 I want to thank Eric for working very diligently on this exhibit. I know that he was working up until just about four o'clock on his arrival in details. So this has been quite the labor for him and his co-organizers, including Bernadette and Pat Bins. I also want to mention Donna, who's standing out there in the hall. She has helped organize this along with a number of other anniversary events. We're celebrating this exhibit as part of one of three anniversaries that we're observing. Of course, the Tri-Sentinel of the City of New Orleans. Also the 80th anniversary of the founding of the Howard Tiltland Memorial Library and the 50th anniversary of the current Howard Tiltland Memorial Library across the street. I also want to thank folks in the admin office who worked very hard to make all this happen behind the scenes. Dorothy McKendrick is here. Thank her for making Marla Bennett the assistant. She is not here, but she did quite a lot of things to make this move forward as well. So thanks to those folks. It's my pleasure to introduce and welcome Liz Williams. Liz is the founder of the Southern Food and Beverage Museum and president of the National Food and Beverage Foundation. She does a great job, actually. Liz's research and writing centers on issues related to the culture of food and drink in New Orleans. She also writes and consults about food museums. Her most recent publication, Lift Your Spirits, a celebratory history of cocktail culture in New Orleans, was published by LSU Press in 2016. Without further ado, Liz. Thank you very much. I want to thank the entire team of people who put this together. I think this is just an absolutely wonderful exhibit. And considering all of the resources that were used to put this exhibit together are wrong to blame, it really speaks to the depth and breadth of your collection that you could pull all of this together even from the architecture school and the jazz archives and all that. I just think it's really very, very exciting that you can put this together. I want to thank you, though, for giving me the opportunity to talk about a very big topic. And that is the Food of New Orleans. I do want to add the Southern Food and Beverage Museum to the anniversary list because we are 10 years old this year. Wow, that's very good. That's very exciting. So, one of the things that happened in putting together that museum was that I began to ask the question, why is it that we have a cuisine in New Orleans? Sidney Mintz, the anthropologist, gave three different steps to be a cuisine. And one of them is that everybody knows what the food is. Number two, everyone eats it. And number three, it's actually part of the identity of the area. And I think that definition was written for the Food of New Orleans. I argue this every time I do it other than in New Orleans, people argue with me. But I claim that we have the only cuisine in the United States. There are many other places that have a fabulous food culture. If you go to New York, you have this great array of restaurants to eat from. But there isn't a cuisine that you can talk about that is the food of New York. Here in New Orleans, we can talk about our food. And even in other places in the south, say Charleston or Savannah or any of those places, or some place like Boston, you can name dishes that you associate with those cities. But there is not a complete cuisine that is built up in those cities. So I wanted to know why that was the case. And of course, it has to do with 300 years of culture and 300 years of layers of peoples and all of that sort of thing. I don't deny that. But, you know, some parts of America are a little older than 300 years. And they don't have a cuisine. So it's not just time alone. If you look at old cookbooks in your attempt to find this information, you can find a lot of information about what peoples mythology tells them about the cuisine of New Orleans. So you can say that a lot of people say it's because there were lots of ethnic groups that came together and everyone was eating together. And then sort of African Abra, there was a cuisine. But those same ethnic groups came together in other cities. And there was no abracadabra there. So somehow there had to be some other thing that made us have a cuisine and not other places. So I began to look for that. There's a lot written about the history of individual dishes. And you can find that in several places, not only in books, but in scholarly writing and all of that. But I wasn't looking to define the history of the po-boy or the history of gumbo or anything like that. I wanted to know why we had a cuisine. So I did a number of things. I started to read. I'm a lawyer by training, which means that we think we can do anything. And so I said, well, sure, I can figure this out. And also I did a little bit of empirical research. A friend of mine and I got very dressed up. We carried briefcases and went into an elevator in downtown New Orleans. And we stepped in and out of the elevator. Now you know what the protocol in an elevator is. You stand there and you face the door. And if you're not right in front of the door, you still stand and face the door and look at the head of the person in front of you. You don't have a big conversation. And of course, the more people there are in the elevator, the more likely you are to fall silent. So we had this worked out where one of us would say to the other, no, I think the best po-boy is at playing. And then we started this argument over and over and over again in one elevator ride after another, no matter who was in the elevator. And everybody in the elevator began to enter into our conversation. Nobody hesitated. Nobody thought, oh, I can interrupt them or anything like that because everybody thought that they had an opinion. And everybody knew that their opinion would actually be heard. And it's really true. So this was the janitor who pushed the mop bucket and the mop into the elevator to go from one floor to another. We felt just as entitled to give an opinion as the people that were all dressed up going on their busy way to their offices or whatever. We probably did this about 25 times. Certainly not a scientific study, but it happened absolutely every single time. And when a new person would, we wrote all the way to the top and all the way down. So when new people would get into the elevator and the conversation was going, as soon as they had listened enough to figure out what was going on, they would enter into it too. And if somebody didn't enter into it, I would often ask, and what do you think? And usually that was somebody who wasn't from the clinic and they just didn't have an opinion. So based on that, I felt really confident that our identity was based on food. I was also confident that everybody ate it. And I think that that's one of the things that really joins us all is that we know that whether you are a trained chef, whether you are an accomplished cook, or whether you have this, that, or the other credentials, you probably know something about food that we don't know and we want to know what you know. I have overheard in the bus people talking about whether they sweat their green peppers before they put in the celery when they're making their moment. Now this is a great detail, but who talks about this except people from New Orleans? Or maybe chefs, but certainly the people from New Orleans, all of us are not chefs. And yet we talk about these little details because we know it's going to make our food better. Okay, so how did we get to eat this way? That is always but the bottom line. How did we get to eat this way? So we have food and let's look at gumbo as a way to talk about this. I'm not going to tell you that we have a gumbo here because that's too close. But I will tell you that there are three thickeners in gumbo. And I think that gumbo is the quintessential dish. So if you think back before refrigeration, not that you can actually remember, but think in your imagination back about refrigeration before it happened, you ate with the seasons. And if you look at older cookbooks and in recipes that have appeared in the newspapers and all that, you will see that if you put Oprah in your gumbo, it usually was coming to fruit and able to be harvested around the same time as shrimp and crab were harvested. And therefore, you used Oprah as the thickener in your gumbo. Not every gumbo had a roof. The concept first to make a roof is a 20th century concept. Before the 20th century, there were three thickeners. So gumbo with Oprah and Oprah as the thickener represents Africa. We got our gumbo, I mean, we got our Oprah from Africa. And the word gumbo means Oprah in some of, it's not pronounced exactly like that, the word derives from certain West African languages. And if you say gumbo in France and you're asking for gumbo, you're going to get Oprah. So there is the first thickener and that is Oprah. Second thickener is, and they're in no particular order here, second thickener is filet. If you look at certain recipes of our native people, you will see a whole cup of filet that is put into a gumbo. So that is our American, so I'm talking confidence here, that is our American contribution to gumbo. Now, you can make that soup. It was certainly not called gumbo in the beginning when the native people made it, but it is something that has come into being merged with what we now call gumbo. And then you have the European contribution as a thickener, and that is root and that is because it uses flour and there was no flour in the New World before Columbus because we didn't have a meat here. So all three of our thickeners provide, they provide flavor as well as thickening. So, alright, this is an example of all the ethnic groups, if we can say, that contributed to creating the food. However, it still doesn't answer the question, why did we develop a cuisine? So this is my theory. During the time that we were founded in France during the age of enlightenment, they applied reason, which of course it's also called the age of reason. They applied reason not to religion, not to government, not to literature or science. They applied it to the arts, and one of the arts was the culinary arts. So they considered not only eating, but also cooking to be an art. So every art on their logical study or their interpretation, the art of, say, making music had to have a listener. So you had to be educated in how to listen. So the same thing was true with food. You had the art of making the food and the art of tasting and appreciating the food. So that mindset came to New Orleans when it was created. And it was at the same time that the restaurant was developing in Paris, and what became of cuisine was developing in Paris also. And so all of the people who came here and settled, even though most of them came out of prisons and all that sort of thing, they all had this in their heads, because this was part of the culture. And then it's in contrast with the English, who didn't really think that food was an art form. So that's why in all these other colonies that ultimately became English, even though they didn't start out in English, they didn't think that it was important. So they had dishes because they were all cooking from what was available in their region. So they had dishes, but they didn't develop a cuisine. So everyone came together who was here, whether it was the Africans or the three descendants of Africans who were actually doing the cooking. It was Europeans who were doing the eating. It was the Native Americans who were able to identify all of the food and where it was. All of that was contributing to creating a cuisine. And it was allowed to become a cuisine because the French thought that cooking was an art form. And so they wanted this to develop. And they were reading, because people were speaking French, they were reading all about the development of cuisine in France. And so they began to look at their food that way also. So finally, I do not want to say that we have French food. Absolutely we do not. If we had to name who invented our food, I would say it was the Africans. But the fact that it spread to everyone and that it was allowed to become a cuisine, that was a French attitude. By the time we had Americans coming in, by the time we had then later this great and growing court that brought in food from Latin America and the Caribbean, then we also had the food coming from all over America as the basin draining into the Mississippi River down to New Orleans. We had this huge array of things that we could eat. And so our food is very rich, it has been influenced over and over again. So yes, we had later the great influx of the Sicilians at the turn of the 20th century. We've had the Vietnamese at the end of the Vietnamese war in the 1970s. And then post Katrina, we have had yet another influx of people from specifically Mexico in the beginning and then later all of Latin America helping to rebuild the city. All of these influences continue to be sucked into our food and we realize it. And we don't just let it stay isolated and on its own. I think that that dynamism is what makes our food system so rich because it's continuing to change as our influences change. And I think that we're just so fortunate to be here. Yes, in addition, we have great bounty in this area. All of that is really an important part of us having this cuisine. It was Lefcadio Herm who called it Creole Cuisine. Up until then it was just food. And then we have a name for it. And so that allowed us to be in contrast with everyone else's food. And since then I think that we have just cherished it. One more story and then I will let you vote me. We at the Southern Food and Beverage Museum were not open yet prior to Hurricane Katrina. We were making plans to be open but we already had a website. So after Hurricane Katrina when we had that diaspora and everybody was all over the country we found that people would write to us and they would say, I can't find chilean red beans. And I'm living in Minneapolis and all they have are these things they call red kidney beans. They're not the same thing to me. Or I can't find chile at the grocery store. Where do you think I can find chile? And I can't find red drink. And I can't find who knows what. And oh, Cochle and Chifrey, that was also a big one. And so we could see how much people wanted to eat their own food. Aren't we out of comfort because they were displaced and it would remind them of home. But also because it was better with the food. So we are all people who still cook. And since food is a social invention, I'm not mentioning restaurants by name because those restaurants aren't inventing our food. They invent dishes or whatever, but our food is socially created. And that's why I can go to your house or your house or your house and your gumbo is going to be different from mine. But I'm going to know that it's gumbo. And I learned something about you because I eat your gumbo. And it means that we can then share in the fact that we all eat gumbo, even though everybody's gumbo is different. So I leave you with that on to you. I want to thank you and say, let's eat.