Elizabeth Williams is the founder of the Southern Food & Beverage Museum (SoFAB). The museum on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard has displays on food and culture from across the southeastern U.S. SoFAB is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, and part of that is releasing its first cookbook, the “SoFAB Cookbook,” by Williams and Maddie Hayes. It features more than 100 recipes for dishes and cocktails, from Tennessee Williams’s favorite Key lime pie to Texas brisket, a Kentucky Hot Brown sandwich, South Carolina she-crab soup and plenty from New Orleans and Louisiana. For more information, visit southernfood.org.
Gambit: What are your thoughts on reaching the museum’s 20th anniversary?
Elizabeth Williams: The museum is a totally different animal than we expected when we first started. It’s taken on its own life, which is a really good thing because that’s what you want. As a founder you want it to be able to go on without you. It’s been a wonderful ride.
When we first started, we were making it up as we went along. There aren’t a lot of guidelines. Everyone knows about art museums. There’s one in every town practically. But people don’t know what a food museum is. That gave us a lot of freedom.
Food is everything. It’s life. This is something everyone experiences. As much as art is a wonderful addition to the world, you could live without it. Food is so quotidian that people forget about it and take it for granted. SoFAB represents the place that food has in our culture. It’s everything from fast food and comfort food to haute cuisine. We also did an exhibit on hunger and photographs of starving people.
There’s a sense that ‘this relates to me.’ It’s something everyone can identify with. It’s different than what you find in other museums. There are a few different categories of responses we’ve gotten. People who are of retirement age often feel very nostalgic. They remember things like old packaging or an old refrigerator, like one of the first refrigerators. They enjoy it as a memory.
Young people, and I am talking from children to their early 20s, already think food is important. You see this change in the culture. They’re used to the Food Network and movies about chefs and “The Bear.” All of that is part of the culture younger people grew up with. They are not as amazed with the idea of the museum. They want to talk about food itself. They have a totally different attitude and are interested in the history and how we got here. They like old tools. They’re like, “Oh my god, this is an early food processor.” It gives them the sense that people were always doing this. We find our gadget table is one of the most popular exhibits.
Gambit: How do the museum and cookbook see the South?
Williams: We decided to take politics out of our conception of the South. When (Dwight) Eisenhower came back from World War II, he had experienced the Autobahn in Germany, which was a series of highways that connected the whole country. He decided we need to have a federal highway system like that in the U.S. They took the four quadrants and looked at the geography and how to put it together. We stole that idea. This is the southeast of the U.S. It’s not the Mason-Dixon line. We also didn’t cut any state in half or eliminate it if it wasn’t fully in the quadrant. That’s how you get Texas. Part of east Texas is very Southern, yet there’s a lot of Texas that has different influences.
The South is changing all the time. We’re constantly having new immigrants, and by that I mean from places other than the U.S. but also places not the South. If you’re from Minnesota and you move to the South, you have a food culture that you’re bringing to the South. You’re making your food in the South, so it’s Southern food. That’s changing our food. So we wanted something that would reflect that.
A new cohort of diners has discovered the culinary gem tucked away in Audubon Park since Dickie Brennan & Co. took over operations last year.
Gambit: What types of recipes does it include?
Williams: We wanted to have some unknown recipes and recognize people like (Thomas Jefferson’s enslaved chef) James Hemings and (New Orleans’ first TV cooking personality) Lena Richard. We also asked our friends, chefs and museum volunteers and board members. Not everything needs to be cheffy. So we have a really eclectic blend of recipes.
One classic is the Brennan’s recipe for bananas Foster. That’s a 20th-century recipe. It is cheffy, but it’s easy enough that you can do it at home. It’s come to be part of the canon of the food of New Orleans.
At the same time, we have Serigne Mbaye’s recipe for hibiscus tea. That’s like the precursor to red drink. It’s straight from a person who was raised in Senegal and is here in New Orleans and just won a James Beard award.
We have board members who gave us recipes. Julia Johnston gave us all sorts of mango recipes. She lives in Florida.
The fried catfish with Comeback sauce is at the same time traditional and kind of modern. They use masa instead of flour to fry the catfish. Dijon mustard is in the Comeback sauce, which is not traditional.
We do talk about the history of SoFAB in the cookbook. It’s a little bit of our history. We tell our story and say this is why we’re here, and then we say please join us at the table and experience all these things.
Keep up with the latest at calendar.gambitweekly.com.