: 71,747

Rating: 4.8552279 out of 5

Keywords: DURCP FILMS, DURCP, STORY OF NEW ORLEANS CREOLE COOKING, black hand in the pot, jeremy shine, zella palmer, leah chase, sybil haydel morial, creole history, michael twitty, creole cooking, new orleans history

Id: p0ayRQA4Rgw

Length: 22min 44sec (1364 seconds)

Published: Fri May 27 2016