Description

Hardcover

Named a Best New Cookbook of Spring 2020 byBon Apptit,Food & Wine, NPRsThe Splendid Table, Eater, Epicurious, and more

Martin shares the history, traditions, and customs surrounding Cajun cuisine and offers a tantalizing slew of classic dishes.
Publishers Weekly, starred review

For anyone who loves Cajun food or is interested in American cooking or wants to discover a distinct and engaging new female voiceor just wants to make the very best duck gumbo, shrimp jambalaya, she-crab soup, crawfish touffe, smothered chicken, fried okra, oyster bisque, and sweet potato piecomesMosquito Supper Club.

Named after her restaurant in New Orleans, chef Melissa M. Martins debut cookbook shares her inspired and reverent interpretations of the traditional Cajun recipes she grew up eating on the Louisiana bayou, with a generous helping of stories about her community and its cooking. Every hour, Louisiana loses a football fields worth of land to the Gulf of Mexico. Too soon, Martins hometown of Chauvin will be gone, along with the way of life it sustained. Before it disappears, Martin wants to document and share the recipes, ingredients, and customs of the Cajun people.

Illustrated throughout with dazzling color photographs of food and place, the book is divided into chapters by ingredientfrom shrimp and oysters to poultry, rice, and sugarcane. Each begins with an essay explaining the ingredient and its context, including traditions like putting up blackberries each February, shrimping every August, and the many ways to make an authentic Cajun gumbo. Martin is a gifted cook who brings a female perspective to a world weve only heard about from men. The stories she tells come straight from her own life, and yet in this age of climate change and erasure of local cultures, they feel universal, moving, and urgent.