ABSTRACT
In one of the first scenes of HBO’s Treme, David Simon’s series about post-Katrina New Orleans, Chef Janette Desautel, in the midst of lamenting the ongoing shortages of food supplies and staff, exclaims, “How bad can it be? It’s oyster season!” The next scene set in her fictional restaurant, Desautel, shows a packed dining room and kitchen workers fraught because they’re running out of food. Continuing characters Toni and Creighton Bernette, having dined well on Janette’s New Orleans-fusion cuisine, require dessert. Though she’s sold out of everything on her dessert menu, Chef puts together a lemon ice for Toni and dresses up a Hubig Pie for Creighton. At the end of the evening, Janette has fed them well; their souls are restored and spirits high. They have, after all, consumed New Orleans fare, including a traditional hand pie produced in a landmark factory, one of the first businesses to come back after the levee failure. In short, this early episode of the series makes clear that the city’s foodways, from locally produced oysters served in high-end restaurants to mass-produced snacks, play a germinal role in its restoration. As Treme continually emphasizes, consumption signals New Orleans’ resilience and rebirth.
After filming the first season, executive producer Nina Kostroff Noble told HBO that in addition to the highly marketable soundtrack, their team would also produce a cookbook. Noble asked New Orleans native and Treme story editor, Lolis Eric Elie, to write the cookbook. Elie, an established food writer, agreed. Far from an ordinary cookbook, Treme: Stories and Recipes from the Heart of New Orleans, weaves together recipes with narratives written in the many voices of the characters featured in the series. Each section, introduced by the characters, contains recipes from famous New Orleans chefs and home cooks, some of the narrator’s story, a good deal of their personality and perspective, and a brief history lesson about NOLA food. The narratives and recipes represent the mélange that is New Orleans; each speaker, whether a new resident from another state or country, or descended from Louisiana slaves or slave owners, embraces the city’s culture and cuisine, and the histories that produced both. And each adds his or her own history and traditions to the mix, which means that local recipes stand beside those from around the world, Holland, Vietnam, Mexico. The flavors of France and Africa, the foundations under Creole and Cajun cookery, provide a strong influence throughout.
This chapter examines Treme: Stories and Recipes from the Heart of New Orleans from the perspective of consumption, resilience, and power. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s theories concerning the ways in which power circulates, I will trace its moves through these narratives and recipes, and they ways in which they reflect social power structures, subvert or employ them, and how the book, in its totality, works to bring back to life the city it figuratively consumes. As Creighton Burnett notes in both series and book, restoration sometimes can be found in a good bowl of soup.
