MAR_APR_2014_FINAL_3-15-16

Little Italy by Chef Carl Schaubhut, Executive Chef, Café Adelaide, New Orleans

M y grandmother, Anne Calato Maffei, grew up in Little Italy, Louisiana. She was was a college graduate from Southeastern University in Hammond in the late 1940s. She majored in Home Economics, and started her own sewing business in the 1970s. She worked for premier designers in New Orleans, and some of her creations were even featured in Architectural Digest magazine. As proud as she was of what she did for a living, she was even more proud of her cooking. Her living room was for show, but her kitchen was for visiting. My grandmother taught me to love anchovies. I am an anchovy freak. I can’t get enough. Her food, Sicilian food, is much more what people would know as “Mediterranean” food. It has resemblances to Southern French coastal cooking, and I love the way Sicilians use anchovies, olives, capers, sardines, squid, and, of course, beautiful tomatoes. They don’t use as much cheese, cream, butter or truffles like you find in Northern Italian cuisine. My grandmother and her friends would spend weeks preparing elaborate St. Joseph’s Day altars or feasts.They would play cards while their Italian cookies, cakes, and breads baked in the oven.  They were competitive with the card games, but they were even more competitive with the baking, cooking, and decorating for the altars. Everyone wanted their altar to be the best.  My wife says that this is where I get my competitive nature. I haven’t been to an altar since my grandmother

Chef Carl Schaubhut, Executive Chef, Café Adelaide, New Orleans — photo by Frank Aymami

passed away. But last year when I saw one at Rouses, I thought, Abbastanza! Enough! Its time to create my own. This will be the first altar at Café Adelaide, and I’m building it in honor of my grandmother. Fig cookies, which were always a family production at my grandmother’s house, will be on it, and Rouses bakers are baking our bread, which they twist into the familiar St. Joseph’s Day

shapes. I will also feature my grandmother’s cookbook, which she wrote for our family, Catholic memorabilia that was special to her, and family photos, including a very embarrassing picture of myself, at 12, playing a Saint in the St. Joseph’s Day pageant. In addition to preparing the altar at Café Adelaide, I’m making a special St. Joseph’s Day tasting menu for the restaurant, and I will be cooking alongside Rouses’ chefs for the altar that Rouses is preparing at their Baronne Street store in downtown New Orleans. I will be bringing my grandmother’s recipes — and a deck of cards. INDEPENDENCE In the 1890s Italian emigrants who arrived in Louisiana at the Port of New Orleans were immediately attracted to the developing strawberry industry in Tangipahoa Parish. Many southern Italians (mainly from Sicily) began to purchase land, and raise their families there.  By 1910, the Italian population was the majority in Independence, Louisiana, “Our farmer partners in Tangipahoa Parish plant entire fields of strawberries exclusively for Rouses.” —Joe – Rouses Produce Director

24

MY ROUSES EVERYDAY MARCH | APRIL 2014