Recipes Lost And Rewritten

My Thursday newspaper, The Times Picayune, has a section every week on food. Given that New Orleans is known as a food city and that we think about (and eat) food too much, it is appropriate to have a special section.
Well, today's featured an article about lost recipes. That is, recipes the residents lost in the flood. Given that 80% of homes in New Orleans flooded, mostly heavily, and that most people lost much or all of their housing contents, the recipe boxes and books are largely gone as well. This is too bad, because people here have created their own recipes and have passed them down to their children or other family members since the first days of the city. The "home food" in New Orleans is excellent. One can be assured that if he or she eats a meal in a home here the cooking will be excellent. And many of the things eaten are home recipes.
Nothing can be done to recapture those, except perhaps wait to see if those people who survived the storm rewrite the ones they know from memory. So many of the unique homes recipes have been lost forever. But the recipes from cookbooks are another story. The article in today's paper was directed at the retrieval of treasured cookbooks from local chefs, people, and the restaurants of New Orleans.
An effort is being made now by publishers here to reissue or republish some of the great old classic cookbooks that are out of print, and now out of homes after the hurricane washed them away to the food graveyard. This may seem trivial to you, but in New Orleans we often define ourselves by three things- our unique culture, our music and festivals and our food. To lose our recipes is to lose a leg or two of the city's soul. And it's not a stretch to say that without our recipes and food we are just another nameless, faceless, homogenized American city.
My home wasn't flooded so I still have my favorite local cookbooks, my mother's and grandma's recipes. I know if I had lost them in the storm I would have noticed- noticed often and felt less because of it. It's good news to us to hear that we can replace our local cookbooks, and perhaps a motivation to sit down and reconstruct those lost personal recipes. Am I (finally) making any sense in my E mail to you? From the "At Least He Isn't A Golddigger" department come news that a 33-year-old man in northern Malaysia has married a 104-year-old woman, saying "mutual respect and friendship" had turned to love. It was Muhamad Noor Che Musa's first marriage and his wife's 21st ( Oh..Maybe she is the gold digger?), according to The Star newspaper which cited a report in the Malaysian media recently.
Muhamad, an ex-army serviceman said he found peace and a sense of belonging after meeting Wook Kundor, whom he said he initially sympathized with because she was childless, old and alone. "I am not after her money, as she is poor," Muhamad reportedly said. My God! If Muhamad is after her body....uh....I don't even want to imagine it.
"Before meeting Wook, I never stayed in one place for long." He said he hoped to help his new bride to master Roman script while she taught him Islamic religious knowledge. The report did not say if any of Wook's previous 20 husbands are still alive, but if they are they probably wish they weren't.
Since Malaysian Muslim men are allowed by their religion to take up to four wives at a time, these reports of women who marry more than once are rare. Hmmmmmmmm Muslim women do not practice polygamy. Wook must just be hot to trot. But at age 104, how much fuel can Wook have left in her tank? They better hurry up with that honeymoon..