New Orleans School of Cooking

I was delighted when visiting my brother last week to find that he had stumbled on the recipes that we had been given on our New Orleans cookery course all those years ago, so it can now be revealed that the venue that I had feared lost to memory and posterity was the New Orleans School of Cooking & Louisiana General Store. We rusted up a jambalaya (replacing the unavailable andouille* with chorizo) to celebrate.

The website says, "our Creole/Cajun experts teach New Orleans specialities such as Gumbo, Jambalaya and Pralines, and season them with history, trivia and tall tales", and that is just what I remember so fondly.

John found the handout in his copy of "River Road Recipes", the textbook of Louisiana recipes prepared by the Junior League of Baton Rouge.

I remember our instructor recommending that sort of work over the more conventional cookery book as he reasoned that, for example, Mrs Augustine Renaud Foster III would not contribute her recipe for squirel stew to a collection that was also going to feature the down home favourites of her peers unless she had confidence in it. And that instructions assembled by a food technologist to be published under the imprimatuer of a celebrity chef couldn't compare.

* Louisiana-style andouille is not to be confused with the French version.