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(Photos by Denny Culbert)
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You’re Invited to Mosquito Supper Club
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Melissa M. Martin’s Mosquito Supper Club restaurant in New Orleans operates like a dinner party at a best friend’s house—she pulls biscuits out of the oven as guests arrive, and everyone sits together and helps each other plate their jambalaya and white beans. And while she’s paused this soulful format for the moment, her new cookbook, Mosquito Supper Club: Cajun Recipes from a Disappearing Bayou, steps in to serve as a lyrical ode to the friendship, food, and Louisiana waterways that have formed Martin’s life and philosophy.
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“Look up Chauvin, where I grew up, on Google Maps,” Martin says. “And see just how surrounded by water it is.” No wonder, then, that so much delicious seafood fills this book, including entire chapters devoted to crab, oysters, crawfish, and shrimp (try this shrimp jambalaya). The women in Martin’s life play a significant role in the cookbook, too: The Southeastern Louisiana culinary legend Alzina Toups inspired a recipe for “pillowcase cookies,” simple treats that fishermen have long carried onto their boats. And Martin’s mother shares tips as well, such as adding butter to cooking stock to make shrimp easier to peel, and cooked many of the final recipes and delivered food in Tupperware containers to the photo shoots. (Denny Culbert’s resulting images are beautiful and evocative, down to the dusting of sugar on plump blackberries.)
Martin doesn’t romanticize Louisiana in the cookbook, though—she frets over the vanishing landscape and connected-to-each-other way of life, and hopes readers come away from Mosquito Supper Club with a respect for natural resources and each other. “Pause for a moment and think about each person—the farmer, the fisherman—and the work that they do that goes into a basic dish,” she says. So consider the potato farmer, and then make Martin’s buttery sweet potato biscuits. They might transport you to Louisiana, or they might just make you happy to be home. —CJ Lotz
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Recipes from Mosquito Supper Club
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| | Here’s to Mom (and Grandmom)
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