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by Rachel Edelman

Marcela was born in New Orleans and grew up in Florida. We met freshman year at Amherst College. Six months after Hurricane Katrina battered New Orleans, we traveled to Louisiana on a spring break service trip. One afternoon, Marcela invited me to join her for dinner with her godmother, Caroline. We waited for Caroline to pick us up at the gate of our FEMA volunteer camp, which housed around 2,000 college students and was patrolled around the clock by four National Guard members. “Y’all going into the French Quarter for some bourbon and beignets?” they asked.

“Yum,” I said. “Not tonight.”

Just then, a blue minivan pulled up and Caroline jumped out with her arms open, squealing, “Oh, Marcela!” At five foot nine or so, she towered over both of us. Her blue eyes were wide behind big round glasses that seemed to fog for a moment before she squeezed us both and whisked us away.

As I rode through the outskirts of New Orleans, her stories flowed like the sticky breeze across the Delta. Down each bend in the road, she’d point out a city block where a barge floated, or a swath of the city inundated by twenty feet of water for nearly three months. She drove us from poor white St. Bernard Parish to diverse middle-class Metairie on the east side of the canal, spared from the worst of the devastation. We picked up Caroline’s mother, Marie, who had recently moved in with Caroline, and headed out to a neighborhood seafood joint, the kind of place my father always sought out when we went to the beach. I could smell the clarified butter from the parking lot.

We sat at a table draped with a red checkered cloth. The windows were wide enough to invite a hint of the salty breeze. Marie sat down to my left, her glasses and gaze mirroring her daughter’s across the table.

“If you girls want a beer, order the Abita. It’s bitter, and it’s the best thing to drink with the seafood,” suggested Caroline.

The menu was a series of lists, no descriptions. Po’ boys, gumbos, all kinds of nautical creatures to eat boiled, fried, or steamed.

“It’s softshell crab season,” she told us. “We weren’t sure if we’d get any this year, but some of the boats are fixed up enough to go out again, thank goodness.”

Caroline could hardly stop smiling when she looked at Marcela, but whenever she glanced away or looked to her mother, I caught a glimpse of weariness around her eyes. Our beers arrived in cold dark bottles. When I put mine to my lips, its bitterness burst all over my tongue and then, all at once, was gone; a perfect palate cleanser for the rich sweetness of shellfish on the way.

“This was one of the first places to open up again after the storm. It was open a week before we found the house in Metairie.” Caroline’s house in the city proper had been flooded, drywall soaked. Even the studs were moldy. Her description of her ravaged home reminded me of the drywall I’d torn out earlier that day and the water-logged carpets I’d wrenched up with a crowbar the day before.

I grew up in Memphis, another food-loving Mississippi Delta city. Long before my time, traders used to travel south on the river with cash crops to sell at the port of New Orleans. They’d come home on steamboats, smelling of chicory, bourbon, and gumbo filé. I imagine them returning, telling their wives of the glorious bowls of gumbo and jambalaya.

Differences in regional cuisine notwithstanding, these Delta cities share an undying love of gumbo. In Memphis, it’s something that folks cook at home; you don’t see it so much in restaurants. It’s the food I crave when I’m homesick, the dish my Grandma makes when I visit. When our bowls of gumbo arrived, I began to feel right at home in this wrecked city, at ease with this family that was not mine. At the restaurant, the bowl before me contained Gulf shrimp and Andouille sausage instead of the chicken falling-off-the-bone I grew up with, yet the sauce was bound by the same rich brown roux that I learned to stir, perched on a stool in my grandma’s kitchen.

We sipped our soups and beers. As Caroline and Marcela shared recent stories about their families, I wondered how to ask Caroline about leaving and having her home destroyed, and then coming back to try to rebuild when all kinds of government officials had already hinted that the city wasn’t worth saving. The disaster had already created the largest Diaspora in U.S. history; was it really worth it to uproot all those people again to bring them back? Marcela and Caroline continued their exchange in English peppered with French. I talked with Caroline’s mother.

“I hadn’t planned on moving in with Caroline,” she said. “I liked my independence.”

“What do you think now?” I asked.

She sighed, looking down at her pale, wrinkled hands as she delicately peeled her shrimp. “I’m glad to have a roof over my head. It’d be hard to live alone right now. I don’t want to drive at night by myself; the National Guard’s still everywhere. You see your neighborhood on the news. It makes the place feel like a war zone.”

I nodded. She smiled and said, “But we’ve got seafood again.”

Soon enough, I saw two servers walk toward us in a billow of steam. One dished out the main courses: boiled shrimp for Marie, fried softshell crab for Caroline, shrimp po’ boy for Marcela, and oyster po’ boy for me. The po’ boys were overwhelming: six-inch-long cocoons of fresh French bread spread with butter and mayo, then scattered with lettuce and stuffed with fried seafood. I wondered if I’d even be able to taste the oysters through all the fixings, but with my first bite, every ingredient revealed its purpose: each was a foil for the fish itself. In one bite, you could taste every nuance of the salty-sweet, cornmeal-battered oysters played out through each component of the dish. It was so bold, so tangy, so bright.

For a few bites, none of us spoke. Then, Caroline divided up lumps of her crabmeat and passed around a shared plate to which the rest of us added bites for sampling. As we tasted spicy boiled shrimp and crispy crab, she told us about her son’s new school, and his frustration over closed soccer fields. He missed his friends who were still holed up in Houston or Birmingham.

“My son and I left for Baton Rouge with Mama the day before the evacuation order,” she told us. “My husband wasn’t even going to leave;” he was a cameraman for a local news station. “But then there was the mandatory order and even the news crews moved north. They hardly had time, really. He was headed out of the city, and—you know, I can’t even believe it—he went back for the cat. I’m just so grateful; we would’ve lost her. It would’ve been even harder to come home.”

“Why did you come back?” I asked. Caroline sighed. Marie looked down into the tablecloth. The aftertaste of my words was insensitive and stale. It was as though I was a creature of the land, crawling into the sea and asking where all the water came from. And how was it that one breathed there?

“We never imagined it would be so bad.” Caroline said. “But we couldn’t abandon this place. It’s too special. My husband’s from Ohio, but I grew up here. It’s not so often any more that you get a feeling of a place like you do here.”

“We were some of the lucky ones,” Caroline continued. “Our jobs are still here. Our family survived. But we still don’t know who else will come back.”

I took a sip of my beer and felt its bitterness soothe my nerves. I looked at the bottle: Abita Extra Bitter, brewed in New Orleans. Bottling date: 1/13/06, Expiration date: 6/5/06.

Well, I thought to myself, I guess the brewers must be back.

When we left the restaurant, it was dark. There were few working streetlights, and some neighborhoods were so dark I wondered if I was staring into Lake Pontchartrain. We drove back by Caroline’s house to drop off Marie. Caroline’s twelve year-old son, Ben, was home. He hugged Marcela and presented us each with Mardi Gras beads and candies from just a few weeks before. Then, Caroline drove us back to the FEMA camp in St. Bernard. I thanked her for her stories. She gave Marcela a long hug. And then she slipped her hand under her glasses to wipe her eyes. “Just don’t forget us here,” she said quietly, then waved and drove away.

Rachel Edelman is a writer and environmental advocate living in Boulder, Colorado. She enjoys helping others connect with the earth, especially through delicious food.

by Jennifer Baily

I felt my sister clutch my hand and I looked over at her.  The huge toothy smile showed me she was nervous. We were sitting alone in a dark dusty living room- the house was alive with sounds of people bustling and talking about, but we were alone. We were perched on a mustard coloured couch with a coffee table in front of us, on it a vase filled with plastic carnations and roses. A bookcase nearby was covered in family photographs, fabric bound books and more plastic flowers. It seemed to me like any house, in any town. The most unique feature was the view. Through the window I saw a sloping hill leading down into a river. The bank was covered in shrubbery, trees and sporadic smooth round rocks. Over the other side of the river was sand, a light orange that seemed a vast contrast to the lush greenery below.

We were sitting above the Nile in Aswan, Egypt in the home of my uncle’s neighbours. As I stared out, an Egyptian river boat, a felucca, meandered slowly but with expert precision through the swirling and shallow waters, the sailor leaning back on the sail appearing to sleep at the wheel. My uncle has lived in Egypt for over 30 years and this was my sister and I’s first visit. My uncle is an antisocial man and had never taken up the invitations of the neighbouring family to visit their home for dinner. So my sister and I decided to accept, dining with the neighbours as my uncle napped the early evening away on his roof top.

As the sun set, the women of this household stood in the kitchen, whilst my sister and I waited in the living room. I could hear them chattering through the mud brick walls. I wanted to help, but we were guests and our place was to relax alone until called. I inhaled smells wafting from the kitchen- not the spicy heady scent you might imagine: it was warm and savory. I pictured pots of broth with chunks of meat and potatoes, and then through the air came the tang of just-cut red onions followed by hints of cumin and cardamom.

A teenage girl entered and grabbed our hands- “Come,” she said.  She introduced herself as Fatima. Our lack of Arabic made communication difficult, but Fatima’s high school English class had come in handy, and she became a translator of sorts for evening.

On the table was a dark meat curry, cucumber and feta salad, red onion and tomato, pita bread, baked minced beef slice and Koushari, a dish of rice, lentils, and chickpeas, an Egyptian family staple. The family sat and smiled at us; the celebrities of the party had appeared. Fatima relayed questions back and forth: were we married? Why weren’t we? Was it hard to find a husband in Australia? We laughed, similar questions were asked at our own family dinners by our female relatives.

We sat laughing and eating, the women filling our plates when they began to empty. Everyone smiling, watching us eat. Conversation was secondary. The focus was ensuring that we were being well fed. Any time we paused to speak they gestured, as if to say ‘More! Have more!’

We with our bellies full, having learned barely anything of the family who had just fed us, yet feeling cared for and satisfied.  There was no pretension, no facades or attempts to impress. There was simply food shared and food given. Which in this case spoke louder than words.

Jennifer Baily is a lover of food and writing and combining the two whenever possible.

by Diane M. Stillwood

The recipe for Cheese-Stuffed Peppers sat in my small green metal file box, printed in my girlish swirl on a not-yet-stained index card. I had been collecting different cooking ideas since becoming vegetarian several years prior, and had been meaning to try this one. I hadn’t had any kind of stuffed peppers since childhood, and had never prepared them myself. So during a routine trip to the grocery store with M–my tall, dark-haired honey–I picked up the ingredients: six shiny green peppers, slivered almonds, raisins, cheddar cheese; I already had the rice and the tomato paste, along with other assorted staples. We were doing one of those close-to-dinnertime sojourns, both of us fairly famished and thus susceptible to impulse purchases just to get us through to a decent meal.

So it was, while putting together the various parts of this special dinner later on in the kitchen, that we both started snacking on Doritos, coupled with thick chunks of blue cheese–a favorite of his, not mine, but hunger will make exceptions. To my surprise, the recipe took forever to prepare; there were several stages, most of them painstaking. We parboiled, sliced, chopped, simmered, sautéed, covered, spooned, emptied, diced, filled, assembled–all the while munching on the powdery triangular salt licks topped with the rich cheese–and finally, finally, popped the whole thing in the oven to bake.

As we cleaned up the cooking and prep mess, I finally stopped eating to give my stomach a rest before the meal. Alas, once I slid the Pyrex baking dish containing the wonderful, bubbling concoction from the oven an hour or so later–a full three hours after we’d started–I knew I still didn’t have enough room in my tummy to accommodate much more of anything. I ladled one of the peppers onto my plate, marveling in its piping hot aroma, a mixture of spices and sauce, pepper and rice, almonds and raisins. My eyes truly felt “bigger than my stomach,” befitting the legend my parents had bestowed upon me as a child. I savored a couple of bites, then put down my fork in despair.

“I can’t,” I told M.

“Why? What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Damn Doritos,” I muttered. “Your blue cheese didn’t help, either. I’m still full! There’s no way I can eat this–not and enjoy it.”

“So wrap it up and eat it later or tomorrow,” he suggested. “We made enough of them.”

I watched enviously as he polished off his pepper; he was relishing the experience thoroughly, maybe even a bit teasingly. I moaned softly and got up to wrap the leftovers while he cleared the table. The kitchen in our second-floor apartment was even more steamy than usual, with the continued warmth of the stove mixing with the languid summer heat. Once I had the glass dish covered in plastic wrap and aluminum foil, I padded over to the tiny alcove where the refrigerator sat. As I opened the fridge door, the dish shifted in my right hand and crashed to the floor.

“Oh! My peppers!” I yelled, bursting into tears.

M ran over from the kitchen, stopping just short of where I stood surrounded by splintered glass, tomato sauce splattered onto my bare feet and legs. Momentarily oblivious to the danger, all I could think of was the waste–of time, money, effort, food, even the love I’d put into the creation.

“Don’t move!” M said, sounding shaky. “DON’T. MOVE!”

“My peppers!” I wailed.

He looked almost ready to have me committed to a padded room. I thought at first he would admonish me for my seeming foolishness, but his voice softened as he continued to finesse the situation.

“OK, just stand still. There’s glass all around you. Let me get some of it up first.”

“The peppers…..” I whimpered.

“I’ll clean those up, too.”

“Save what you can.”

He looked up at me, pityingly, then went about sweeping and wiping while I stood in the light of the still-opened refrigerator. No matter how M tried to keep the thick red sauce separate from the glass shards, the two smeared together into one gooey mess. When I finally looked over at the peppers, I saw that none of them could be salvaged–food gone, favorite Pyrex baking dish gone, the entire evening a waste, it seemed. And I hated waste.

Years later, I stood in a different second-floor kitchen, several miles away, with my grown son, who was helping me tackle my second go at Cheese-Stuffed Peppers. I hadn’t had the heart in all the intervening years to attempt the unwieldy recipe, keeping the card tucked away in the now-rusting and slightly dented green metal box. I told myself it wasn’t the disaster that had befallen me the first time that had prevented me from making the peppers again, but merely the time and effort involved. No matter now, since I was sure my high-powered microwave would cut the prep time at least in half, and would ultimately streamline the whole endeavor. And I was definitely keeping my stomach “open” for the eating experience, although my tall, dark-haired son thought eating Doritos–one of his major food groups–would be just fine, and he loved blue cheese.

The irony–or was it just poignancy?–of making this dish twice was subsumed for the moment in the whirl of assembling ingredients and prepping everything, with Son and I sidestepping each other in the small space. We used equipment both old and new, but the basics remained the same as they had been in that earlier kitchen adventure–slicing, dicing, chopping, filling–and the one-hour bake in the regular oven was unchanged.

Total time for this second try at the lovely, luscious pepper dish: twenty years, two hours, thirty minutes.

Diane M. Stillwood is a writer and teacher who lives in the Mid-Hudson Valley above New York City.  She is a graduate of The New School with an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing (2009), and is currently completing her memoir, Through a Brick Wall, a coming-of-age story with a twist, about the eighteen months she spent as an adolescent in an orthopedic rehabilitation hospital following surgery to correct scoliosis.