Dear Friends Tout de Sweet - All about Sugar, our most ambitious exhibit yet, opens June 1, 2005 at the Riverwalk in New Orleans. Many interesting programs are being scheduled during 2005 to celebrate the sweet stuff, including web exhibits for those of you who cannot travel in person to New Orleans. Get the scoop on Tout de Sweet. We'd like to thank everyone who made the March opening of the Toast of New Orleans exhibit such a grand success. We're especially grateful to the wonderful folks at the Louisiana State Museum Old U.S. Mint, who are housing the exhibit, our sponsors, and the Friends of the Cabildo, who hosted the opening reception. The exhibit opened to great fanfare and has subsequently received considerable national media attention thanks to our friends at Beuerman Miller Fitzgerald. We will continue adding these stories to the press section of the website. If you missed the exhibit, it wll be at the Mint for the next year. Hours of operation are posted on the SOFAB website.
| Coming Soon: Wine & Cheese Pairings |  |  A friend of SOFAB has arranged a mouthwatering series of wine and cheese pairings during the New Orleans Wine and Food Experience this May that will benefit The Museum while giving you a chance to taste interesting new cheeses paired with wine. The dates are: - May 24 at Martin Wine Cellar on Veterans Hwy
- May 25 at the Columns Hotel on St. Charles Ave.
- May 26 at the Country Club in the Bywater
More details, including ticket information, will appear in our next newsletter. If you have questions, please email us at info@southernfood.org. |
| Menu Collection on Display | | Our archival partner, the Earl K. Long Library at the University of New Orleans, has included several of the menus from our Menu Project in a Special Collections exhibit now on display at the library. The exhibit can be found on the 4th floor of the library. It will be open:
Monday-Thursday: 7:45 am - 11 pm
Friday: 7:45 am - 8 pm
Saturday: 10 am - 6 pm
Sunday: Noon - 8 pm
For more information about the exhibit go to www.uno.edu.
The Menu Project is growing by leaps and bounds. Menus are coming in from all over the South. We have also received some interesting vintage menus, which will add depth to the collection. Thanks to all of you for sending menus to us. Remember that this project is ongoing. It is never too late to send a menu, and we cannot have too many. Our goal to maintain a collection of every restaurant in the South is ambitious, but not impossible. With your help, we can make it happen. |
| A Recent Acquisition | | The St. Michael's Special School has chosen the archive of the Southern Food and Beverage Museum at the University of New Orleans to house a complete set of the souvenir cookbooks that have commemorated each celebration of the Chef's Charity for Children founded by the late Warren LeRuth. Each year locally and nationally acclaimed chefs contribute recipes for the cookbook and demonstrate the preparation of dishes that they have contributed for the benefit of St. Michael's Special School. Regular participants include Emeril Lagasse, John Folse, and Frank Brightsen. The 2005 event hosted Mario Batali. We are pleased that we have been chosen to maintain this collection, which represents a very special part of the culinary history of the south. We look forward to adding other ephemera from the Chef's Charity for Children to the collection. |
| Other News | | On April 20, 2005 "You Are WHERE You Eat" Stories and Recipes from the Crescent City will open at the Crescent City Farmers' Market at the French Market - Governor Nicholls at the River. The Exhibit can be viewed on April 20 from 10 am to 2 pm. It will travel throughout the New Orleans area. For more information, email elsa.hahne@earthlink.net. |
| Send Us Your News and Stories | | Please continue to send us your news, tidbits and stories so we can share them in the newsletter. While we are interested in hearing from everyone, we especially need reports and contributions from outside New Orleans. You can email us at info@southernfood.org.
We're also interested in getting the word out to more people. If you support what we're doing, please pass our newsletter on to your friends and ask them to sign up for a FREE subscription. |
| A Food Memoir | | By Katherine Doss
I stopped by the local wine cellar to pick out a potpourri of hors d'oeuvres and a nice bottle of red wine. My friend had called earlier from aisle nine of the Save-A-Center to invite me and several others to a dinner party at her house. She was inspired to cook a new dish and wanted to play host to willing critics - an opportunity I could not refuse. Eating habits, among the ordinary activities that we engage in as matter of daily course, have shifted. The tradition of eating three square meals a day has given way to eating on the run or while doing something more important. The notion of savoring good food, much less the even more humanizing and important function of creating community by sharing a meal, seems relegated to a past era. Memories of dinner parties with friends and cohorts, feasts prepared by professional chefs, or just simple picnics enjoyed in the outdoors delight. Plopping in front of the television with food in my lap, eating at my desk to maximize work output, or digesting fast food while en route, be damned. I opt to approach my consumption of food as a meal. As an act of discipline, I find it helpful to engage in ritualistic actions to prepare food and eat. Setting the table, having fresh flowers nearby, and designing the presentations tell my systems, conscious and unconscious, that I am eating a meal and enhance my appreciation of "the event". Upon arrival, I found six women gathered around the table in her small graduate student apartment. When seated in my chair I surveyed the room to conduct a visual inventory of all meal-related props. Flowers on the table, check. Candles placed around the room, check. Forks on the left and knives on the right, check. The local jazz music station on the radio reaching us faintly from the other room, check. Albeit we looked like a scene from an Oprah special, huddled around the table, increasingly rosy-cheeked and full of conversation, ours was the satisfaction of having enjoyed one another's company over a meal. Grand dinner parties such as this are not part of my nightly routine nor could I incorporate them into my otherwise busy schedule. In seeking other creative ways to enjoy food, I find eating with others and observing little rituals helps make my eating experience a genuine meal. Katherine Doss has lived throughout the South. She now lives in New Orleans and works at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. |
|
