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 Saving New Orleans Culture, One Sandwich at a Time 
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Location: Friendswood, TX
Post Saving New Orleans Culture, One Sandwich at a Time
If you have never tasted a true, authenic N'Awlan's po boy - I pity you! Ain't nothing better in the whole wide world than a good ole roast beef po boy - fully dressed. Well, except for a fried oyster one. No wait! Fried shrimp one - uh huh - that's it! No wait...
:crylaugh

THIS month, New Orleans is having a party for the po’ boy.

At the New Orleans Po-Boy Preservation Festival on Nov. 22, as brass bands play and celebrators hoist drinks, serious-minded panelists will tell tales of long-lost po’ boy shops. They will speak of the import of this city’s signature sandwich, piled with roast beef and gravy or corn-flour-breaded and fried shrimp, slathered with mayonnaise, paved with sliced pickles and sliced tomatoes, strewn with shredded lettuce, wrapped in butcher paper. My mouth is watering!

Cooks, from restaurants as varied as Emeril’s and Jack Dempsey’s, will fry, stuff, dress and wrap for what is expected to be an overflow crowd.

And in what organizers are calling a French Bread Fight, a combatant portraying Jared Fogle, the calorie-conscious Subway pitchman, will square off against a combatant representing John Gendusa, the baker who, in 1929, fashioned the first modern New Orleans-style, French bread loaf, the base on which po’ boys have since been built.

If all goes the way it’s planned, as fragments of crust fly and a partisan crowd shouts, Mr. Gendusa will beat Mr. Fogle with a loaf of stale bread.

Such sturm and staging is good fun, but the sobering thought is this: If a sandwich needs a street festival, for which press coverage has been curried and stale bread weaponized, then that sandwich might be imperiled.

Po’ boy preservationists recognize a range of culprits, inside and outside the city limits.

A creeping monoculture is the most frequently cited threat, exemplified by chains like Subway and Quiznos, which are making inroads south of I-10. :gah

Katherine Whann, who, along with her brother Sandy Whann, operates Leidenheimer Baking Company, the city’s dominant baker of po’ boy bread, frames the struggle in practical as well as cultural terms.

“Most po’ boy shops don’t have off-street parking,” she said, from a perch at Hermes Bar in the French Quarter, as she bit into an oysters Foch po’ boy, stuffed with fried oysters, smeared with pâté. “They don’t have advertising budgets. They don’t have Jared. But what they do have is a history in this place.”
:clap
A problem that’s more difficult — possibly reflecting a drop in expectations set by fast-food purveyors — is that the quality of some po’ boy shops has declined.

Of course, many still hew to tough standards.

The uptown stalwart Domilise’s Po-Boys, in business more than 75 years, cranks out textbook roast beef po’ boys and fried oyster po’ boys, cooking each batch of bivalves to order, and piling all on Leidenheimer bread, delivered twice daily. :heart

At Zimmer’s Seafood, a working-class market established in 1980 in the city’s Gentilly neighborhood, the proprietor Charleen Zimmer buys Louisiana shrimp from her cousin. (Her husband, Craig Zimmer, works a shrimp boat, too.)

When a customer orders a fried shrimp po’ boy, she reaches first into a bin of iced shrimp, then for a coating of corn flour. And her bread could not be fresher, for Mrs. Zimmer buys sesame-seeded loaves from her neighbor, John Gendusa Bakery.

But a recent tour of old-guard makers found that some paradigmatic players, like Mother’s, a tourist favorite in the central business district, are not aging well. :shock:

In suburban Metairie, Radosta Grocery, a beloved checkered-cloth joint, still cooks top rounds for roast beef po’ boys. But Don Radosta, an owner, said slicing lettuce for sandwiches is now too laborious. Instead, he buys shredded iceberg, delivered in plastic-wrapped bundles. And he’s not alone. :nono

Preservationists rail against the lowering of standards. In response, they’re setting standards of their own and, perhaps, kindling a renaissance.

Benjamin Wicks, proprietor of Mahony’s Po-Boy Shop on Magazine Street, open since the summer of 2008, is a raver and ranter with the heart of an old-timer. He makes money selling soft-shell crab po’ boys but also offers po’ boys made with liver cheese, a cold-cut analogue to liverwurst, to signal his respect for the sandwich’s Depression-era roots. :clap

At the close of a recent lunch, Mr. Wicks, 32, a veteran of white tablecloth New Orleans restaurants like Rio Mar, sat at the back of his cottage restaurant, boasting of fried shrimp po’ boys made with Louisiana shrimp and Creole tomatoes, and of grilled shrimp po’ boys, shingled with fried green tomatoes and slicked with rémoulade sauce. :awe

He talked of how to glaze a ham with a slurry made from root beer extract so that the resulting hunk of protein tastes of both sassafras and pig. And he spoke of his reliance on the downy crumb and parchment crust of bread from Leidenheimer.

But he said far too many of the po’ boy makers in his hometown are complacent, even lazy. He questioned the culinary patriotism of competitors who use powdered and bagged mixes for their roast beef gravy. :rant

He revealed that his gravy owes its consistency to the use of a hand blender, with which he churns bits of beef chuck and vegetables into a purée. (That gravy reaches its true potential when Mr. Wicks builds a French fry po’ boy, stacking hand-cut fries like cordwood inside a length of dressed loaf, before ladling on the beef.) :tounge

With a sense of incredulity that played just shy of cocky, Mr. Wicks asked rhetorical questions about everything from frying shrimp to dressing sandwiches, as in: “How hard is it to keep a deep-fryer clean and full of peanut oil?” And, “How can people put tomatoes on their po’ boys that taste like they came from McDonald’s?” And, “Why don’t people care about making great po’ boys?” :dunno

When he opened, Mr. Wicks joined a cadre of neo-traditionalist makers whose ranks included, among others, Jacques Leonardi of Crabby Jack’s, a restaurant-cum-roadhouse on Jefferson Highway, open since 2002, famous for roasted duck po’ boys.

Also in the mix were Wanda and Skip Walker, who earned their reputation beginning in 2001 at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, with roasted pork and coleslaw po’ boys. (At Walker’s Southern Style Bar-B-Que, a hutch by the Lake Pontchartrain levee, the Walkers now sell their smoked and pulled pork, tucked into a French-Vietnamese pistolette roll from the nearby Dong Phuong Oriental Bakery.) :yamon

And then, in late 2003, Jay Nix reopened Parkway Bakery & Tavern, a 1912 vintage bar and sandwich shop in Mid-City, where he served straightforward roast beef po’ boys, crafted with an attention to detail and ingredients that tasted somehow transcendent. (He later moved on to curiosities like surf-and-turf po’ boys of roast beef and fried shrimp, gobbed in roast beef gravy.)

Back in the summer of 2004, Katherine and Sandy Whann of Leidenheimer’s attempted to forge a coalition of neo-traditionalists and quality-focused old-guard po’ boy makers, a cadre with the common goal of elevating the “status of the po’ boy sandwich in and around New Orleans as a delicious and nutritious cultural treasure.”

The Whanns called meetings. They conceived a New Orleans Po-Boy Preservation Society. They talked of a festival. They spoke of co-op marketing.

They talked of proving that po’ boys were healthier than fast food. (Recently, Leidenheimer financed a nutritional analysis that Katherine Whann said found that a gravy-dressed roast beef po’ boy, on Leidenheimer bread, with mustard, lettuce, tomato and pickles, has fewer calories from fat and less saturated fat than a comparable tuna sandwich from Subway.) :banana

The hope had always been that future generations of New Orleanians would reject — on economic, cultural and gastronomic grounds — fast-food simulacra of their totemic sandwich.

“I know, for a bread baker, it seems an act of self-preservation,” said Katherine Whann. “But it’s also about pride in place.”

Then came the levee failures and the flooding that followed Hurricane Katrina. Bakeries and po’ boy shops struggled mightily to get back in business. By 2007, the Oak Street Association had taken up the Po-Boy Preservation Festival idea. In November of that year, they staged the first one, in the Carrollton neighborhood of New Orleans.

Crowds thronged the streets. Leidenheimer threw in support. Momentum continued to build. And so did the emotional tempo, leading — as shots follow beers in a French Quarter dive bar — to plans for the forthcoming French Bread Fight. :popcorn

Revivalists, in church or on Broadway, know the need for an unexpurgated text revealing new truths. That’s where Michael Mizell-Nelson, a University of New Orleans historian, came in.

Researching a violent 1929 streetcar strike, during which 1,100 members of the Amalgamated Association of Electric Street Railway Employees walked off their jobs, Dr. Mizell-Nelson confirmed how the sandwiches acquired their name and their form.

Similar sandwiches existed before the strike, Dr. Mizell-Nelson learned. And the term “poor boy” was already in use, applied to, among other groups, orphaned children.

But in 1929 a sandwich called the poor boy was something new. Fashioned to be wider, to accommodate generous and equitable slices from a loaf, the bread was first baked by John Gendusa at the request of the New Orleans restaurateurs Bennie and Clovis Martin. (Today, Jason Gendusa, great-grandson of the founder, still works the ovens at John Gendusa Bakery, playing a feisty David to the Goliath that is Leidenheimer.)

The Martins were onetime streetcar workers who, at the height of the strike, pledged to feed their former colleagues at their sandwich and coffee stand. “Whenever we saw one of the striking men coming,” Bennie Martin later recalled, “one of us would say, ‘Here comes another poor boy.’ ” :lol

Over time, by way of various elisions, both vernacular and purposeful, po’ boy or po-boy became the widely accepted renderings of poor boy. In the process, as vowels and consonants were swallowed, the roots of the sandwich were, too.

“I can’t imagine there’s another American food item that owes its birth to labor violence,” Dr. Mizell-Nelson said. “That’s the forgotten story.” :clap

Dr. Mizell-Nelson believes in the power of public history. He believes that if people know their history, they’re likely to be better stewards of their present.

But if the Po-Boy Preservation Festival fails to compel New Orleanians to take action to preserve their legacy, he’s willing to take other steps.

Radicalized by his study of the strike, Dr. Mizell-Nelson envisions “civil disobedience bread actions” wherein po’ boy devotees target chain restaurants, “arm customers with loaves” and demand they serve their sandwiches on po’ boy bread, with its velvet interior, its crepitant exterior, its only-in-New-Orleans back story. :yamon

A tack like that may not be a typical professor’s path to tenure. But it might win the French Bread Fight. :crylaugh

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/11/dining/11unit.html?_r=1&em

_________________
The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little. - FDR


Wed Nov 11, 2009 12:34 pm
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