New Orleans Cuisine: Fourteen Signature Dishes and Their Histories

FRENCH BREAD

38 french bread Michael Mizell-Nelson Bread symbolizes maintenance of life as well as deprivation, as in a bread-and-water diet. A staple throughout the world, bread figures prominently throughout New Orleans culinary history as variations on the French cap loaf and other styles. It accompanied the finest meals, and stale loaves from the same bakeries fed the poor. New Orleanians could build a day’s meals around loaves: pain perdu (lost bread or French toast) for breakfast, a poor boy sandwich for lunch, and pistolet (a smaller oval roll) with dinner, which one could end with either bread pudding or Russian cake, amalgamations of leftover bread and cake, respectively. Fittingly, the history of bread in New Orleans cuisine demonstrates a culinary mixing, with German and Italian bakers making essential contributions. The first baker in the city accompanied the move of Louisiana’s colonial headquarters from Mobile in 1718 to the area that developed into New Orleans’ old quarter. François Lemesle, working under the alias Bellegarde, had by the early 1720s sited his bakery at the corner of St. Ann and Chartres streets. Food and flour shortages presented two of the early colony’s most regular hardships. Lemesle’s bakery recovered from the devastating 1722 hurricane, but a rival baker went into debt. Lemesle purchased the baker’s business and equipment at auction in 1725. The next year the Superior Council found Lemesle guilty of “running short-weight loaves” and had the bread dumped into the Mississippi, despite flour’s scarcity and high cost. Flour shortages, concern over pricing, and underweight loaves dominated colonial records regarding bread bakeries. Corn and rice flour as filler and, at times, substitute, proved to be a useful if unpalatable alternative to wheat flour. The earliest loaves produced in the colony resembled the standards of earlyeighteenth -century France. Unlike the more familiar and lighter baguette or french bread 39 “stick” loaves introduced later, these were the heavier, round, “cap” style available in one-, two-, or four-pound loaves. Humid conditions made it difficult for bakers to produce hard crusts and capture yeast from the air. Producing this elemental part of life generated too much heat and required too much physical stamina and skill for most New Orleanians to attempt.1 Since so few households produced their own bread, the gathering of this staple, along with produce and meats, represented one of the city’s communal acts from its earliest days. Bread production separated the community, too. The Company of the Indies takeover of the colony in the late 1710s introduced en masse enslaved Africans , who handled the most difficult parts of the work. They carried water in buckets from the Mississippi River to their owners’ shops; many developed into skilled bread artisans. Slaves owned by bakers regularly distributed bread orders in wicker baskets balanced upon their heads. Advertisements for a baker’s business and equipment included his slaves and lease among the bargain. The transition from French to Spanish rule in the 1760s was marked by more than the local elites’ ill-fated rebellion and the familiar French cultural holdovers. General Alejandro O’Reilly had been dispatched in 1769 to put down the rebellion and end the smuggling trade between colonists and English merchants. O’Reilly’s earlier relationship with Scots-Irish merchant Oliver Pollock proved mutually beneficial.After the latter offered a cargo of precious flour at a reasonable price, O’Reilly provided Pollock free-trade status and contracted with him to supply the garrison.A weak military presence allowed the free trade to continue with little interference, especially since grain from North America’s French and British colonies proved essential to maintaining the colony.Pollock’s flour bargain and the subsequent supply of North American flour also factored into the success of Governor Bernardo de Galvez’s military campaigns against the British in Baton Rouge and other areas of the Gulf Coast during the American Revolution. In periods of scarcity, colonial governing officials often set prices to prevent gouging. In 1772, the government purchased all available flour and resold the supply at cost to individual bakers. In the 1790s, Spanish officials worked with two bakers to determine the exact amount of rice one could add to flour without 1. Brick ovens fueled by wood fire produced a hellacious job of cleaning out the embers every Saturday, the one day providing a lull in baking. The later development of oil-burning ovens also produced a mess...