This week the first graders immersed themselves in the food culture of New Orleans, Ms. Webb’s hometown! The read aloud was Nancy Parker’s book The Adventures of Yat and Dat: What’s Cookin’? about two birds who travel around the city sampling the best foods New Orleans has to offer at all the famous restaurants, from barbeque shrimp to beignets to gumbo to étouffée and crawfish.
In class we ate a vegan version of red beans and rice, garnishing our meal together with fresh parsley, thyme, and oregano. It was impressive how some of our first grade chefs were able to lick their kit containers totally clean! While the dish is indisputably delicious, red beans and rice also expresses the painful legacy of colonization, slavery, and the history of the American South with the West African, French, Spanish, Caribbean, and Indigenous influences that make up Creole cuisine.
We watched a short film from Eater called How New Orleans Came to Make Red Beans and Rice a City Wide Staple and learned that red beans and rice was traditionally cooked on Mondays using the leftover pork bones from Sunday dinner. Largely women of color who did the domestic labor would do the wash on Mondays, so red beans, which can cook unattended for hours, was a perfect meal to prepare on a busy day of the week. We learned that red beans and rice was the favorite food of famous jazz musician and New Orleans native Louis Armstrong, who signed his correspondence with “red beans and ricely yours.” At the end of class we held a Zoom dance party watching him and his band perform a rousing rendition of “When the Saints Go Marching In.”
