New Orleans Cooking Recipes by Mary Moore Bremer

There are cookbooks for cooking ... and cookbooks for just looking ... and then there are cookbooks that beg to be read! This is one of them. Mary Moore Bremer wrote this long-lived and much-loved New Orleans Recipes collection in 1932. It is filled with recipes from old New Orleans ... done the way "the Negro woman" did it. She reigned in the kitchen and rightly so.

I love the dedication …

Sounds like a wonderful "recipe" to live by!

Here is one of the recipes from Mary Moore Bremer’s New Orleans Recipes cookbook. (You may want to “modernize” it if you see fit.)

Saucisses aux Haricots (Red Beans and Sausage)

Soak two cups of red beans for five or six hours. Start them in cold water and salt. Cook for two hours and throw away almost all of the water. Add butter and keep beans going over a slow fire.

Now grill about ten little pork sausages till pretty and brown, and then put them into the saucepan on top of the beans.

Stir till the fat evaporates and the beans are crisp. Season well. A little mustard is good for them. Bon appetit!

Bremer adds colorful commentary to many of the recipes: When you eat them be sure to appreciate the one behind the scenes, who prepared them, and say, with the colored folk, “Ain’t dat sumpin’.” Bonne chance, mes amis!

  

Of course, New Orleans cuisine is famous for its sauces, so here is one of the pages of sauces from the book.

Mary Moore Bremer died in 1943 ... a decade before the copy of this book that we have was published (1952). She was just 68 years young.