Thursday, February 11, 2010

Aunt Mabel’s Table

New Orleanians don’t allow anyone to remain a stranger for long. In other cultures, it’s considered impolite to look at someone on an elevator. Here, whoever is first on the elevator becomes the elevator operator with, “What floor, Dawlin?” This person is just as likely to ask, “Who you goin’ see?”

It’s very common to be in line at the grocery store and have the person behind you inventory your basket and ask for your menu and the details of the function you’re planning. Many times the maw-maws at the registers will offer up recipes for you purchases, whether you ask for them or not.

If you’re not family when you arrive in the Big Easy, you’ll be family before you leave. Everybody is always looking to shrink the degrees of separation. They’ll find something that connects you to someone they’re connected to, if you stand next to them long enough.

I’m one of the lucky ones. I grew up in this area with an honest-to-God Cajun daddy. My summers were spent with my daddy’s mama and sister on the quiet bayou and on the plantation property of my mother’s sister’s family. There could hardly be two more opposite experiences of rural Louisiana living within a couple of hours of the pulsating rhythms of New Orleans.

I still have a sultry sister who’s a singer in the city and my daddy’s eighty-year-old baby sister on the bayou. Aunt Mabel and I are working on a book of her family’s Cajun cooking. She’s asking her kids and their kids to collect their memories, their photos, and their food interests into a memoir of their good times on the bayou.

Aunt Mabel, like her mama before her, has passed down family values with every spoonful of gumbo she’s fed the many who have eaten at her table. Uncle Roman presides at these meals, bringing up topics of interest to him, while Aunt Mabel monitors the conversations for their effects on the enjoyment of the time at the table. She allows very little talk that causes stress during the meal. These are topics to be taken up after dessert.

I, like Aunt Mabel, am concerned that, with so many mamas working outside of the home, the recipes for family meals and family living will be lost unless we make a concerted effort to preserve them. Has there ever been a better way to create strong family bonds than preparing a meal together, consuming the meal around a common table with civil discourse flowing, and cleaning together in the afterglow of the gift of good food made with loving hands and shared with loving hearts?
It may be old fashioned, but Aunt Mabel’s table is still the heart of her home.