By Katelyn Kenney, assisted by Barbara Kenney
My grandmother has shared bits and pieces of her life with me throughout my childhood, and most of what I have been told has revolved around her time spent with her grandmother in Breax Bridge, Louisiana. If you have ever heard of Breax Bridge, it is either because you live there, you know someone who lives there, or you really love crawfish—the city hosts an annual “world famous” crawfish festival and considers itself the crawfish capital of the world. Not surprisingly, my family comes from Cajun blood. It is the one shred of culture that my Caucasian self has clung to because the Irish part of my family hasn’t given me much to work with except my name. After many conversations with my grandmother, Barbara Kenney—also known as Nonnie—I have come to realize that learning about her own grandmother is a great place to start if I ever want a chance at preserving family history. Her married name was Victoria Castille, but her grandchildren knew her as “Mamit” (mah-MIT). As I listen to stories about Nonnie’s childhood, I cannot help but reflect on my own, and yes, I do recognize the cliché in that. But the ties in this family are strong, and a common thread seems to be the significance of food.
I lived with her quite a bit when I was little because my dad was in the service. My mother would have to put us some place to stay while she would go visit my dad. It was really special, because while I was there, it was like living in another world. It’s not that I’m that old, it’s just they were that backwards, which made it a lot of fun as a kid. She loved to cook, and eating was kind of a celebration for us, it always was. Whenever you got together, you got together with food; eating was a big deal, and when it was a big get-together, that’s when they would kill a pig and they would make cracklin’, and they would make boudin, and, of course, have big pots of gumbo going. She taught me cooking, which was my favorite because I was a kid, and I loved to eat.
My parents divorced when I was seven years old, and my dad was the parent to move out. For reasons I will not get into, my dad bounced between various apartment complexes and his parents’ house (Nonnie and my grandfather, Pop). That being said, I was fortunate enough to spend most of my childhood enjoying the luxury of seeing my grandparents on a weekly, sometimes daily, basis. Many summers were spent lounging around their house, and many conversations between the two of us were held in the kitchen. She has always been welcoming of friends that get brought over to their house, and she never hesitates to serve them a plate of whatever she has prepared at that moment. As for get-togethers, holidays are always hosted by Nonnie, and to use her own words, they are a big deal. I look forward to the colder months for the sole reason of knowing that carved turkey, mashed potatoes, and corn casserole at Thanksgiving, and a buffet-style sandwich spread with a variety of chips and dips at Christmas are waiting for me. Nonnie prepares most of the meals herself, beginning days in advance, and when I am able, I like to show up early under the guise of providing some help, but with the ulterior motive of learning a thing or two and maybe stealing a homemade dinner roll a little early.
Rice Dressing (Dirty Rice)
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Cajun food, not Creole food, but Cajun food was really the poor man’s food, and you cooked everything. You made something out of everything. Nothing went to waste. This rice dressing is actually similar to what boudin is. She would put me to work grinding the meat. This recipe makes four servings. They didn’t make anything small; everything you cooked, you cooked in big batches. Basically, if you had field hands, everybody came in at noon and ate. They ate their big meal at noontime, so she’d get up at the crack of dawn and start cooking. Everybody ate their big, hearty breakfast and go out in the fields and come back at noon and eat their big meal, and then at night they ate leftovers. |
I remember going to a crawfish boil, taking one bite of a potato, and thinking my mouth had just caught on fire. I have come a long way since then, and now the spices of Cajun food are something I pine after. It is fitting that I now wait tables at a restaurant that serves Cajun food (with a Tex-Mex twist), but nothing compares to a warm bowl of homemade gumbo or, my personal favorite, red beans and rice prepared by Nonnie herself. Even though I like the food my restaurant serves, the concept of franchised Cajun cuisine seems a little inauthentic. Not to mention the prices of our dishes make it hard to see it as “poor man’s food.” But Nonnie has given our gumbo her seal of approval, so I guess it is not all bad.
My Aunt Kathy is a big fan of Nonnie’s dirty rice. Well, I guess it’s not technically “Nonnie’s” because the recipe has been passed down for generations. When Nonnie was learning to cook on her own, she would write letters asking for recipes, and that is how she received the handwritten recipe for rice dressing, or dirty rice. Some years later, Nonnie was able to transcribed the recipe through a typewriter, and eventually through a computer. The three recipes now live in a binder full of old family recipes; a binder I hope to inherit someday. Among those three pieces of paper alone are decades of cooking, even probably even more beyond when the recipe was written down. I am pretty sure Nonnie does not grind all the meat for dirty rice anymore, but the fact that she is still preparing a dish that has been in her family and in her culture for so long is a testament to importance of a meal. Food can bridge the generational gap between a granddaughter and her grandmother and the cultural gap between a 20-year-old suburban white girl and her French-Cajun roots.
Growing up in her house was a real thrill because I remember fondly all the different smells that would come out of her kitchen because cooking was always going on, and I used to help. She’d go out and get a chicken and wring its neck, bring it in and dip it in hot water to get the feathers off, and I used to help her do that, too. So, if you wanted to fry chicken for supper, you had to go out and wring that chicken’s neck first. We ate duck, we ate rabbit because they raised all that. Everything in this cuisine, in this culture, is smothered. Rice and gravy. And then you have the fancy rice, the dirty rice, and you wouldn’t eat gravy with that.
Nonnie loves fried chicken. KFC is her chicken of choice when she’s not making it herself. But when she is, there’s a good chance you’ll see a few more relatives around the house. Nonnie’s fried chicken is like seeing a shooting star: it rarely happens, but when it does, it’s glorious. It’s double breaded with a little seasoning, then fried in a cast iron skillet she’s had for years. When it’s done, it resides in the drawer under the oven on a wire rack so the grease drips off. Hearing about neck wringing and boiling water is admittedly a bit of a turn-off, but it is reassuring to know that chicken was at least treated well by its owners while it was alive. This is one of those moments when the story of Mamit feels far removed from my own story. I would never consider killing anything myself in order to eat it, but that was the way of living in Breax Bridge. Nothing could stand in the way of a good meal for Mamit and her family. She was determined and brave while also being loving and generous, characteristics I can assume by the lengths to which she would go to provide food in her household. They raised, killed, and ate these animals by their own hands, and there is a sort of provincial charm and awe about that. I cannot say that I have ever done the same, nor will I probably ever be able to say that, but the take away at least for me Mamit’s tenacity and ferocity in meal-making. Actually, there is a lot I can take away from Mamit, and Nonnie, too. The more I hear about their relationship, the more I am recognizing the parallels with my own relationship to my grandmother, with food being the heart of it all. The meals that have been passed down through generations have nourished my body, but the stories that have travelled alongside those meals have nourished my soul.