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RED BEANS AND RICE
- University Press of Mississippi
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128 red beans and rice Karen Trahan Leathem and Sharon Stallworth Nossiter For many years, Louis Armstrong, arguably New Orleans’ most famous native son, signed his letters, “Am red beans and ricely yours, Louis.” Armstrong loved red beans, which he learned to cook at an early age. When he was released from his year-and-a-half stay at the Colored Waif ’s Home, where he was sent for shooting a gun in the air on New Year’s in 1913, the young teenager took over the household cooking for his father and stepmother , keeping his voracious young stepbrothers fed with red beans and rice. In his autobiography, he reels off a list of favorite dishes from his sister Mama Lucy’s repertoire: courtbouillon, gumbo, and cabbage and rice. He added, “As for red beans and rice, well, I don’t have to say anything about that. It is my birth mark.” He mentions red beans more than any other food in his autobiography , Satchmo, and he ate it everywhere, from New Orleans’ tiny Chinatown to Harlem soul food joints. When he was getting acquainted with his fourth wife, Lucille, he asked her, “‘Can you cook red beans and rice?’ which amused her very much. Then it dawned on her that I was very serious.” For the rest of his life, Armstrong took red beans, the ultimate comfort food of New Orleans, with him everywhere. Armstrong is not the only one who equates the dish with home. Less than a month after Hurricane Katrina, Mayor Ray Nagin confidently predicted New Orleanians would return to the city. In making this assertion, he turned to the language of food, which stood both metaphorically and literally for the ties to home. He told reporter Anderson Cooper,“I know New Orleanians. Once the beignets start cooking up again and, you know, the gumbos in the pots and the red beans and rice are being served on Monday in New Orleans and not where they are, they’re going to be back.” It would not be the last time Nagin invoked red beans and rice; he has mentioned the dish as either a way to lure people red beans and rice 129 back home or else as a proxy for community and family. Just over three months after Katrina, he told a crowd of evacuees in Atlanta,“What’s up, New Orleans! I miss y’all! The red beans and rice just ain’t the same without ya’ll! So we need y’all back quickly.” Although many New Orleanians remained skeptical of Nagin’s rhetoric, post-Katrina statements reveal that the mayor was not off base in this emotional linking of red beans and rice with home. New Orleans writer Randy Fertel tells of a trip back to the city five months after the storm: “Like many in the New Orleans diaspora, I longed for the proper ingredients to recreate our food. Five weeks after the storm, I returned to New York from New Orleans with my suitcase filled with Camellia Brand red beans, green baby lima beans, crawfish tails, ham seasonings, and smoked sausage (or, as we say, ‘smoke sausage’).” Wayne Baquet, whose family has operated various Crescent City restaurants over the years, including the defunct Eddie’s and the current Lil’ Dizzy’s, recalled cooking for sixteen evacuated relatives in suburban Atlanta in the days after Katrina: “You couldn’t find the things you wanted to cook with. You couldn’t find the kidney beans, red beans, you couldn’t find pickled meat. We had to make our own hot sausage.We were missing so many things that we had to improvise and make happen.” Even as red beans and rice represent the heart, home, and family, they also stand as a symbol of New Orleans itself. In the spring of 2007, capitalizing on the ubiquitous symbol of New Orleans’ rebirth after Hurricane Katrina, forty or so fiberglass fleur-de-lis sculptures graced city streets in a public art display sponsored by the Fore!Kids Foundation. One featured red beans nestled among black and gold strokes, colors undoubtedly referencing another prominent symbol of a reborn city—the Saints football team. But the sculpture’s creator, French-born artist and restaurateur Jacques Soulas, was hardly the first artist to take advantage of the symbolic value of red beans. In 1973, jewelry designer Mignon Faget came out with one of her first lines, which featured the red bean. Throughout New Orleans, red...