“Lulu’s Kitchen: A Taste of the Gulf Coast Good Life”
Author: Lucy Buffett, Foreword by Jimmy Buffet
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Pages: 264
Price: $19.99 (Paperback)
“Lulu’s Kitchen” is a revised edition of “Crazy Sista Cooking” which Lucy Buffett had self-published some time ago.
The volume is mostly a cookbook, with almost all the 120 recipes under active use at Lulu’s, her hugely successful restaurant on the Inland Waterway in Gulf Shores, and part memoir, with essays by Lucy, her daughters, her brother-in-law Tom McGuane and her brother, Jimmy Buffett, who seems to have underwritten the original project.
She tells the reader right off the bat “this is not your basic how-to cookbook.” This is more like a visit with her in her kitchen, telling stories, listening to Sinatra or Buffett, having a drink, and cooking.
Lucy Buffett explains a couple of times that she always really wanted to be a writer—to write a book. In a way, she has. Scattered throughout the book are essays that constitute a kind of autobiography. We learn that she had a career as cook in the islands and on yachts, in New Orleans and in Los Angeles before she was called back to Baldwin County when her aging parents needed her.
“In Lulu-land Fried, Died and Gone to Heaven is gospel.” Once upon a time, she tells us, “the menu included rice pilaf and steamed vegetables, but we threw away more than we sold.” She sells 100,000 cheeseburgers annually in her paradise. Vacationers want fried shrimp, oysters, and hushpuppies. The recipes are here.
If making a roux is as exacting and heartbreaking as described, stirring flour and oil for half an hour or more until “it feels like your arm is about to fall off” and then sometimes there is a whiff of burnt flour and you have to start all over again, I’ll leave gumbo to the professionals.
I was intrigued, though, by the variations on gumbo. Summer Seafood gumbo has shrimp and crab. Winter Gumbo has lots of chicken and andouille sausage—no crabs, while Day After Thanksgiving gumbo uses turkey and sausage. There is always that roux, however.
The recipes for shrimp and crab bisque and oyster stews look terrific. I also learned there are usually 39 oysters to a quart. Lulu does not explain what pigeon peas are in the dish Bahamian Pigeon Peas and Coconut Rice but black-eyed peas can be substituted.
In the salad section Lulu suggests it is OK to chop lettuce; the lettuce doesn’t seem to mind. Although Lulu has, like so many others, discovered fancy lettuces, she does not distain the iceberg. Lulu’s has a wedge.
There is a section that outlines entire dinner parties.
The “traditional” Christmas dinner is Oysters Rock-A-Fella, Maine lobster and grilled asparagus and, because “Christmas time can be a drag…so many expectations…so much craziness…,” lots of pink champagne.
A dinner for her mother on her 80th birthday featured West Indies Salad and tenderloin of beef.
The New Orleans Jazz Fest dinner party is margarita-glazed Cornish hens, crawfish enchilada , washed down with Pimm’s Cup.
There are dessert recipes: chocolate chunky cookie, Key Lime pie with Grand Marnier whipped cream, banana pudding with ’nilla wafers, red velvet cake, but the essay that introduces this section sums it all up: “Life itself is a treat…enjoy it; eat your dessert first.”
Don Noble is host of the Alabama Public Television literary interview show “Bookmark with Don Noble.” A shorter form of this review was originally broadcast on Alabama Public Radio.
