Category: Food and Cooking

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Lou LaRose: Chef at Work

I’ve always enjoyed cooking and helping my mom or grandmom in the kitchen, whether it was making fried chicken or chocolate chip cookies or even tater tots. You’re still cooking. I got a job at the original Poet’s when I was really young, and it kind of went from there. I worked there for a couple of years and moved up quickly. It was pretty tough on somebody as young as I was; it was a bar scene. Obviously I felt there was more appeal to things other than washing dishes. I started bussing tables after washing dishes, then found out I was pretty good with a knife; I picked a knife up and started hacking on chicken, prepping it, trimming it, doing shrimp, and I got pretty fast at it, so that’s how I moved up into prep. I waited tables for a while, cooked, bar backed, did a little bit of everything. While I was at Poet’s, I worked at Sam’s Westside, which is where Broad Street is now. And then I worked at Mick & Mott’s, which used to be Jackson Bar & Grill, now La Cazuela’s. Then I went to work at Bravo!.

When I first started cooking, I didn’t realize you could buy knives out of a catalog, I didn’t realize there were “chefs”. I mean, I did, because I remember watching “Yan Can Cook” as a kid on television and loving that dude because he was awesome. I also watched “The Galloping Gourmet”. While I was working, I was learning. When I was at Poet’s, I didn’t know you had culinary schools and real knives, so I started to learn and pick up on it and began thinking I should learn what I could at one place and then move on to another. So I progressed through the restaurants around here and ended up at Bravo!.

I started out as a hot line cook my first night there and soon picked up a lot of shifts because I was always the guy who wanted to work more. I was always one of those guys out there working. I worked at Brick Oven for a while, because a guy I worked with at Bravo! worked there as well, and he told me they were short-handed and needed some help. I picked up a few morning shifts at Brick Oven while working nights at Bravo!. I didn’t work at Brick Oven too long because I wanted to devote myself more to Bravo!. I really enjoyed working in the Bravo! kitchen; its well-run, well-organized, and I got to learn a lot of things that I’d never had my hands on before, whether it was making pizzas or baking bread. I started doing things such as that right off the bat. After about the first year I was there, I was making the breads three mornings a week. It was when I went to work at Bravo! that I began to think my career path was leading to the restaurant business.

After a couple of years, I started looking at the culinary schools. I chose Johnson & Wales in North Miami. I knew I had to go to a place to work and earn income because I couldn’t go on full scholarship, I couldn’t go with all the money in the world, and I was going to have to get loans. I went through an advanced-standing program, which let me test in and get on with recommendations for having prior experience. By this point, which was 1997, I’d worked for five or six years in kitchens, so I was able to CLEP-out of the lesser classes, since they had a program for people with industry experience. This advanced program only required me to be there about a year and a half, but it was still a full culinary degree. I went every day, early morning to mid-afternoon, and then went to work at night. I worked at some really good places there. I worked at Mark’s Las Olas for Mark Militello, who was one of the bigger-named chefs in that area when I was there.

I’m a native to Jackson. I grew up here; my dad’s been a realtor here for almost forty years. I grew up on Whitworth Street, and have lived on Belhaven, Manship and Poplar Streets. I love the Belhaven neighborhood, the old houses, the feel of it, and it’s one of the most storied neighborhoods around as well. There’s a lot of appeal to that. I chose Jackson for my restaurant because there are simply more people here who would decide to go out to eat than there would be in a more remote location such as Madison, Ridgeland or Flowood. It’s a tougher sell outside of Jackson. For one thing, you don’t get the draw from outside people in Madison or other places that you do here in the city. Not as many people go out, and you just get your local crowd, but from what I’ve seen people from those areas are more inclined to come into Jackson to eat and then go back home.

When we first came in to this location, we liked the space and we liked the way it looked at night. I really liked the old black-and-white checkerboard floors, which are still here. We kept the ceiling grid, cleaned it and repainted it. I came in and had an idea about what I wanted, how I wanted it laid out, talked to my architects about it, and we ended up gutting the whole place, took it down to four walls. The only wall that was left standing was a four-foot section that had the electrical panels on it. Everything else is brand new.

I really didn’t put a lot of thought into the menu before we opened. I wrote a menu a long time ago and just sat on it. I had a couple of different ideas for what I wanted to do, and depending on the spot I got, I was going to do a different concept. If I’d gotten the place in Madison I was looking at, it would have been completely different. You don’t want to open up something too similar to something else; I wouldn’t open up a wood-fired kitchen here with my buddy Alex Eaton at The Manship up the street, even though I worked with the pizza oven at Bravo! and worked with one at Brick Oven. I wanted to incorporate that somewhere, but it would have been at a whole different end of the culinary spectrum: less of the Creole/French/American that I’m partial to as well, and more to the Mediterranean/Spanish/Italian. That may be one day or not, you never know. I’m content right here with this one place, trying to keep the doors open, keeping the business going and building a good name and reputation as these other chefs and restauranteurs are doing.

The dynamics of restaurants in big cities change a lot more than it does in Jackson, but I like it better here because a lot of restaurants have been around for a long time, which is my interest. You know, in a lot of these cities you have restaurants that change what they do and open up for a couple of years, then they’re happy closing down and opening up another restaurant. But I look at restaurants like Bravo! and Walker’s that have been around for twenty years or longer, and that’s where I want to be. Obviously you progress with the times and you change so you stay relevant. If you can. I don’t want to be one of those restaurants that are open for five or six years and then closes down and does something different. That’s really not what I want to do. The industry is a marathon, not a sprint. The work itself is a double marathon, but it is what it is. I want Lou’s Full-Serv in Belhaven to be relevant for more than a just few years. At the end of the day, what matters is treating customers right and putting a good, well-seasoned plate in front of them that they enjoy and want to come back for. That’s really as simple as it is.

 

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Holidays in Old Calhoun

My mother Monette Morgan Young was born in 1915 on a small farm east of the village of Reid in the northeast part of Calhoun County on the old road to Houlka. She was the daughter of Hosea Morgan and Eula Murphree Morgan, and was an only child. The lack of siblings and nearby neighbor children made her childhood lonelier than most. Her mother was a teacher for many of Monette’s early years, moving around from one one-room community school to another and lodging with someone in that community during the short school term each year. She took Monette with her while Hosea stayed home to take care of the farm. When schools were not in session, all three worked hard to raise enough food and “bring in” a small cotton crop to sell for their cash needs.

Monette was a reader and a writer; she loved poetry and history. In her later years, Monette began to write of her growing-up days and her life on that farm. Like many people as they grow older, she became interested in family history and began a decades-long period of formal research and the gathering of family stories from surviving aunts, cousins and others who had lived in Reid. Her cousin Clarence Morgan was a great source of family and community information; and she and he made many trips, some with grandkids along, to old cemeteries and old communities barely recognizable by then with the changes of time.

 In the early 1980s she began sending me long letters—some she typed but most were handwritten in a hurried scrawl—letters with information she had gathered about not only our family but also about other families who lived in that area and her memories of them and her life there. As I saved her letters, I began to realize that if the material was organized, edited a bit, fleshed out with a map or two, and if I took the various bits of information about, for example, the Clark family or the community social life, and put those together and did likewise with other topics, this might make an interesting memoir as well as a useful genealogical and historical resource. I did that. It took months in those pre-computer days, but it began to come together. I finished typing it and decided I’d have a few copies made for me and my children and would give her a few copies on her 75th birthday. I called it “The Cherry Hill – Poplar Springs – Reid Community in Calhoun County, Mississippi”. She was delighted, but said several times, “If I had known you were going to do this, I’d have written this or that, or would have not said that, or would have added the story about….” I told her to consider it a draft and to add or subtract whatever she wanted, and I’d revise the book accordingly. She did, and I did. After Mother died in 2000, I created a second edition of the book, adding the additional material and cleaning up some typos and some errors that had been pointed out. Over 100 copies of that second edition were subsequently made and a digital version is available on the internet for free download.

Holidays
(an excerpt from The Cherry Hill – Poplar Springs – Reid Community in Calhoun County, Mississippi, by Monette Morgan Young

We did not do lavish Christmas cooking, not in our circle of acquaintances and kin, nor did we do lavish Thanksgiving cooking. We usually had fresh pork both times and often our meat would be a huge pot of backbones. If the hog killing had been in the last day or two before the holiday, we had the most prized meat of all, the loin strip. Our men did not make pork chops of any cut of hog. That long lean strip was taken out without bone and how I looked forward to it. I hated any boiled meat. Mother and all her acquaintances and kin only boiled or fried meat. One reason for that is that they did not know of roasting procedures and second that it would have required oven cooking and use of much stovewood. They could boil a piece or pieces of meat in the black iron cooking pot on the coals on the hearth by the fire which was already going for warmth. Mother would make good dressing with that water and we always had small Bermuda onions growing in the garden all winter. These grew in clusters and did not decay as the large ones did and were not hot. Mother did not have to buy sage. She grew it, dried it in a slow oven and so we had sage and onions for dressing and since I always contended for fried meat, she fried something for me. We sometimes did have a hen boiled but since I wouldn’t eat boiled meat, she had to do the frying for me and I ate dressing with that.

Usually Thanksgiving Day was just another day. Daddy was sometimes up to his ears in corn gathering and we cooked a little better dinner. Some meat as I have described, maybe a molasses cake with the dried apple filling and frosting, one or two or three of the many vegetables in storage, canned or dried, the usual dish of pickles, preserves, canned berries, or peaches, on the table. Christmas would be the same with the exception of a coconut cake. Mother always cooked a large luscious coconut cake. She used only her simple two-egg recipe for the batter (2 eggs, ¾ cup milk, 1-1/3 cup sugar, 1/3 cup fat, 2 cups flour, 3 teaspoons baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon salt), but we always got a fresh coconut and she filled and covered the cake lavishly with frosting and coconut. Then she always had Daddy to buy the cone-shaped frosted jellied candies, assorted colors. She topped the cake with those and it looked like tiny frost-covered shapes of color in a snow bank. That was her specialty. I never saw or read of a fruit cake. With all our folks, just ordinary cakes were made. A little more lavish perhaps, was a Christmas cake, or was called so.

We often saw no one but ourselves on Christmas Day. The weather would have been too bad to venture forth. My parents had bought a little fruit and a few nuts. Oranges still always smell like Christmas. We had them no other time unless someone was really sick. Those little home-grown apples smelling like all the aromas of Araby would still be crisp and we would allow ourselves a few more of those unwrapping them from the Sears Roebuck catalog pages that were used to protect them and out of their cardboard boxes from under the bed in the front room. We got a few raisins, the seeded ones still on stems, I never taste such now.

If we did not go to Mama Murphree’s on pretty Christmas days we would walk to Grandaddy Morgan’s. My parents occasionally bought a box of lemon stick candy. At Grandfather’s he would bring out his goodies. He may have sent to town for a bushel of shipped in apples, which then I preferred to our small homegrown ones, and he had oranges and several boxes of candy. He always bagged up a large paper bag for us to carry home. Uncle Alsie’s children made their home at Grandaddy’s and Grandmother’s. These were Euras, Theda, Roy and Lois. Lois was near my age, the youngest. So I would get to see the cousins there.

One favorite toy at Christmas time for parents and teachers to give children was a harmonica. At that time, all children were given gifts by teachers. A harmonica, which we called a French Harp, cost all of a nickel or a dime. A good sized professional one might cost a quarter. I invariably wanted one. Of course, I had not a musical bone in my body. I made noise on it, and that was all. Another gift that teachers most often gave was a “bought” toothbrush. Our toothbrushes were off the black gum bush or the black gum tree. They made a large tree, but the woods were full of the small ones and we got a good sized twig about as large as a small cedar pencil, peeled the bark down about an inch and a half and the whole thing was about six inches long. We chewed the peeled end into a mop shaped thing and brushed our teeth with that. We used ashes or baking soda. I recall that Daddy used ashes.

I had bountiful Christmases. I always got one special large gift and one or two small ones. Also there were the oranges and raisins which we did not get at other times, not often. There was candy too, then, but seldom at other times. My victory over my nice pretty things was a little hollow, with no one to show them to or to play with them with me. Some other children of the area did not get anything but the candy, nuts, and fruits. Christmas was a very quiet celebration then. The weather was usually bad and the roads almost impossible to travel on, so family get-togethers were never planned. We almost always got to both my grandparents during the Christmas week. At “Mama” Murphree’s sometimes we got to see other cousins, sometimes not. At the Morgan grandparents, my four cousins who made their home there were always at home and I enjoyed them. Friends and relatives did not exchange gifts. We had no church programs. We didn’t try to plan for such due to not knowing what the weather might do. Mother tried to see that I had a good Christmas. When she was a child, they had had usually nothing except a little candy and one time nothing at all. One Christmas there was a bisque doll with curls for me and one time there was a big sleeping doll and a cloth body–perhaps a paper mache head with painted-on reddish blonde hair. That day it rained all day. We never got outside.

When I was about four, Tellie Murff and Winnie Davis gave me some lovely Christmas gifts. I think Tellie gave me a beautiful ball and some of the best of candy. Winnie gave me a box of blocks, some of which were painted to form the facade of an antebellum house. They were still in the house when all of the things had to be sold and/or given away when Daddy got sick. Some winter Sundays we couldn’t go to church. We’d have Sunday school at home. My Father was well read in the Bible. He was on speaking terms with the old Bible Patriarchs. We three would read and discuss the lesson while pork backbones simmered in the kitchen, they for our Sunday dinner, and while sweet potatoes baked and while perhaps dried peas or butterbeans cooked.

Monette Morgan Young
Monette Morgan Young