In Katrina’s wake, New Orleans builds an appetite for cookbooks

There is one post-Katrina loss I kick myself for not thinking of: the fact that thousands of family recipes are gone forever. —Stacey Ornstein, The Paper Palate

In the long months after Hurricane Katrina, book donations have poured into New Orleans. Charity used-book sales have helped to match people who lost books with titles from the hundreds of thousands of donations, and proceeds have helped to fund collection acquisitions for the region’s soggy library stacks.

Combine the loss of books with that of priceless home recipe collections and it becomes easy to understand why “the most popular books that [people are] replacing are cookbooks,” according to The Times-Picayune. Combine that local interest with the national fascination for just about anything New Orleans, and it’s also easy to understand why suddenly there’s a host of new and revived New Orleans cookbooks on bookstore shelves. Among the highlights are the following, also from the Picayune:

• Who’s Your Mama, Are You Catholic, and Can You Make a Roux?, by Marcelle Bienvenu
• Creole Cookery, by The Christian Women’s Exchange
• Louis Evans’ Creole Cookbook, by Louis Evans
• Red Beans and Ricely Yours, by Mona Lisa Saloy
• Recipes from Mulate’s: The Original Cajun Restaurant, by Monique Boutte Christina
• Stir the Pot: The History of Cajun Cuisine, by Marcelle Bienvenu, Carl. A. Brasseaux, and Ryan A. Brasseaux

This also seems like a good moment to plug the potential to donate specific titles to New Orleans libraries through the Alibris Donate-A-Book program, where several regional libraries maintain their own lists of hoped-for titles (including a good number of cookbooks). Books purchased through the Web site are shipped directly to the libraries that have requested them.