Palace Caf: The Flavor of New Orleans tells the story of a restaurant, a city, and the Brennan family. Featuring home-cook-friendly recipes, serving tips, and sample menus. The color food photography and stylish black-and-white photos of this nationally acclaimed French Quarter restaurant make this book a delight to both the eye and the palate.

“Far from being just a gimmicky marketing ploy, Treme . . . is an engaging representation of the cuisine of modern-day New Orleans . . . Fascinating.” —The Austin Chronicle Inspired by David Simon’s award-winning HBO series Treme, this celebration of the culinary spirit of post-Katrina New Orleans features recipes and tributes from the characters, real and fictional, who highlight the Crescent City’s rich foodways. From chef Janette Desautel’s own Crawfish Ravioli and LaDonna Batiste-Williams’s Smothered Turnip Soup to the city’s finest Sazerac, New Orleans’ cuisine is a mélange of influences from Creole to Vietnamese, at once new and old, genteel and down-home, and, in the words of Toni Bernette, “seasoned with delicious nostalgia.” As visually rich as the series itself, the book includes 100 heritage and contemporary recipes from the city’s heralded restaurants such as Upperline, Bayona, Restaurant August, and Herbsaint, plus original recipes from renowned chefs Eric Ripert, David Chang, and other Treme guest stars. For the six million who come to New Orleans each year for its food and music, this is the ultimate homage to the traditions that make it one of the world’s greatest cities. “Food, music, and New Orleans are all passions about which—it seems to me—all reasonable people of substance should be vocal . . . This book gives voice to the characters, real and imaginary, whose love and deep attachments to a great but deeply wounded city should be immediately understandable with one bite.” —Anthony Bourdain

In this culinary memoir, readers get a personal tour of the storied New Orleans restaurant with the woman who put it—and Creole cuisine—on the map. Meet Ella Brennan: mother, mentor, blunt-talking fireball, and matriarch of a New Orleans restaurant empire. Ella is famous for bringing national attention to Creole cuisine, and her unique vision is best summed up in her own words: "I don’t want a restaurant where a jazz band can’t come marching through." In this candid autobiography, Ella shares her life story from childhood in the Great Depression to opening acclaimed eateries. When the Brennans launched Commander’s Palace, it became the city’s most popular restaurant. Many of the city’s most famous chefs such as Paul Prudhomme, Emeril Lagasse, Troy McPhail, and many others, got their start there. Miss Ella of Commander’s Palace describes the drama, the disasters, and the abundance of love, sweat, and grit it takes to become the matriarch of New Orleans’ finest restaurant empire.

They Called Us River Rats: The Last Batture Settlement of New Orleans is the previously untold story of perhaps the oldest outsider settlement in America, an invisible community on the annually flooded shores of the Mississippi River. This community exists in the place between the normal high and low water line of the Mississippi River, a zone known in Louisiana as the batture. For the better part of two centuries, batture dwellers such as Macon Fry have raised shantyboats on stilts, built water-adapted homes, foraged, fished, and survived using the skills a river teaches. Until now the stories of this way of life have existed only in the memories of those who have lived here. Beginning in 2000, Fry set about recording the stories of all the old batture dwellers he could find: maritime workers, willow furniture makers, fishermen, artists, and river shrimpers. Along the way, Fry uncovered fascinating tales of fortune tellers, faith healers, and wild bird trappers who defiantly lived on the river. They Called Us River Rats also explores the troubled relationship between people inside the levees, the often-reviled batture folks, and the river itself. It traces the struggle between batture folks and city authorities, the commercial interests that claimed the river, and Louisiana’s most powerful politicians. These conflicts have ended in legal battles, displacement, incarceration, and even lynching. Today Fry is among the senior generation of “River Rats” living in a vestigial colony of twelve “camps” on New Orleans’s river batture, a fragment of a settlement that once stretched nearly six miles and numbered hundreds of homes. It is the last riparian settlement on the Lower Mississippi and a contrarian, independent life outside urban zoning, planning, and flood protection. This book is for everyone who ever felt the pull of the Mississippi River or saw its towering levees and wondered who could live on the other side.

Here for the first time the famous food of Louisiana is presented in a cookbook written by a great creative chef who is himself world-famous. The extraordinary Cajun and Creole cooking of South Louisiana has roots going back over two hundred years, and today it is the one really vital, growing regional cuisine in America. No one is more responsible than Paul Prudhomme for preserving and expanding the Louisiana tradition, which he inherited from his own Cajun background. Chef Prudhomme's incredibly good food has brought people from all over America and the world to his restaurant, K-Paul's Louisiana Kitchen, in New Orleans. To set down his recipes for home cooks, however, he did not work in the restaurant. In a small test kitchen, equipped with a home-size stove and utensils normal for a home kitchen, he retested every recipe two and three times to get exactly the results he wanted. Logical though this is, it was an unprecedented way for a chef to write a cookbook. But Paul Prudhomme started cooking in his mother's kitchen when he was a youngster. To him, the difference between home and restaurant procedures is obvious and had to be taken into account. So here, in explicit detail, are recipes for the great traditional dishes--gumbos and jambalayas, Shrimp Creole, Turtle Soup, Cajun "Popcorn," Crawfish Etouffee, Pecan Pie, and dozens more--each refined by the skill and genius of Chef Prudhomme so that they are at once authentic and modern in their methods. Chef Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen is also full of surprises, for he is unique in the way he has enlarged the repertoire of Cajun and Creole food, creating new dishes and variations within the old traditions. Seafood Stuffed Zucchini with Seafood Cream Sauce, Panted Chicken and Fettucini, Veal and Oyster Crepes, Artichoke Prudhomme--these and many others are newly conceived recipes, but they could have been created only by a Louisiana cook. The most famous of Paul Prudhomme's original recipes is Blackened Redfish, a daringly simple dish of fiery Cajun flavor that is often singled out by food writers as an example of the best of new American regional cooking. For Louisianians and for cooks everywhere in the country, this is the most exciting cookbook to be published in many years.

A collection of over 175 recipes for American regional dishes gathered from "Commander's Palace," a restaurant in New Orleans which specializes in Southern cuisine.

Originally published: New Orleans: R.L. Crager, 1961.

From the historic New Orleans restaurant, a cookery of time-tested Cajun and creole recipes from the fourth generation proprietor and chef. In the New Orleans French Quarter there is a dining room whose fine French cuisine attracts visitors from all over the world. It is Galatoire’s, a family-run restaurant in operation for more than nine decades. Leon Galatoire, a fourth-generation member of the founding family of Galatoire's Restaurant, knows that recipes designed for feeding large numbers of people will not work by reducing them proportionally. With this in mind, he has redesigned recipes for home use that retain the tastes he knows so well. Now, for the first time, the classic versions of dishes such as Shrimp Remoulade, Crawfish Etouffée, Stuffed Creole Tomato with Grilled Chicken, and Steak au Poivre can be prepared at home with ease. This cookbook serves as an anthem to traditional French menus in New Orleans. There are two hundred recipes in this gourmet collection, each one offering practical advice on preparation and complete lists of ingredients. These are time-tested favorites from the experience of master chef Leon Galatoire and represent the quintessential old-time standards for chefs and fine homes alike.

A renowned chef and physician shares her secrets to a healthy life in this cookbook filled with healthy recipes that will fuel and energize your body and mind. "I like to think of a spicebox as the cook's equivalent of a doctor's bag--containing the essential tools to use in the art of cooking. Learning to use spices is the best way to add interest and vibrancy to simple home cooking."—from the Introduction In her first cookbook, chef and physician Linda Shiue puts the phrase "let food be thy medicine" to the test. With 175 vegetarian and pescatarian recipes curated from her own kitchen, Dr. Shiue takes you on a journey of vibrant, fresh flavors through a range of spices from amchar masala to za'atar. With a comprehensive "Healthy Cooking 101" chapter, lists of the healthiest ingredients out there, and tips for prevention, Spicebox Kitchen is a culinary wellness trip you can take in your own kitchen.