Buttermilk Beignets + Chicory Crème Pâtissière

I remember New Orleans as if from a fever dream. I ran away from home at seventeen, all the way to Bourbon Street. I blamed it on an existential crisis. I still do. Well that and an unholy fear of a preordained life. I’d never set foot in Louisiana before that night, middle of the week, in my pale yellow shift dress, my school uniform. My high school textbooks were in the trunk. I smoked cigarettes and drove, untethered, unhinged, and free. I remember thinking I could feel the textbooks getting lighter and lighter, losing their very physical substance, the farther south I drove. I used maps, the paper kind. It was about midnight when I arrived, accidentally went over a toll bridge, spent my last dollar getting back over it, and parked illegally in the French Quarter. I wandered the streets in fake leather pants, ate my first oyster on the half shell, and naively accepted all sorts of charity. I drank like a high school girl who thought she was a woman. I read bad poetry (I thought it was good) with a homeless man. I thought I was living. I thought I was an immigrant. But I was a run away. And so happy. Because I didn’t understand a thing, and girls don’t possess the capacity for horror and anxiety that women do. It was one of the happiest times of my life. I went home a few weeks later because I didn’t want my mother to be sad. The day I left I ate an entire plate of beignets at Café Du Monde by myself, got a muffuletta from Central Grocery to go, and drove back north. That was my first time in New Orleans.

And after that all I wanted was to get back. Something I’d never found anywhere else seemed to live there. I felt at home. I didn’t fit in at the private girl’s school I went to growing up (no surprise), and I’d finally found a land where they spoke my own mad tongue. I ended up going to university there, at Loyola. The Jesuits, they’re good for studying philosophy with. So that’s what I did. I moved to New Orleans and studied philosophy, writing, and painting with the Jesuits. And learned to drink too much and how to wear perilously high heels and sit in a decrepit mansion with a a three-legged cat, how to live the novel I couldn’t write. I was still a girl and proud of everything that would ultimately become my life’s great failure. But that’s neither here nor there. I was fearless, did my nails on the streetcar on my way to work at dicey clubs. But it wasn’t all dark. I learned to eat there. Really eat. I fell in love with the food, and it’s where I learned to cook. I’d gotten a taste for it in Europe, and in New Orleans I found what I thought only existed across the Atlantic. It’s as close as you can get to Europe in the states, that’s what I’d always say.

I still think it’s the most marvelous city on earth. Tennessee is my blood home. And that means a lot. But New Orleans is my soul home. You don’t choose these things. They choose you. I don’t visit anymore. There are too many ghosts milling about, peering out the window above the ice cream parlor on Prytania, grilling eggplant in the Bywater. Too many ghosts. They’ll come a time when I’m ready, and I have a feeling it will be soon. But not just yet; I don’t know how to be who I am in that city. I only know how to be who I was: the girl shaking, blank faced and silently weeping & listening to Lou Reed croon Jesus, help me find my proper place; help me in my weakness because I’ve fallen out of grace as she drove, geeked out of her mind, from her secret-not-so-secret life in the Bywater back to her university existence in the Garden District. New Orleans’ great strength & great evil is that it can make the dark light. Those nights and days, those years, were punctuated by great bowls of red beans and rice, fried oyster po-boys from the corner of Magazine by my house, and my all-time favorites: a muffuletta from Central Grocery and chicory coffee & beignets from Café Du Monde. I’ve recreated that latter experience, best had at midnight, for you here in one bite: airy buttermilk beignets with chicory crème pâtissière and mountains of powdered sugar.

So if you’re like me and always a little broken hearted for New Orleans or if you’ve never been & want a taste: make these, listen to this, and watch this. Tom Waits, Jim Jarmusch, and these beignets will give you a fix. A little. I do, in fact, wish I was in New Orleans. And I actually see it in my dreams. Just the other night I dreamt I was walking across the Audubon green, my heart so light, thinking, “I’m home, I’m home. This is home.” It’s a recurring dream, that I’m back in New Orleans and finally at peace. I miss you, NOLA. So much it physically hurts. That’s the sort of city New Orleans is, one you can’t ever really leave.