Louisiana native and New Orleans chef Melissa Martin (Mosquito Supper Club) pays tribute here to the Cajun home cooking of the Mississippi River delta.

Martin takes us into a world where “we preferred the kitchen to the dining room and never had an heirloom piece passed down from generations.” The recipes she offers are of working people who often drew much of their food from local waters and lived through seasons of abundance and restraint, inundation and rebuilding.

Frequent sidebars introduce us to community-wide festivals like Carnival and Mardi Gras, instruct us on cleaning soft-shell crabs, and invite us to a rabbit hunt and a hog slaughter.

The recipes include many dishes right out of home kitchens, such as a crawfish boil, fresh bean salad with tomatoes and herbs, pork backbone stew, and cornbread with dark onion butter. 

But Martin also looks to the wider world for the insights as well. Her method of soaking eggplant slices in milk before frying is something she learned in Andalusia; her persimmon pudding cake uses fruits that flourish locally, but her cooking method is borrowed from time working in Napa Valley kitchens.

Gently evocative and inspiring.

Hardcover. Color photographs throughout.