Philadelphia Weekly

Sara Roahen's book about New Orleans food doubles as a spiritual journey.

Sara Roahen was four chapters into writing her just-published book--Gumbo Tales, an exploration into the culinary wonders of New Orleans--when Katrina hit her adopted city.

"I'd been writing the book as a thank you to New Orleans for giving me so much," says Roahen, who now lives in Center City. (Her husband is studying to be a doctor here.) "But then the storm hit, and suddenly it all took on a much greater meaning."

Gumbo Tales grew out of Roahen's four and a half years as the restaurant critic at New Orleans' alternative newspaper Gambit Weekly. (She'd also previously worked as a line cook.) Her book focuses on the fertile gastronomic traditions of New Orleans with specific chapters dedicated to such specialties as gumbo, po-boys, crawfish, red beans and rice and far lesser-known fare.

"Food idolatry is not a post-Katrina phenomenon," writes Roahen. "It blankets New Orleans, from the novelty T-shirts festooned with crawfish pinching ass, to the shrimp playing the accordion on the menu at Pascal's Manale, to the $3,500 Keishi pearl 'Gumbo necklace' ornamented with 14-karat gold shrimp, crabs and okra at Mignon Faget, a jewelry store that is to Magazine Street what Harry Winston is to Rodeo Drive."

But what makes Gumbo Tales more than just another food or restaurant guide is the personal passages, including stories about the author's Wisconsin upbringing, her New Orleans friends and the city's many iconic personalities, and in the margins, the intimate and near existential relationship she developed with New Orleans and its denizens.

Still, it's the insights into the city's culinary traditions from which Gumbo Tales is built.

On learning to cook Louisiana fare: "By eating in New Orleans, continually asking questions about eating in New Orleans, obsessively reading about eating in New Orleans, and writing a weekly column about eating in New Orleans, I had created a comfortable world in which it looked and felt as though I were really doing it--really becoming one of them, a New Orleanian. But my rusty cast-iron skillet told a difficult truth. I was like those expats who eat France out of Camembert and croissants but continue to read Sartre in English. In Louisiana, cooking is a foreign language."

On gumbo: "If I've become partial to any single gumbo style, it's the lusty, oily, everything-but-the-sink sort that's ladled out at black-owned restaurants, often only on Fridays."

On the po-boys at Liuzza's by the Track: "It's a sandwich that changes your life ... Its shrimp seem infinite, and its tart, peppery gravy thickens over time as it soaks into the bread. At a minimum, this po-boy alters your priorities."

On crawfish: "Crawfish shape the New Orleans metro area's landscape in more static, even decorative ways. The 20-plus crawfish preparations on parade at Jazz Fest--crawfish pasta, crawfish etouffee, crawfish sausage, crawfish bread, crawfish beignets and so on--cast doubt that the second annual intersection between the music festival and crawfish season is coincidence. While festival grounds crew excel at controlling what could be a garbage catastrophe, by the end of the second weekend trampled crawfish exoskeletons texturize the Fair Ground's topography like white quartz in a Florida mobile home park."

Roahan was in New York when Katrina hit, and was forced to watch the devastation on television.

"We only learned our house hadn't been flooded because a reporter friend from the Times Picayune drove down our block and reported that it was okay," she says. "The reporters were doing double duty--reporting on the story for the paper, and telling people who had evacuated what had happened to their homes. They were nothing short of heroic."

When Roahen finally returned to New Orleans, she was staggered by the sights.

"I still can't express what I felt very well," she says, unsettled by the memory. "All the words fall short. I have these moments still when things rush at me--these flashes, they're like bright lights, of what I saw."

Though Roahen hopes to someday return to live in New Orleans--she and her husband still own their home in the city's Uptown section--she's learning to love Philadelphia in the meantime.

"Philly is like New Orleans in ways," she says. "Things are old, and like New Orleans there are things to discover on every street."

For a time after Katrina, Roahen was emotionally unable to cook Louisiana fare. "But now I'm making things again," she says, "like gumbo for the neighbors. Their appreciation for the food reminds me how lucky I was to have lived and eaten there."