Jambalaya

I went to visit my parents for about a week and a half and picked up this little gem while I was back home. This is my dad's jambalaya recipe, which is more in the creole school of cooking than the cajun. (Here's a good article highlighting the strong points of both.) Jambalaya is a great dish to show the difference of the two cooking styles. Creole jambalaya is red and has an emphasis on tomatoes. Cajun jambalaya is a more grayish color and has an earthy, homey taste to it. Here we go:

Cook two cups raw rice in chicken stock.

1 stalk celery
1 large onion
2 bay leaves
3 cloves garlic
1/4 c bell pepper
1 14 oz can diced tomatoes (drained)
1 8 oz can tomato sauce
1 lb andouille sausage (kielbasa is an adequate substitute)
1 lb raw shrimp (peeled)
Chicken as desired

to taste:
salt
black pepper
white pepper
Tabasco
Tony Chachere's

Sauté vegetables until tender. Add sausage and shrimp. Sauté til shrimp are pink. Add tomatoes and tomato sauce. Bring to boil.

Mix sauce with cooked rice and let simmer over low fire for 10 minutes.

——

After I copied this recipe down from my dad's near-illegible scrawl, he asked me, "So you know how to make it now?"

"Yeah. I got the recipe, and I watched mom as she was cooking."

"No. It's made with love," was his response.

I groaned a little on the inside. My whole life he told me that "love" was the secret ingredient in his Nana's cooking, and I always chalked it up as sentimental southern mysticism. But then I started thinking about it, and I think my dad is right. There are three kinds of love that play into good cooking, and I feel like how my brother cooks fried chicken exemplifies them all: a love for the tradition of the dish, a love for the ingredients, and a love for the company. This is what makes his fried chicken the best I've ever tasted.

My brother calls his cooking "ancestor worship." I think all of us Wyatt kids have a deep love for the traditional cooking of our forbearers, and we feel a strong duty to get those dishes right. It's our job to pass down our great-grandmother's étouffée recipe and keep creole cooking alive in our family. You should see Jake fret over his fried chicken. He constantly reassesses the time that each cut of chicken should be in the oil and how best to cut the chicken. If he weren't so concerned with preserving and presenting the fried chicken recipe bequeathed to us by our ancestors, I don't think his chicken would be half as good as it is.

Next, Jake has a love and respect for the ingredients he's using. He does not buy the chicken already cut—he gets the chicken whole and parts it himself. This is probably is unnecessary, but it shows a love for the experience of cooking with chicken. This is how I cook my fricassee as well. Yes, it's more work to part a chicken yourself, but I feel that it's a more intimate way of cooking. And if you show that level of respect to such a pedestrian ingredient as chicken, you're going to give crab, crawfish, shrimp, and oysters the level of respect they deserve. And your dish will be all the better for it.

The third type of love is what my dad was trying to communicate to me through the years, and that is a love for the people that you serve. When Jake fries chicken, he invites all of his friends and family, and everyone rejoices together. He's incredibly open-handed with the chicken, and Kathryn is always right there with equally stunning potatoes and pies to back it up. Under these conditions, I think it's impossible for anyone to harbor ill will. Cooking for someone is helping them to fulfill a basic survival need in an elegant and satisfying way. In the grand scheme of things it may be a small contribution, but you're helping them to sustain their very existence. It is an inherently magnanimous endeavor.

Just because you've heard something all your life doesn't mean it's untrue. As cheesy as it sounds, I do think "love" is the secret ingredient in good cooking. Love of tradition, love of ingredients, and love of people. It's a difference you can taste.