Gumbo Tales: Finding My Place
at the New Orleans Table
By Sara Roahen, W. W. Norton & Co., 2008.
$24.95, cloth. 
The best writing about food grows from a place and a personality, and Sara Roahen’s book is a wonderful example of the intersection of the three. Roahen, a Wisconsin native, came to New Orleans so her husband, Matt, could attend medical school at Tulane. She immediately fell in love with the cooking of the city and resolved not only to eat as much of it as possible but also to understand it.
The opening chapter on gumbo chronicles her transforming experience with this definitive New Orleans dish from her initial anxiety “into curiosity and even desire”—a good summary of her method as she explores sazeracs, sno-balls, po-boys, mirlitons, crawfish, oysters, red beans and rice, café au lait, pho (yes, pho), ya-ka-mein, and other delicacies of her adopted city.
She explores by eating, joyfully and obsessively eating, by reading the requisite literature, and, most important, by getting to know the people who have grown up on and continue to cook this traditional and evolving cuisine. It’s a cast of characters that includes Miss Dot, who presides over Domilise’s; Ashely Hansen, who now runs her family’s Sno-Blitz shop; Marie Fagot, who prepared a traditional Sicilian St. Joseph’s Day dinner for 400 of her neighbors and friends each year; and Pableaux Johnson, who cooks red beans and rice for a revolving group of lucky friends every Monday evening.
The most appealing of this appealing cast is Sara Roahen herself, who takes obvious joy in her subject. Sara Roahen the narrator is much like the Sara Roahen many of us have come to know at Southern Foodways Alliance events—friendly and open, appealingly self-deprecating, inquisitive with just the right amount of obsession, intelligent, finely observant, and never snide. She not only makes you want to go to New Orleans and eat, but to eat with her. (Disclosure: Roahen serves on the SFA board.)
Hurricane Katrina interrupted Roahen’s writing and research for Gumbo Days, and a sense of loss, sometimes temporary, sometimes permanent, runs through this book. No matter, Roahen has faith that “ a flood cannot destroy the most interesting and ingrained food culture in my country,” and that New Orleans will continue to teach us “about connecting with people by cooking and eating together.”
TOM HEAD
SFA Contributors
TIMOTHY C. DAVIS is a Charlotte, North Carolina, native currently living in North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. An MFA student at Queens University, he has written for Saveur, Christian Science Monitor, Mother Jones, and others.
MARCIE COHEN FERRIS, SFA president, is assistant professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is author of Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South.
THOMAS HEAD writes regularly for the Washingtonian and other publications on food, drink, and travel.
ANGIE MOSIER, SFA vice president, is a freelance writer and food stylist.
