The Picayune’s Creole Cookbook
Originally published at BlogFerret. Please leave any comments there.
Today we did some errands and, as usual, couldn’t stop ourselves from visiting Half Price Books. I was so pleased to pick up an actual treasure: The Picayune’s Creole Cook Book - Sesquicentennial Edition! It contains 150 years worth of recipes compiles from The Times Picayune, the New Orleans daily newspaper. The Picayune itself is somewhat sentimental
for me, in part because my grandfather always said it phonetically to make us giggle when we went to visit. Also, a lot of my mom’s own recipe clippings come from the Picayune, and, miraculously, the paper has two pages of comics on weekdays! Weekdays! Can you believe it?
This isn’t the newer version, printed in 2002, with the pretty cover. The hardback of that edition seems not to be available now for less than a C-note, but I’ll settle for the more “homey” version from 1987. It is a reprint of the second edition of the Picayune Cookbook from 1901, which is considered the definitive collection. This edition was edited by Marcelle Bienvenu, of St. Martinville, LA. She worked for the Brennan’s family of restaurants, as well as opening her own restaurant, Chez Marcelle.
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