Filled with dozens of sumptuous and straightforward soup, gumbo, and bisque recipes from New Orleans's finest chefs, caterers, and restaurants, this collection was created with the home cook in mind. Each entry incorporates an anecdote or fond memory from the contributor.

Perfect for gatherings for NFL games, Mardi Gras, Jazz Fest, and more, this gorgeous cookbook offers more than forty festive recipes from famous New Orleans restaurants, along with photographs, history, musings, and stories. These classic Crescent City celebration recipes are knockouts for the eye and the taste buds.

"It makes perfect sense that the Big Easy, with its knack for nostalgia as well as its passion for living in the moment and savoring it, would be the home of so many decadent after-dinner celebrations. In this gorgeously photographed gift book, Kit Wohl has compiled a collection of classic desserts celebrating the city's renowned sweet tooth, complete with straightforward recipes for creating easy elegance"--Publisher website (May 2007).

Illustrations and text on lining papers.

Mix up a cocktail New Orleans-style. From highfalutin to down home, from Sazeracs to mint juleps, this gorgeous cocktail cookbook offers more than sixty recipes from famous New Orleans establishments and mixologists, along with photographs, history, and narratives. These Crescent City cocktails are easy on the eyes and the taste buds and can be paired with recipes from the New Orleans Classics Series.

Here for the first time the famous food of Louisiana is presented in a cookbook written by a great creative chef who is himself world-famous. The extraordinary Cajun and Creole cooking of South Louisiana has roots going back over two hundred years, and today it is the one really vital, growing regional cuisine in America. No one is more responsible than Paul Prudhomme for preserving and expanding the Louisiana tradition, which he inherited from his own Cajun background. Chef Prudhomme's incredibly good food has brought people from all over America and the world to his restaurant, K-Paul's Louisiana Kitchen, in New Orleans. To set down his recipes for home cooks, however, he did not work in the restaurant. In a small test kitchen, equipped with a home-size stove and utensils normal for a home kitchen, he retested every recipe two and three times to get exactly the results he wanted. Logical though this is, it was an unprecedented way for a chef to write a cookbook. But Paul Prudhomme started cooking in his mother's kitchen when he was a youngster. To him, the difference between home and restaurant procedures is obvious and had to be taken into account. So here, in explicit detail, are recipes for the great traditional dishes--gumbos and jambalayas, Shrimp Creole, Turtle Soup, Cajun "Popcorn," Crawfish Etouffee, Pecan Pie, and dozens more--each refined by the skill and genius of Chef Prudhomme so that they are at once authentic and modern in their methods. Chef Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen is also full of surprises, for he is unique in the way he has enlarged the repertoire of Cajun and Creole food, creating new dishes and variations within the old traditions. Seafood Stuffed Zucchini with Seafood Cream Sauce, Panted Chicken and Fettucini, Veal and Oyster Crepes, Artichoke Prudhomme--these and many others are newly conceived recipes, but they could have been created only by a Louisiana cook. The most famous of Paul Prudhomme's original recipes is Blackened Redfish, a daringly simple dish of fiery Cajun flavor that is often singled out by food writers as an example of the best of new American regional cooking. For Louisianians and for cooks everywhere in the country, this is the most exciting cookbook to be published in many years.

Recalling childhood visits to her grandmother's house in New Orleans, where she would feast on shrimp and okra gumbo, Dale Curry offers fifty recipes--for gumbos, jambalayas, and those little something extras known as lagniappe--that will put Louisiana taste and hospitality on your table. "Gumbo" calls to mind the diverse culinary traditions of Louisiana that, like gumbo itself, are simmered from elements of the many cultures circulating in the state. Drawing historically from French, African, Caribbean, Native American, Spanish, Italian, and other culinary sources, the Creole and Cajun cooking featured in Gumbo embraces the best of local shellfish, sausages, poultry, and game. The heart of Louisiana home cooking--and now showcased by of chefs across the South and beyond--gumbo, jambalaya, and lagniappe traditionally drew from the state's waterways and estuaries rich with crustaceans, swamps exploding with waterfowl and alligators, and forests full of game. From the land came rice and peppers, two leading ingredients in gumbo and jambalaya. Recipes include classic and traditional dishes, as well as specialties offered by star chefs Bart Bell, Leah Chase, Emeril Lagasse, Donald Link, and Tory McPhail. With Curry's easy-to-follow instructions at hand, home cooks will be ready to let the good times roll at every meal.