My mother died this winter. Even as I write these words, believing them is like trying to imagine that something elemental like the ocean or the stars is gone.
I notice her absence most keenly in the mornings, because that’s when my mother would text me, almost every day. It was a habit she fully embraced once she discovered that she could just talk into the phone and have Siri turn her words into messages. Because Siri doesn’t speak Southern, though, those messages could take some effort to translate. I enjoyed the challenge.
Her morning texts usually included photos of some peculiar DIY project she was working on or, when they were in bloom, her New Dawn roses. Often, we would talk about what we each were planning for supper. Even though feeding three sons for decades had, for her, mostly stomped the joy out of cooking, and she wanted dishes that were easy to prepare, her food memories could be inspiring.
One morning, she sent a photo of a bottle of Arnaud’s Sauce, embellished with many more emoticons than should be legal. By then, my mother had moved to southern Arkansas to be near my brother and his family. While she made a home for herself there, she missed many things about Louisiana, particularly the food.
The sauce, which she’d discovered could be had through the dubious magic of Amazon, is a commercially packaged version of the venerable restaurant’s remoulade, used in their Shrimp Arnaud.
Arnaud’s, on Bienville Street in New Orleans’s French Quarter, has probably been serving up some version of this dish since it opened its doors in 1918. It was one of my mother’s favorite New Orleans restaurants, and the shrimp was one of her favorite dishes.
Even today, dining at Arnaud’s is a bit of a to-do, and, when she was younger, my mother enjoyed the spectacle as much as the food. But as she got older, she liked the fuss of dining out less and less, and so we stopped going. Several years ago, when I learned that the restaurant had opened a small balcony overlooking the fancy main dining room, I proposed that we give it a try. My mother was willing, as long as she didn’t have to dress up and could wear her comfy gold slipper-shoes and her deep purple warm-up suit — Nevest had a baroque sense of style.
Once we were seated in the little balcony, shielded from view, we could look down on all the goings on below while we worked our way through her favorite dishes. There were Oysters Rockefeller, Pompano Pontchartrain, and Shrimp Arnaud. It was our last visit to the restaurant.
Shortly after my mother’s death, I was shopping for groceries at the Robert’s Fresh Mart on St. Claude, not far from the apartment Christopher and I had rented in the Bywater neighborhood of NOLA. As I headed out of the pasta and tomato sauce aisle, I came upon a display stacked with hundreds of bottles of Arnaud’s distinctive orange colored sauce, and it brought me right back to that last meal in the balcony. I started to cry. Not ugly crying, just some tears and modest sniffling, but enough to lose track of how long I’d been standing there blocking the way to the pasta.
“Sir?” asked an older woman, in a voice that was politely formal. “I wonder if you’re OK?”
Propelled back to the grocery store by her question, I thought to say, “I’m weeping in the pasta aisle at Robert’s Fresh Mart so, no, I’m not OK.” Instead, I replied “Oh, yes, yes, thank you. I’m so sorry.” She smiled and continued to look at me inquiringly. “Thank you for asking,” I said. “It’s just that I lost my mother recently.”
“A mother is a hard thing to lose,” she said, and made her way past the aluminum foil and out of sight.
Weirdly, I felt a lot better. Maybe it was just the opportunity to feel sad, combined with some human kindness, which seems to be in such short supply these days. I put a bottle of sauce and a pound of boiled shrimp in my carriage for our supper.
Since we’ve been back in Truro, I’ve wanted to make up a batch of homemade remoulade sauce. We don’t have Gulf shrimp here, but now that my Old County Road neighbor has started setting out tomatoes at his roadside farmstand, we have those. The time seems right to raise a fork to my mother.
Remoulade is a wonderfully versatile sauce, great for summer spreading and dipping.
There are as many variations of Louisiana-style remoulade as there are folks who whip it up — white ones and pink ones and Arnaud’s-style orange-y ones. (There are also milder French versions of the sauce flavored with cornichons and capers).
I decided I would try to dig up the Arnaud’s recipe, but that’s apparently a closely held secret. I did learn that, after a visit to the restaurant, Craig Claiborne tried to recreate the sauce for the 1985 edition of his Southern Cooking. I gave his version a shot, but I found the result neither pleasing nor reminiscent of Arnaud’s. Unlike any other recipe I’ve tried, Claiborne’s sauce wasn’t bound with egg yolk, and so it separated no matter how much I whisked. I threw it out and went back to my tried-and-true version, which I adapted many years ago from an old Paul Prudhomme cookbook.
I make the sauce in a blender, but I like to reserve some of the chopped vegetables to mix in by hand at the end for textural contrast. This is at odds with the Arnaud’s version, which is smooth, but I think my version is better. The sauce calls for Creole mustard, which is made in a grainy Dijon style, but any grainy mustard will do. Ditto for the vinegar and hot sauce: use what you have.
Remoulade works really well with almost any seafood. And while I rarely see it served over vegetables in Louisiana, I think it works well with a Truro garden’s August bounty. Right now, I’m spooning it over ripe tomatoes; in the fall it might be good over fried green ones.
I haven’t found myself weeping in grocery stores this summer. Time is doing its work.
LOUISIANA-STYLE REMOULADE SAUCE
Makes about 2 cups
2 egg yolks at room temperature
¼ cup neutral oil such as canola
4 Tbsp. prepared horseradish
2 Tbsp. Creole mustard or other grainy mustard
½ cup plus 1 Tbsp. finely chopped celery, ideally from the tender green-yellow inner ribs, divided
½ cup plus 1 Tbsp. finely chopped scallions, divided
¼ cup plus 1 Tbsp. chopped fresh parsley, divided
¼ of a large lemon, seeded and cut into 3 pieces (do not remove the peel or pith)
2 Tbsp. ketchup
2 Tbsp. Worcestershire sauce
1 Tbsp. white wine vinegar
1 Tbsp. Crystal or other hot sauce
1 Tbsp. minced garlic
2 tsp. sweet paprika
1 tsp. kosher salt
1 bay leaf, crumbled
A handful of fresh parsley, minced, as a garnish
- In a blender or food processor (the blender will make a smoother sauce), blend the egg yolks for 2 minutes until thickened and pale yellow. While it’s running, pour in the oil in a thin stream until incorporated. Add the remaining ingredients one at a time, blending until well mixed and making sure the lemon rind is finely chopped. Reserve the extra tablespoons of onion, celery, and parsley.
- Pour the sauce into a bowl and stir in the reserved chopped vegetables by hand. Let the sauce rest in the refrigerator for an hour or so to allow the flavors to meld, but take it out several minutes before serving as it’s best when not ice cold.
- Spoon over thick slices of ripe tomato, grilled zucchini, fried flounder fillets, or fried clams. Or serve over boiled, peeled, chilled Gulf of Mexico shrimp, if you can get them. Garnish with parsley.
