Mosquito Supper Club

Mosquito Supper Club: Cajun Recipes from a Disappearing Bayou- Melissa M. Martin 
Artisan
Release Date: April 14, 2020


Rating:
📚📚📚📚📚

Synopsis: For anyone who loves Cajun food or is interested in American cooking or wants to discover a distinct and engaging new female voice—or just wants to make the very best duck gumbo, shrimp jambalaya, she-crab soup, crawfish étouffée, smothered chicken, fried okra, oyster bisque, and sweet potato pie—comes Mosquito Supper Club.
 
Named after her restaurant in New Orleans, chef Melissa M. Martin’s 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 field’s worth of land to the Gulf of Mexico. Too soon, Martin’s 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 ingredient—from 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 we’ve 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.

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Every hour, Louisiana loses a football field's worth of land to the Gold of Mexico.  Soon, the people and culture of South Louisiana, where chef Melissa Martin was born and raised, will disappear.  In Mosquito Supper Club (named after Martin's restaurant in New Orleans) Martin combines traditional Cajun recipes with explanations of ingredients and the traditions behind them.

This book was a delight from start to finish.  A combination of gorgeous photographs, easy to understand recipes, and stories of the people and traditions behind the food, "Mosquito Supper Club" takes 'cookbook' to a whole new level.  From how to properly clean a crab to shucking oysters, from dancing the shrimp to the story behind gumbo, readers will learn the truth behind the Cajun traditional way of life. Melissa Martin gives readers unfamiliar with the land, culture, and people of South Louisiana a perfect introduction to her home and the ways it has both changed and stayed the same over the generations.  She encourages you- as a reader and a cook- to think about your ingredients and where they come from, to question the impact they have on the farmers, and fishermen.  As a novice cook, I greatly appreciated how her recipes sounded like she was standing right there, talking to me about what to look for in a pot- from the color of the onion to the texture of a dough, these descriptions took the guess work out of what to look for and how to tell when something was ready.  As a native of New Orleans, I greatly appreciated her discussions of the impact humans have had on the environment and how that has changed the resources and culture people experience today.  Anyone who glances as just one photograph in this book will be drawn to discover more, and before you know it you'll be both reading and cooking while enjoying a whole new world.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review