New Orleans

Elizabeth M. Williams is founder and president of the Southern Food and Beverage Museum in New Orleans, which celebrates the food of the American South with exhibits, a library, archives, collections, and programming. SoFab is one of Saveur's "5 Great Museums Devoted to Food" (5/2011). Williams is also consulting professor at the Kabacoff School of Hotel, Restaurant and Tourism, University of New Orleans. Her roles there include teaching, writing, and researching issues in hospitality law, culinary history and culture, and nonprofit administration. She has contributed a number of articles on aspects of Southern food to journals. Williams has a law degree and co-authored The A to Z Encyclopedia of Food Controversies and the Law (2010).

New Orleans: A Food Biography is the first in a projected series, "Big City Food Biographies," from AltaMira Press. The aim of the series is to focus on "those metropolises celebrated as culinary destinations, with their iconic dishes, ethnic neighborhoods, markets, restaurants, and chefs" and to provide "real biographies that will satisfy readers' desire to know the full food culture of a city." New Orleans, with its unique cuisine and urban culture, is an appropriate city in which to begin such a series. Williams spends the first half of the book identifying the historical events, cultural influences, raw materials, and immigrant groups that greatly contributed to the creation of New Orleans cuisine. The second half of the book details restaurants, drinking culture, home cooking, and the signature New Orleans foods. The final chapter on New Orleans foods is the book's strength, highly readable and researched. The historical background provides necessary context for the evolution of New Orleans food, and a bibliography is provided). Summing Up: Recommended. General readers and lower-division undergraduates.

• Series Foreword, by Ken AlbalaPrefaceTimeline1. Introduction: A Real Cuisine2. The Material Resources3. The First Inhabitants and Their Foodways4. The Old World in the New 5. Immigrants: Their Neighborhoods and Contributions 6. Markets, Retailing, and “Making Groceries”7. Restaurants8. Drinking in New Orleans9. Cooking at Home and Cookbooks10. Signature Foods and Dishes BibliographyIndex About the Author