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24
MY
ROUSES
EVERYDAY
MARCH | APRIL 2014
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
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,
Little Italy
by
Chef Carl Schaubhut,
Executive Chef, Café Adelaide, New Orleans
Chef Carl Schaubhut, Executive Chef, Café Adelaide, New Orleans — photo by
Frank Aymami
“Our farmer partners in Tangipahoa Parish plant
entire fields of strawberries exclusively for Rouses.”
—Joe – Rouses Produce Director