Who’s Your Mama Now?
by Jude Theriot
Marcelle Bienvenu at her guest house in St. Martinville
Marcelle Bienvenu never intended to pursue a career in food, but after over fifty years as a cookbook author, food historian, food writer and restaurant owner, she’s a testament to the fact that sometimes life is bigger than our intentions. Growing up in St. Martinville, she didn’t have a name for the food her parents and grandparents prepared. It wasn’t Cajun or Creole. It was just good food. And when the world finally caught on to the unique cuisine of southern Louisiana, she found herself at the forefront of a movement that quickly became a global sensation.
Since its publication in 1990, Who’s Your Mama, Are You Catholic, and Can You Make a Roux? has been a top-selling cookbook. More than that, it has served as an evergreen document of a people and a place. And with the release of a sumptuous new edition of the classic in November of last year, it’s clear that the recipes and stories contained within it have only grown more valuable and more vibrant over time.
I sat down with her at her home on Bayou Teche in St. Martinville to learn about the new edition of the cookbook, and before all was said and done, she knew who my parents were, what connections we had in common, and, most importantly of all, how my mama makes a roux. Maybe she’s onto something after all.
New edition of the classic cookbook
JT: In addition to being a cookbook author, you’ve written about food, and about the history of food, and I’m sure that along the way you’ve met chefs from all over the world. What’s special about St. Martin Parish when it comes to food?
MB: Well, you know, I never meant to be in any kind of food-related business, and when I look back I always think of Daddy cooking. He was the Boy Scout leader, so he cooked a lot outside on a wood fire, and when we were in Catahoula, or Cypremort Point, or even in our backyard, he didn’t have medium heat or low heat or whatever. He would have to move the pot to control the temperature. And I was totally amazed that he would take such time to do that.
I was named after Daddy, and they called me the big spoiled brat, because I went everywhere with him. I mean, he used to take me out of school to go get the money out of the newspaper bins, and we’d stop and talk to anybody that had one of those newspaper bins. We went all over. And I never thought that our food was any different. I thought everybody had gumbo. I started thinking about it when I went to work in Washington, D.C. in the summer of ’64 as an intern. After about two weeks I called my mama, and I said, “I don’t think this is going to work.” She said, “What’s the matter?” I said, “Well, they don’t have any gumbo here.”
So she told us to call Senator Ellender and Congressman Willis, and I did, and they said, “If you need something, let us know.” Well, I was living—there was about eight of us, I guess, but two girls—and we were staying at a little house behind the Supreme Court building. And we asked the lady if we could use her kitchen on Sundays—she didn’t use the kitchen on Sundays—she said, “Sure, but you have to clean up.” Well, we started cooking all kinds of gumbos and rice and gravy, and all that, and on Fridays they would have a luncheon and a program for all the interns. So we were at one, we were waiting for the bus, and this limo pulled up and it was this guy, and he said, “Are y’all the people from St. Martinville that cook?” I said, “Yes sir.” It was Hubert Humphrey. He had gone to LSU. He said, “Well, can I send somebody to get me a plate on Sundays?” And that’s why I realized that everybody does not eat gumbo.
Photo spread featured in the new edition
We never said we’re eating Cajun food, or we’re eating Creole food. We ate it because it was good. So I never made that distinction until people started talking about that. Mama was a good cook, just a different kind. She came from a farming family, sugar cane farmers, and I learned how to can stuff. And then Daddy’s family lived in town—Daddy was one of twelve, as you may know—and the stoves never got cold. That was when the men would go home for lunch, so there was always food in that house. Mrs. Lezaire Bienvenu was this little tiny person, and she had a helper, and they would just cook all the time.
We had different influxes of people of this area, so there was a French-Indian trading post, then the Acadians came, then during the French revolution the French came, and about the same time the French revolution was going on, it was also the Haitian Revolution, so we have the different types of people that settled here. You have to understand, I’m sure you realize this, there’s a lot of people with their fingers in the pot. The Germans contributed a lot. The Italians. The Indians are the ones who taught us about crawfish.
I remember going with Daddy somewhere, and he said, “We’re going to go see Mr. Higginbotham.” And I’d never heard of that name before. And Daddy said, “Well, he’s German.” I said, “Why does he speak French?” And I think that the French kind of dominated it all. The Germans gave us things like boudin, and it became like a little melting pot here in this area. So we had so many diverse people contributing to our cuisine.
When Paul Prudhomme came along, I said, “I never knew we were eating Cajun food!” Nobody said that. When we went to New Orleans, and we had food in New Orleans, nobody said, “Ooh, this is Creole food.” We knew it was more adventuresome than what we had at home. But it was Ella Brennan, when I went to work at Commanders. She’s the one that said, “You know, Marcelle, you should write more about your food and your family, because nobody knows that part of Louisiana, South Louisiana.” So it really made me start thinking about what we eat, and why.
View of Bayou Teche from the screened-in porch
JT: New Orleans casts such a big shadow over Louisiana, but there are other sides of Louisiana!
MB: When Paul Prudhomme came along—I was at Commanders when Brennan’s hired Paul—and I went, hmm. At the time, this was in the early 70s, you could not find a chicken and sausage gumbo in New Orleans. You could find seafood gumbo, seafood okra gumbo, but no chicken and sausage. And I told myself one day, I said, “I don’t know what y’all doing with poor Paul.” I said, “He’s gonna cook Cajun food.” I said, “You know, we cook our gumbo with chicken on the bone.” And she said, “Oh yeah, well, we’re gonna have to take it off of the bone for people when they come eat here. We can’t have them struggling with bones.”
So anyway, she and Paul really made a great marriage of introducing Cajun stuff and combining it with New Orleans food. But we all have to remember too, that Paul Prudhomme was very, very creative. When he came to Commanders before they hired him, they said, “Fix us something.” So he made, it looked like a little pirogue. Then he filled it with fried shrimp and fried oysters. Then he had a béarnaise sauce flavored with tasso. I had never had that at my house, and I said, “I don’t think anybody knows what tasso is.” So, you know, it was interesting to see that he used all our local products, but he just became something new.
JT: He was creative.
MB: Very creative. I mean, when he started bringing his little paper bags of seasoning, I went, “Oh, I hope he’s not going to kill everybody!” Because he had these paper bags, and you know, blackened redfish and all that. Mama said, “It’s burnt!” But, you know, he had an incredibly creative mind and he used everything that we had in this area and just did it differently.
JT: And where was he from?
MB: From near Opelousas. Then when Emeril (Lagasse) came, I had just left Commanders when they hired Emeril. And we made friends. He and my husband loved each other. He would come here on weekends, and we’d go roaming around eating boudin. He started calling what he did “New New Orleans” food. Shrimp remoulade is one of my favorite New Orleans food. Well, it’s always served chilled on a bed of lettuce. No, he served it hot with pasta. And people thought it was fabulous. So, you know, as long as the food is good, I think people are very open to it. And suddenly, everybody wanted to know, where is South Louisiana and what are they eating? So he brought a lot of attention to our state.
Photo spread featured in the new edition
JT: I think it’s easy to forget how recent the spotlight has been on the cuisine of this area, because it wasn’t that long ago that nobody knew about it.
MB: No, you couldn’t get crawfish in New Orleans in the 70s. There was a little place, you know where the lakefront is, where all the old restaurants used to be? We would cross over and there was a little place that’s on the levee and it’s called R&O’s. I think you could get boiled crawfish there in the 70s, but nobody would do crawfish.
JT: You had to look for it.
MB: Yeah. I’ll never forget one time, Mama and I went to Jazz Fest. Okay, so we went, and they were selling some t-shirts that said, Pinch Me, Eat Me, Suck Me. My mama said, “What are they talking about it?” I said, “Mama they’re talking about eating crawfish!” When we were little we’d go eat crawfish in Henderson, and then we had to sit in the back room, and there was a curtain, because the regular customers, if they saw us they would think we were crazy pinching, eating and sucking . . .
JT: You were curtained off from the rest of the restaurant so that people couldn’t see you eating crawfish?
Marcelle Bienvenu at her home in St. Martinville
MB: Yeah! When the oil people started coming from, Texas and Oklahoma, they would eat out in the main area and we would have these little rooms behind the curtains.
JT: There was a sense of shame about it.
MB: Yeah and you know, for a long time, people made fun of Cajuns, because we talked funny. It was interesting when I was teaching at Nicholls in the Culinary Department, we did a class called “Stirring the Pot” and we went through how the Italians came in, what they influenced here, the Germans, the Native American Indians, the enslaved population, the English. Do you know what the English gave us? Bread pudding. They’re the ones that introduced bread pudding to us. That’s about it. So it is interesting, but I think that the French is the core value of those foods.
I was working at Oak Alley one Friday, I was doing menus, and one of the little girls, she said, “Oh, Miss Marcelle, we always have fried catfish and white beans and rice,'“ and I thought, “White beans and rice with your fried, catfish?” I said, “We don’t do that in St. Martin.” She said, “What do y’all eat with fried catfish?” I said, “Potato salad.” So there’s still pockets that eat different things. It’s just what you grew up with. Like gumbo. Who makes the best gumbo? Your mama, or your grandma, because that’s what you grew up with. So to me, there’s no rules. As long as you think it tastes good, it’s all right with me. But I’m a purist. I don’t want seafood in my chicken and sausage gumbo and no chicken in my seafood gumbo. What did your mama and daddy fix when you were little?
JT: Shrimp stew, okra gumbo, fish courtbouillon, couche-couche.
MB: And I guess you grew up when the ladies were making all those pies.
JT: Pies, yes, sweet dough pies—we called them tartes. Blackberry tartes. Tarte à la bouillie. And my mom still makes all those dishes today from scratch. All of those old dishes . . . You know, it’s funny, when you look at videos on TikTok or whatever today, and a lot of people have this idea that cooking is just throwing ingredients together and, voilà. There’s no sense of any technique.
MB: Well, that’s what I used to tell my students. Do not ask your grandmother or somebody for a recipe. I want you to go to their house and be with them in the kitchen, because you’ll see what they do. And it’s not that they don’t want to tell you why, it’s just so natural for them. You know, after Katrina—I worked at the Picayune for 33 years—they called and said, we have to get together when we finally got back to New Orleans. We’re going to have to do something about these people that lost their cookbooks and their recipes. So my food editor at the time was Judy Walker. She said, “Well, we’re going to have an exchange alley. This is what we’re going to do. If you lost your recipe for stuffed eggplant, but over here, this lady, she has the recipe. Her house didn’t get flooded.” So that’s when they said we have to do a book. And it was a community effort.
You have no idea how many people that didn’t lose anything brought stuff to the newspaper office. You want me to help you look for such and such a recipe? Plus, the librarian showed us how to use a search engine, especially for the Times-Picayune because it was not on the computer. But it was in the files. So I would have to look up Oysters Rockefeller. You put that in, and about ten recipes would come through. And then we had to decide which one is the best. But what we found when we were doing that, that people who were rebuilding would rather have their kitchen before their bathroom. They wanted that comfort. They wanted to have something that was normal to them. I mean, if Katrina would have happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma, I don’t think anybody cared if they lost some of their recipes. I mean, everybody was frantic.
JT: Well, food has an outsized influence on every aspect of day-to-day life here, in a way that . . . I’ve lived in California, I’ve lived in Houston, Atlanta . . . and food is so integrated into everything here. Every event is based around food. What are we gonna be eating? Who’s bringing this?
MB: Right, I mean, you’re worried about tomorrow, you talk about what you ate last week, what you’re having next week. And, what I really do like, and I’d almost thought of doing a little book of it. I did a little study with my students one year on roux and how it was made, and the color. Mama used to say you have to make a little lighter roux if you’re making seafood gumbo. So I took some students from north Louisiana, from Baton Rouge, all over, and we found that the more west you went from Lafayette, the darker the roux. And I think that was German influence. They’re heavier foods, you know. But how do you make a roux?
JT: Oil and flour and stir, stir, stir.
MB: And you cook it slowly?
JT: Slowly. Yeah, probably half an hour.
MB: When we were little, mama would tell the whole house, “I’m going to make a roux!”
JT: She announced it.
MB: “Do not bother me!” And, you know, we could have died at her feet, and she would never look up. And I asked Edna one day, I said, “Edna, Mama takes a long time to make a roux.” She says, “Well, she has two old-fashioneds, and she sips them.” And nobody bothered her for half an hour, forty-five minutes.
JT: That was her bliss!
MB: Life is good. But I used to see Paul Prudhomme get his oil hot and throw the flour in it. And I’d go, “Oh, shit.” But it worked for him.
JT: Everybody has their own taste.
Photo spread featured in the new edition
MB: Somebody called the other day and said, “Do you use jar roux?” I said, yeah, “I’ll use it.” I think there’s a place for it. I have a niece who lives in California. She and her husband got married and they lived in Hawaii. So she called me one day and she says, “Nanny Celle, I’m having trouble making a roux.” I said, “Why are you making a roux in Hawaii?” She said, “Well, the people that live next door heard we’re from Louisiana.” I said, “What kind of pan are you using to make your roux?” She said, “A wok.” I went, “No, no, we don’t make a roux in a wok!” I said, “Do you have a microwave?” She said, “No.” I said, “I’m going to send you some jar roux.” She said, “Nanny Celle, that’s cheating!” And I said, “Trust me, it’s going to be fine.” And she said, “Can you put . . .” What do vegetarians eat?
JT: Tofu?
MB: She said, “Can you put tofu in a gumbo?” I said, “No!”
JT: Hard no. You have to draw a line somewhere.
MB: Not everybody can cook.
JT: Yeah, for a lot of people jar roux is a friend.
MB: Hey, whatever. I have no problem with that.
JT: You mentioned earlier that you kind of accidentally ended up in food, which you have devoted your life to.
MB: Yeah, I met Ella Brennan when we were working on the Time-Life cookbook and I don’t know how I did this, but I was working at the Picayune—this was in the 60s, and I actually went back in the 80s—and she and I got to be friends, and she called me one day. She said, “Why don’t you come work at Commanders?” I was working at UNO at the time. So I said, “Ella, I don’t want to work for a restaurant. If it were at night only, or on weekends and holidays.” She said, “Honey, I would never make you do that.” She lied! But I became really infatuated with the history of food once I saw how New Orleans felt about their food and comparing it to what we have here.
Living room of Marcelle Bienvenu’s guest house
JT: And you grew up in a newspaper family, so that was obviously a part of what set you on your journey.
MB: All of us worked at the paper. When I was ten, I was folding papers. And Daddy used to do a lot of job printing, you know wedding invitations, football programs, all that kind of stuff, so we learned how to perforate, how to fold, how to flip. We did it all. All of us worked there, and Daddy was a big raconteur. I mean he comes from the philosophy, Do not let the truth get in the way of a good story. And in fact, after Henri Clay died, I remembered writing about something, and he told me, “Marcelle that’s not how it happened.” And I said, “That’s how it happened to me. Maybe it looked differently to you.” I would never have thought I would end it up in journalism either, so it’s been very curious for me to see how that happened in my life.
JT: Who’s your Mama? first came out in 1990, that’s over thirty years ago . . .
MB: The Independent is the one that said, “Oh, let’s do a little book. We’ll take some of your columns from the Picayune, and we’ll just put it out. And it kept selling and selling. It had five revisions. The first one looked like a photo album. It was so big.
JT: That was the brown one with the photo on the cover?
MB: Yes, then there was a blue cover, then there was a green spiral bound edition. Certainly I’ve not made a lot of money. Mama used to say, “But it keeps her in cigarettes and scotch.” And Jeff, our governor, years ago he says, “You know, Nanny Celle, you’re the most famous poor person I know.” So when I was approached to redo that book, I had never thought to do that. But as long as Amazon has been around, I’m always ranked in the top ten of that kind of book, Cajun cooking or Louisiana cuisine, so it kept selling. And when this lady said, “Why don’t we do it in color?” I thought, “Okay, but it’s gonna be the same book.” She said, “But we’re gonna have color photographs.”
JT: And is the content, except for the photographs, pretty close to the original?
MB: All the stories and all the recipes are in there, and we use a lot of the black and whites from the old one.
JT: I imagine it was an opportunity for you to revisit the original book.
MB: At first we were hesitant, because that was written in the late 80s, but we decided to leave it as it was. We only had three problems with recipes that no one ever called me on. The recipe for leg of lamb called for ten pounds of spinach. It was supposed to be one pound. But maybe nobody ever cooked it.
JT: Thirty years can be a long time, just in the way that the culture moves, so it seems like these are timeless recipes.
MB: Yes, and I had students from Nichols help prepare a lot of the food, because I was curious to see what they thought of it. I was very pleased because everything looked good and tasted good. We never had to really change anything.
JT: Your photographer took a lot of photographs, so all these dishes had to be prepared. That’s a lot of cooking.
MB: We cooked so much. We did a lot of photographs here, but we also did some in Thibodaux at a friend’s house. And man, when we were cooking, the first set of pictures were taken here. It was in January and we were supposed to be cooking “Spring” you know, so we had to make it look like it was spring, eating crawfish. It was on Martin Luther King and everybody was here, and we were trying to clean up when it turned cold, and when we went to pick up everything out of the yard, when we went to get the tablecloth, it had frozen on the table!
JT: And I bet you had a good time eating too.
MB: Well, the photographer who did this book, he’s from New Orleans. He said, “You know, I’ve done a lot of work with people.” He does a lot of culinary work, kitchen stuff. He said, “Y’all were so organized and so ready to go. Y’all were never late.” He said, “Y’all never even screamed if an egg fell on the floor.” He said, “Marcelle, I don’t need you to go do all kind of makeup and all that. Just be who you are.” So it was really kind of fun.
JT: That’s another thing about culture in this area. I feel like people like to get things done. If they meet a roadblock, they figure it out. They problem solve. They just get it done.
MB: Yes, it was really incidental how it all happened. Susan Schadt and her husband, the publishers, they used to live in Nashville, then they moved to New Orleans, and she published that king cake book, and she had also done some books for the McIlhenneys. Her neighbor in New Orleans is this guy who owns Rienzi Plantation in Thibodaux. And he wanted me to do a book called Bienvenu, which I think I’ll still do. And it’ll be twelve people that have touched my life, and a menu to honor them. And he told Susan, “I think I know who she is. She wrote a book called Who’s Your Mama?” She said, “Yeah.” He said, “Well, why don’t you just republish it in color.” And that’s how that happened. I would have never thought to do that. When she came and said it’s gonna be a pink book, I thought, “Pink?”
JT: It’s eye-catching.
MB: Look, the retailers, the bookstores, the gift shops, they love pink.
JT: And Emeril wrote the foreword to the new edition.
MB: Yeah, I worked with him for fifteen years. I’ve been lucky. I worked for the Brennans, Paul, Emeril. I’ve been very lucky. Happened to be standing in the right place at the right time.
JT: You put in a lot of work, too!
MB: Yeah, yeah.
Photo spread featured in the new edition
JT: You mentioned a couple of projects, the Bienvenu book, maybe the roux book.
MB: I’ve been thinking a lot about that. People who have touched my life. Of course, my family. But, you know, Ella Brennan certainly touched my life. I mean, she was the one, in 1984 . . . I had a restaurant. You knew I had a restaurant in Broussard?
JT: Yes.
MB: Well, it was 1984 when I had to close it up. It was the year of the World’s Fair, because I was housesitting a house for a friend of ours who was in Europe for the summer. And I said, “Well, I guess I better go see Ella. Maybe she has an idea for a job.” So when I went, she said, “Look, we’re going to call the Times-Picayune, and Leon Soniat, he had done two or three cookbooks, and he was also the food writer for the Picayune. He had just died. She said, “We’re going to call them and say that you can take his place.” And I said, “You tell them!” So at the interview with Mr. George Healy, he says, Mrs. Bienvenu, did you know a Blackie Bienvenu?” I said, “That’s my father.” He said, “I was with him on the roof of Mr. Andre’s house during the flood of ’27.” I said, “I know we have a picture of that.” He said, “So, what do you want to do?” And I was hired. You see, I was lucky there. God has given me a lot of good things.
JT: I want to thank you so much for your time. I know people will enjoy hearing your stories. And I want to ask you one last question. What is that dish for you that takes you back to being a kid? What can you make today that’s going to take you right back to that time?
MB: A bouillabaisse or a courtbouillon. Daddy would say, “Go ask mama if she wants a courtbouillon or a bouillabaisse.” Okay. Mama always wanted the bouillabaisse, but I wanted the courtbouillon. In fact there’s a picture in the book, when he’d layer all the stuff for the bouillabaisse, he would put a note that would say, “Do NOT open the lid!” And in fact, we did that for this book. And every time I’ve done it, they say, Marcelle, you cook that for an hour? But it’s on a low, low heat. Tu parle francais?
JT: Un peu.
MB: Okay. So what do you think bouillabaisse means?
JT: Boil. Low.
MB: You break the boil and then stop. So once you get all these layers of everything, you bring it to a gentle boil, and you reduce the heat to simmer and put a cover on, and in one hour, that’s the best stuff you’ll ever put to your mouth.
JT: And that’s the patience and the technique that builds the flavor. There’s no substitute.
MB: A courtbouillon recipe that daddy had printed said it was for five people. And I said, “Well, why do you think he was cooking for five people?” And part of it said, “If you add two people, add a little bit more roux.” And he used to make me do this. He said, “After you put your tomatoes in, you have to let it simmer. And when it starts to make a paper on top, aha, that’s when you want to add either your fish stock or your shrimp stock or water or whatever.” But you have to that paper thin on top. And I used to think, what the f*** is he talking about? But I do it!
JT: Do you make your courtbouillon with goo or with catfish?
MB: Both!
JT: There’s a divide there. My grandmother taught my mom, and she made it with goo, but she said that there’s a moment when your tomato and roux mixture, and your vegetables, starts to change. It starts to release the oil, you have to wait and look, and then when that happens, it gives you the sign to go on to the next step.
MB: You see that? And you might not know that if you just read a recipe.