Story by Morgan Crawford Scott
Photographs by Denny Culbert
Photos and recipes excerpted from Bayou by Melissa Martin (Artisan Books). Copyright © 2024.
Not everyone is cut out for life on the bayou. The sweltering summers might have cast some outward, but to the many who still call it home, they wouldn’t have it any other way. Melissa Martin is one of those people. You’ve probably heard of Melissa because of her extremely successful restaurant, Mosquito Supper Club. (And if you haven’t eaten there, what are you waiting for?) It’s a must-stop when in New Orleans, and it’s symbolic of many of the things Melissa stands for: community, cooking with hyper-local ingredients, and, through these ingredients, supporting purveyors who help define the cuisine she grew up eating.
The restaurant played a leading role, deservedly so, in the title of her first cookbook, Mosquito Supper Club: Cajun Recipes from a Disappearing Bayou. But her latest cookbook, Bayou: Feasting through the Seasons of a Cajun Life, which debuted in September of last year, somehow uncovers an entirely new side of her cooking and her life in the bayou all while peppered with thoughtful anecdotes, and it proves to be as sought-after as the first.
As the title might suggest, the book is all about celebrations, both big and small, that happen during the seasons of the Cajun calendar. “I wanted the readers to experience what it is like for me to go through a year of cooking through the seasons in Louisiana,” Melissa says, “and to understand what jogs the nostalgia, why we do things the way we do, and at what point in the year do we feel like eating what and why.” These celebrations often occur at a gathering spot, typically around the table, and through recipes that combine humble ingredients and local bounty. And with every turn of the page, you’ll feel as if you’re right in the mix, sitting at the table or gathering around the hearth, with Melissa and her friends and family as they experience these special, seasonal moments.
“The first book was a different experience,” Melissa says. “I’ve put everything in the second book. It was exciting to write because there was so much I couldn’t include in the first one.… In the second, I was able to talk about things the way I wanted to talk about them. It’s way more personal.”
One thing that sets Bayou apart is the way Melissa chose to divide it up into chapters—rather than your typical chapters like “Main Dishes,” “Sides and Such,” and “Desserts,” words like “Abundance,” “Simplicity,” and “Tradition” mark the start of a new season with a host of new recipes. “I came up with it because I wanted the book to be thematic of what the season invokes in you and makes you feel,” Melissa says. There’s a chapter called “Resilience” in which she likens life in south Louisiana and the bayou to an onion and its layers, explaining the challenges that come just by living there, knowing what the next year could bring all while still putting one foot in front of the other.
There’s also the “Love” chapter, which is about the holidays and even the sometimes bittersweet nature of them. “That’s a really important chapter to me,” she says. “I wrote a piece about my nana’s funeral in there and how the holidays are a metamorphosis of the soul and you need the next season of Mardi Gras to shake off the holidays and what they can do to us, especially when we experience them as an adult rather than a kid.” “Love” includes recipes like Fried Turkey, Holiday Dressing, and Red Velvet Cake ready to be devoured by those closest to us, while “Abundance” pays homage to Carnival season and is filled with classics like Carnival Crawfish Boil, Apex Jambalaya, and King Cake.
With this esteemed season upon us, Melissa remarked on her own days experiencing the Carnival lore from growing up and how those memories and cherished foods made their way into the book. For Melissa, one of six kids, Carnival season meant piling into the car, driving to a rural city in Louisiana, and sitting in a flatbed truck amongst other families waiting for the parade to come around. “Everybody got together and cooked while waiting about two to three hours for the parade to arrive,” she says. “If you were older, around 16, you could walk the route; it was sort of a coming-of-age.”
When asked what they were eating while waiting, Melissa answers, “All the same Cajun foods you’d expect.” She continues, “But when I moved to New Orleans, I had a different experience with Mardi Gras.” She recalls a soft-shell crawfish po’ boy she used to eat at Jazz Fest at a stand that is no longer there, and how she will only get the soft-shell crawfish from one purveyor nowadays. (You’ll be pleased to find her take on this memory-evoking recipe in the “Abundance” chapter on page 34.) “Nowadays, Mardi Gras, for me, is sitting on the porch and not going much of anywhere, maybe riding my bike down to go see the floats,” she says. “It’s still fun to see the city swollen with so much excitement, though.”
With dreamscape-y visuals and heirloom recipes aplenty set to create your own memories of old, Bayou claims to be a cookbook featuring a year’s worth of cooking through the seasons, but what you get is much more than that—it’s a compilation of the years of Melissa’s life and that of her heritage in south Louisiana.
