In high school I worked as a busboy at an Elk’s Lodge until a seriously drunken Elk offered to throw me through a large plate glass window. I graduated college a semester early in 1973 because the draft had ended, so to support myself I worked a stint at a restaurant called Lum’s, where I cooked and pulled about a million pitchers of beer. I hated that job for two reasons: 1) While I was in the back slopping around, all of the college kids who were smart enough not to graduate early were out front eating and playing drinking games; and 2) every night I had to filter the boiling hot fryer oil, which left me one move away from third-degree burns and perpetually smelling of bad French fries. Naturally, I vowed to myself that no matter how desperate I may be, I would never work in food service again. Ever.

But in the summer of 1975, my wife, Sue, quit her punk insurance job to go back to school and I hit the streets in search of “summer employment” with the economy in a shambles. Turns out no one was looking for a first-year graduate student in biological anthropology with a B.A. in Spanish language and literature to boot, even if this was all done at reputable universities. That realization, and a rumpled want ad, led me to Jackie’s Place.

Jackie’s Place was an upscale sports bar-restaurant in an upscale suburb of St. Louis. The owner and namesake, Jackie Smith, was a legend and a hero in St. Louis — he played tight end for the St. Louis Cardinals from 1963 to 1977, was the offensive team co-captain, went to the Pro Bowl for five straight years, and set several team and NFL records that stood for years. Sadly, I was largely unaware of most of this at the time as I was not into sports.

The want ad called for a cook. I detested the idea of working as a cook again, but a job is a job and money is money. On Monday morning, I met Rita, the general manager. She looked at my paperwork, we chatted for about 10 minutes, and then she said, “Can you cook?”

“Sure,” I said.

She said, “Go in the kitchen and cook lunch. The cook didn’t come in today.”

“Whoa!” you must be saying to yourself about now. “How could he cook lunch? He doesn’t know what’s on the menu. He doesn’t know where anything is located in the kitchen. He doesn’t know anything! This can’t possibly work out.” Well, I was certainly thinking all of that, and more, even if you aren’t.

It was insane. I quickly went through everything in the kitchen looking for food, plates, pans, utensils, whatever I might need. I grabbed a menu and made a quick dash down the list of offerings and fired up the stove as high as it would go. Then the waitresses started bringing in the orders from the lunch rush. It was furious: I was slapping out burgers and sandwiches and fries and rings and chicken and shrimp and just making it all up as I went, as quickly as I could dish it out. It was like being on a reality TV show, except that nobody had ever heard of reality TV in 1975.

Finally the lunch rush was over and everybody got fed and nobody complained, at least to me (I had sharp knives). Rita strolled in casually and said, “Come back tomorrow.” It occurred to me then that I wasn’t getting paid for today. Good times.

When I came back the next morning, Rita said, “I have another idea. I want you to be the manager of Jackie’s Place. We’ll get another cook. Marty the Bartender is the manager now, but he is an alcoholic who drinks from the bar and steals from the till, so you have three days to get him to teach you everything he knows, then we will fire him.” I protested that I knew nothing about being a bartender or managing a restaurant. She said, “Hmmm,” and left.

For three days Marty taught me everything he knew, which fell primarily into two categories: 1) how to drink all day at the bar without getting caught; and 2) how to skim the till without getting caught. He seemed like a pretty nice guy, but considering what I knew about his fate I didn’t feel inclined to follow any of his advice. I think he knew he was going to get fired, but he did not really seem to care. However, the waitresses cared, for they all loved Marty (probably for the free drinks he made them) and they hated me for stealing Marty’s job. Waitresses who hate you when you are new can really make your life unpleasant.

I spent the rest of the summer working 14-hour days, six days a week and hating every minute of it — managing, taking care of the money, ordering food and supplies, listening to the waitresses bitch about nearly everything. I tended bar and listened to the endlessly tedious stories of the drunken salesmen who fritter away their expense account-fueled days in places like that. I discovered that for drunken daytime salesmen, you don’t have to have many bar skills. Put whiskey or gin or vodka in a glass with some ice and there you are. Just keep ‘em comin’.

By now you must be thinking, “Wow, this is a really worthless story about a really worthless job.” But you would be wrong, and here is why.

From time to time Jackie Smith liked to come into the bar and hang out. He was, not surprisingly, a big man, with light-colored eyes, reddish-blond hair, pinkish-white skin, a zillion freckles, and forearms like country hams. He was born in Mississippi but lived and went to college in northern Louisiana. I think you get the picture. He was softly spoken and had a lovely blond wife and several little kids. His wife taught me to make authentic Louisiana gumbo.

I think Jackie liked me — maybe because I worked hard, maybe because I was not all that taken by his football stardom. In any case, one day I was tending bar and probably looking a little bedraggled, and he said to me, “Come into the kitchen, kid, I want to teach you something.” And he proceeded to teach me to make Jackie Smith’s Louisiana Hot Wings. It is a simple recipe, really, just a few ingredients. He was adamant that you have to eat them fresh, as hot out of the fryer as you can stand them. I don’t think that Jackie knew how to cook anything else, but this one thing was enough. He whipped up a batch and we ate them on the spot and angels wept.

As he left the kitchen, I said, “So, Jackie, are these Louisiana Hot Wings?” And he said, “Son, screw those son-of-a-guns from Buffalo.”

He was right.

Jackie Smith’s Louisiana Hot Wings

Serves one person if you are a teenage boy, more if you are normal people

Several pounds of uncooked chicken wings, washed and patted dry, with the wing tips tucked under the upper bone
1 bottle of Louisiana Hot Sauce
1 pound of salted butter, melted
Celery sticks (optional)
Bleu cheese or ranch dressing (optional)

1. Combine the melted butter and one half (or more to taste) of the bottle of Louisiana Hot Sauce in a largish mixing bowl.
2. Fry the wings, several at a time, in deep fat at 375 degrees until they are golden and crisp, about 4-5 minutes
3. Remove crispy wings from hot oil with tongs or slotted spoon and drain briefly on a spread-out newspaper, preferably a newspaper from Louisiana
4. While still very hot, add wings to butter-hot sauce mixture and stir to coat well
5. Remove wings to plate and eat immediately while you cook up the rest of the wings
6. Serve with celery sticks and bleu cheese or ranch dressing, if for some reason you feel you must
7. Don’t forget the napkins! 

The destruction I ended up seeing was heartbreaking, but what I really found that night, I know now, was a table of the warmest welcome. Sara and her friends greeted me with plates of shrimp and glasses full, and we ended up closing the restaurant down as we talked. Literally. The owners left us there with slices of pecan pie and glasses of bourbon and asked us to just lock the door on the way out.

Sara and I continued chatting in her living room, where she’d prepared a guest bed for me, and our conversation turned to loss — of the neighbors she didn’t see anymore, of her husband’s new job in Philadelphia, of her getting ready to leave this city she had grown to love as dearly as a friend. We talked until very late, and Sara explained, in an accent that still prominently features her high, flat, Wisconsin “a,” how she came to be taken by this place.

Over the next few weeks, in between repairing her house and writing a book on her transformation into a true New Orleanian, Sara invited me back: to her friend Pableaux’s standing Monday night red beans and rice party, to wander the St. Patrick’s Day parade with her roommate Todd, to Brooks’ crawfish boil. I came every time, sharing spice-covered handshakes and greasy-lipped laughs, and every time more and more people invited me to come stay, next time, at their place if I ever wanted. They took me to their favorite po’ boy shops. They taught me about the unclear difference between the present and the nostalgic past over café au lait and beignets at the Café du Monde. They took me to brass band shows and jazz funerals, where we danced in the street and lived the line about New Orleans being as to other cities as poetry is to prose.

One night, before turning in on Sara’s now-familiar couch, she handed me a bowl. In it was a murky, boggy green, a fascinatingly unpretty food. “Gumbozzairb,” she called it, and it took me a few bites to get into it, though I may have feigned an immediate enthusiasm out of politeness. She explained that she’d saved me this last bowl from a massive batch she made with Leah Chase, and while I nodded without really knowing who she was talking about, my fifth bite of the gumbo z’herbes went down smooth and mellow, roundly vegetal. It was an entirely different experience from the meaty, tender bite before it, which was in turn entirely different from the hot chew of sausage before that, the pepper warming the back of my throat. By the end, I was in an ungrateful mood, concentrating untowardly on the sad fact that Sara had saved me only one bowl.

Not long after, I moved back home to New York, where it took me half a decade to make the number and kind of friendships New Orleans offered me from the beginning. In the years since, Sara moved to Philadelphia, Pableaux moved to Kentucky, Brett flirted with points north, and Brooks moved to North Carolina. But their hearts stayed stubbornly put, and I was happy to find them all there, in their proper place, when I went down earlier this year and, with a touch of nostalgia, asked Sara to teach me to make her green gumbo.

Despite the fact that this is a full-day project and that she has a gorgeous new baby to take care of, she summoned me over, telling me to commandeer a shopping cart. As we gathered a turnip-truck’s worth of greens and a barnyard’s worth of meat, she told me her gumbo z’herbes story.

She was also a new arrival in New Orleans, a little bit lost, when a mutual friend who knew Sara was interested in food arranged for her to have lunch with a local chef. Sara didn’t know quite what to say when she met Leah Chase, the octogenarian chef of Dooky Chase and one of the true authorities of New Orleans Creole cuisine. What do you say, really, with your Wisconsin a’s, to a woman who has for decades run one of the most important restaurants not just in New Orleans but in all of black America? Who could refer to Martin Luther King Jr. by his first name and who has hosted the most important leaders of the civil rights movement? But their conversation was pleasant and polite, and they kept in occasional touch as Sara went on to become the restaurant critic for the local alt-weekly and devoted herself to becoming a true New Orleanian.

But that was all Pre-K. After her evacuation for Katrina, Sara got back in touch with Miss Leah to find that she was relegated to living in a trailer next to her restaurant, and offered to help her run some errands. Those errands became long drives and honest conversation, and suddenly history — and whose accent sounded like what — didn’t seem to matter much anymore. Their friendship grew as they tried to put their homes and work lives back together, and Sara realized even more how special her new friend truly was. She wrote in her book “Gumbo Tales” about shopping with Miss Leah and “standing aside as a parade of other customers would rush to kiss a smooth cheek, touch a caramel hand, and ask when her restaurant would reopen.”

One day, Sara got a call: Judges for the James Beard Foundation Awards, the culinary Oscars, were in town and wanted to know if Miss Leah would cook for them. Since Dooky Chase was still closed, Sara offered her home, and the Queen of Creole cuisine came over with greens in her arms, ham hocks in her hands, and a recipe in her bones. Years after she’d arrived in New Orleans, years after she found her deepest connection to this through the food she’s shared there, Sara Roahen was about to cook, in her kitchen, with one of the city’s most important heroes.

The gumbo z’herbes they made that day was what, it turns out, Sara fed me when I first got to New Orleans. And now, with a tableful of greens, ham hocks in a pot, and a recipe copied down and corrected and printed out on an inkjet, she was about to teach me how to make it, about to bring me back to her New Orleans again.

Check back Saturday for Sara and Miss Leah’s gumbo z’herbes recipe.  

As I broke down barbecued ducks, smelling richly of fat and five-spice, Si-fu concentrated on the nearly inaudible crackle coming from the oven, waiting for the pitch that would tell him it was time to take another look. I heard the clack of the latch again, the grumbling of the rail, the tack-tack-tack of nails, the scratch of steel wool scraping at too-dark skin, the rustle of a basting brush. Over and over I would hear these sounds when he worked the pig, for hours at a time, breathing in thick heat.

I’d been working with Si-fu for a week at Ho Ho BBQ, a tiny shop in a nondescript strip mall in suburban Toronto, learning how to roast meats in the Cantonese style. It was work that was supposed to be steeped, for me, in flavors of childhood, in memories of Chinatown walks with my parents. But charming memories don’t get you very far when you’re pushing around carcasses hanging like heavy bags in a boxing gym.

The pig was done. It was a good one, meaning that the bubbles were all trapped inside the skin, making it crackly but also incredibly light, with a texture like Rice Krispies. It threw its heat around the room as Si-fu took a breath and hoisted, squeezing his bony frame through the narrow shop toward a display case. Ideally, he would have waited for it to rest, but the customers were wild-eyed and he came back to it with a big blade and intention. He knelt, only this wasn’t a devotional act. He performed an awkward upward stroke with grace, cleaving one half from the backbone, and began cutting off customers’ orders. The knife sailed through meat and skin, making a sound like walking on potato chips.

After the rush, he cut me a piece and I saw what all the work was for: crisp yet dissolving skin, tender meat, and lush, velvety fat. Textures in perfect balance and contrast. The flavor, too: Earlier, Si-fu had me cure the splayed-open pigs, massaging them with fistfuls of salt and sugar until the carcasses looked like snow at the moment you realize there’ll be no school tomorrow. The cure has only a few hours to penetrate, giving each bite a heavily seasoned side and a clean, juicy side. The flavor was sweet, salty, complex, and then mild and pure, as fascinating as it was delicious. Si-fu looked at me. “Quality,” he said.

When I was a kid, I’d ditch the TV and run to help my mother on the nights she brought home a Styrofoam box from Chinatown. Inside there would be duck like this, pork like this; half of it would be gone before the rice was cooked. It always felt like some kind of reward, but later I realized that it wasn’t about me. It was about convenience. It was about being cheap and easy for Mom.

But the taste of that barbecue is mostly a memory. The places my mother used to go to have all either gone away or gone downhill. One night a few months ago, my great-uncle shook his head as we left Ho Ho. “It doesn’t taste this good anywhere else anymore,” he said. He talked about China as it was a half century ago, a place where everyone knew how to roast ducks so that they were as rich as these, how to roast pigs so that they were as crisp as these. I am never careful enough around nostalgists. I went back inside and asked Jacques Wong, the owner, to let me work with him for a while. He said yes so casually I didn’t think he meant it. Then he said, “You know, it gets hot in here.”

I learned a lot cooking at Ho Ho, but maybe most of all this: Whatever it was for Mom, none of this is easy. Not learning to see invisible bubbles or hear inaudible noises. Not standing in the heat of an oven twice the size of a refrigerator. Not butchering and butterflying whole animals. Not scalding ducks and pigs with heavy kettles of boiling water to tighten up their skins. Not hoisting pigs up the stairs, your knee hitting the backs of their heads and them hitting you right back. But Jacques Wong has been doing these things nearly every day for almost 30 years, the last 10 in this shop. I called him Si-fu, Cantonese for “master,” at first out of convention, then quickly out of genuine respect.

Quality was the first thing Si-fu talked about when I arrived at Ho Ho BBQ. It’s an idea that has a grip on him. He insists on buying nothing less than the best ingredients, on doing things the hard way, the right way. He tells me about the steps others will skip, the cheaper meats others use. But he is fixated on quality, and I suspect it’s because his skills did not come to him easily.

When Si-fu fled China for Hong Kong, he learned to cook from chefs who kept secrets. For years, he plied them with food and drinks in return for lessons, sometimes spending a fifth of his meager pay. A sated cook would show him how to marinate meat; a hungry one would send him scurrying to scrub ovens. There was no complaint in his voice when he told me this, but he also said: “Of course, you have to end up better than your si-fu. You have to take what they teach you and add to it.” His dedication to technique, to quality, is fueled by a fierce pride.

Customers came in spurts, and in the slower hours Si-fu had time to chat with them, handing out extra tidbits—a hock here, pieces of tofu there. Earlier I had watched him drop blocks of that tofu into the fryer with speed, showering his arms with hot fat. Now he’s just giving it away. A regular came in for some bright red cha siu pork and offered Si-fu a lemon cake she’d baked. Si-fu cut himself a slice and urged others to do the same. “You should try some,” he said to a customer who claimed not to like Western sweets. “You don’t have to eat it if you don’t like it. But you should taste someone else’s culture.” He offered to buy coffee for his staff, to go with the cake, and reached into a Styrofoam cup he keeps filled with cash for just this purpose. He reached in again for a little more to buy a lottery ticket.

Once, while waiting for a pig to start sizzling in the oven, Si-fu asked me why I hadn’t written a book about Chinese food to coincide with the 2008 Olympics, when everyone would be interested. I admitted I hadn’t thought of it. He shook his head with gentle disappointment. “You can’t be lazy,” he said. “You always have to be thinking if you want to make money.”

But his own numbers seem hard to figure out. He pays a lot for his pigs, he admits, but he likes the quality he gets. “The guy I buy from’s got a family to feed, too,” Si-fu said. “Hell, maybe he has a couple of them.” But after all the cutting and the curing and the scalding and the resting and the lifting and the roasting, if he manages to sell the whole thing, he nets $30.

It’s a cruel irony that people are increasingly willing to shell out for artisanal foods, and yet for so many cooks plying their traditional crafts in immigrant communities, the numbers don’t really add up. For Si-fu, it’s a brutal calculation, and it’s fine by him that his children don’t want to take over when he retires. He doesn’t want them to, despite his pride in his work. “You see how tired I am,” he said. “This is not what my children go to school for.” He just told the story of the immigrant in one sentence.

Still, I protested. What about all your hard-earned experience? Who will carry on this craft that you’ve learned? He smiled and pointed toward the notebook in my hand. “Besides, I learned to cook,” he said. “When I retire, I can just relax and cook for myself and my friends. Cooking for them is the most satisfying thing I can think of to do.” Then, I understood why he cut me good pieces from the pig all day long, why he hands out the tofu. His work is hard, but he also gets to give.

Back in the basement, I stared at 40 pounds of pork in the sink before pouring on the marinade that will turn it into cha siu. It was like a kiddie pool full of meat. I dug in with my hands, intensely aware of the cold pork, the salty grit, the slippery liquid. I tossed and folded at first, as if working a delicate dough, but then with an animal urge sank down to the elbow and stirred with my arm. I could feel my biceps warming, grinding through the resistance. I could feel my muscle working in this muscle, heard with satisfaction the sloshing and gurgling of so much meat and moisture. Behind me, Si-fu hauled out a massive propane stove and set water on to boil.

I ran upstairs to deliver a chicken and noticed that the case was nearly empty. There was hardly any pork left, a few bits and pieces, and I ran back down to report. Si-fu looked at the clock, a few hours from closing. He leaned on the table and thought. “Let them sell out. We’ll just close up.” He took a beer from the fridge and got back to work, showering hanging pigs with boiling water. Then he added, “It’s not worth the gamble.” By that he meant roasting one now and risking its not being sold. He doesn’t sell leftovers. “I only sell fresh. You have to do things ‘number one’ if you want people to come back,” he said. “That’s why every step matters. That’s why how you season matters. How you brush on the sauce matters. Sewing the ducks up so no marinade comes out matters.”

Just then, I noticed one of the ducks springing a slight leak from its braided flap and pointed it out to him. He took a swig of his beer, his eyes glassing over with tiredness, and aimed his kettle full of water at another pig. “To hell with it,” he said. No, I thought, his kids are not going to school for this.

Ho Ho BBQ 3833 Midland Ave., Scarborough, Ontario (416-321-9818)

For further stories on Si-fu Wong and his son, click here.

“Oh, hi,” he said. Then, realizing why I was approaching, he said, “Oh, I live here. I’m just waiting for my girlfriend to toss some takeout at me.”

“Excuse me?” I asked. “Someone is going to throw dinner at you?”

Just then he looked back up, and out of the glare of the security lamp, I could see the silhouette of a woman’s head poke out from a window. She waved. “Hi, Babe!” she called in a dulcet tone while dangling a package much larger than I am comfortable seeing seven stories above my head.

When she let go of it, I felt that slight, disembodied panic you feel when there is something very strange happening right in front of you, but you kind of can’t believe it’s for real. The bag sailed down, more leisurely than I thought it would. Caught by the wind it bounced off the security lamp and landed – ploosh – into a small bush.

“We order takeout a lot,” the man said to me. “And I hate having all these plastic containers piling up that the city won’t recycle. So we bring them back and reuse them. I like the Thai place around the corner.”

“Yeah, their papaya salad is great,” I said.

He started walking away. “Yeah, we get it every time.”

An older black gentleman picked one up, walking away. He came back a few moments later, weeping. “My momma used to make these when I was a boy,” he said to her. “I forgot all about them until now.”

Poppy was intently inspecting her frying oil for heat as she told me this story from clear, easy memory. But then she looked up sharply. “You know,” she said, “that calas brought that man’s mother back to life for a moment.”

But why had he forgotten about them? And why, despite being a life-long New Orleanian, had Poppy never heard of calas herself? So she looked into their history, and ever since, she has given lectures and classes with missionary zeal on how to make calas, and why we should celebrate their place on the American table.

“Calas came to New Orleans with the slaves from Ghana, where they grow rice,” she told me. “Today, if you go there, you can still see people frying them, and they call them cala.”

“Starting in the 1700s, calas vendors would stand outside St. Louis cathedral, waiting for church to let out. They had a call,” Poppy said. She opened her mouth wide, as if singing, and recited, “Calas, calas, belle calas. Tout chaud!“

“She stood there, selling the calas from baskets perched on her head,” she continued, visualizing the scene, describing the colonial class coming out of church in their Sunday finery, buying these treats. As Poppy told this story, I marveled at how she imagined herself into it, how she spoke as if she knew the calas ladies herself. But I guess being on the quest to spread this story for nearly 25 years will do that to a person.

“And here’s why it’s important. Before Louisiana became American with the Louisiana Purchase, it was the Code Noir that regulated all the roles and relationships between whites, free blacks, and slaves. And in the Code Noir, there were two important rules. One, all slaves had to have Sundays off, so many women would spend the day making and selling calas in the street.

“The other was that if slaves approached their owners and demanded to pay for their freedom, the owner had to accept. So it was with calas money that many slaves freed themselves,” she said. “So this is an important dish! But during World War II the calas vendors disappeared because of food rationing, and they were mostly forgotten unless you had them at home.”

I smiled, gladdened by this story, but later I learned that perhaps the history of calas and slavery was not so tidy. “This is slavery, dear,” the scholar Jessica Harris said to me. “Histories of slavery are rarely tidy. It’s complicated in this case, because there were lots of free people of color; not all calas vendors were enslaved. And the ones who were often sold them for their mistresses. If they were lucky, they were allowed to keep a portion of the money, or perhaps have it go towards their freedom.”

The Code Noir, I also learned, was hardly a warm-and-fuzzy slave code, despite containing such charmingly progressive directives as forbidding owners from feeding their slaves a diet consisting only of rum. (Also charmingly, the first article in the Code Noir basically says “NO JEWS ALLOWED.”) And it was technically not under the Code Noir that slaves bought their own freedom. “Remember,” the writer and filmmaker Lolis Eric Elie reminded me, “for much of the colonial era, New Orleans was under Spanish rule, and the Spanish slave codes included the practice of Coartacion, which is what gave slaves the right to buy their own freedom. So there were calas vendors who freed themselves. (That stopped when Americans took over, though, who proposed instead that free blacks choose a master and re-enter into slavery.)”

Still, while the story might be somewhat less neat than suggested, for Poppy, calas also contain a larger truth.

“Lolis denies this,” Poppy told me, “but he once said to me, ‘I think if you have the calas tradition in your family and y’all think you’re all-white folks, you have to look a little harder in your background.’” 

I confess to wondering, when she said that, why this white woman had made the renewal of the calas her personal mission, even with its fascinating story.

“Two years ago,” she said, “I was making them for a convention here, and a chef came to help me. Afterwards, he said, ‘These brought me right back to my childhood!’ I looked at him, surprised. He was as white as me! But then he said, ‘My grandmother was black.’”

“That’s the thing,” Poppy continued. “Here, we’re all so commingled. You would never know.” I looked at her posters celebrating Rex, the King of Mardi Gras, and I understood what she meant. Sometimes blackness and whiteness matters less than being of this place, of New Orleans.

Check back tomorrow for Poppy’s calas recipe.