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NOTE: What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

Edited Transcript

Subject: Ann Maylie Bruce
Date: November 6, 2008
Location: New Orleans, LA
Interviewer & Photographer: Sara Roahen

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Sara Roahen: This is Sara Roahen for the Southern Foodways Alliance. It’s Monday, November 6, 2008. I’m in New Orleans, Louisiana with Mrs. Ann Maylie Bruce, and if I could get you to say your name how you pronounce it and tell us your birth date, we’ll get started.

Ann Maylie Bruce: You’re exactly right—Ann Maylie Bruce, and I was born November 12, 1942, here in New Orleans.

Where?

At Baptist Hospital.

And what is your family heritage?

Mostly French. The Maylie side is 100-percent French. And my mother’s is Italian, both Northern Italian and Sicily…But I really grew up with the French cooking.

Well you really grew up with the French cooking because your family had a restaurant. Can you tell me what it was called and where it was located?

Originally it was called Maylie and Esparbé Café. And they—it was on, by the Poydras Market on Dryades Street in an old building, and there was a bar at first. Just a little café. And eventually they expanded into a restaurant. There were two friends, Mr. Maylie and Mr. Esparbé, that married two sisters from France. And Mrs. Maylie ran the household while Madam Esparbé did the cooking. She was the cook down there and she managed the kitchen. So the men eventually were the greeters and held court in the dining room…when it was a stag restaurant. And so women were not allowed in the dining room except on certain occasions, I understand, in little private rooms. But anyway, then when they died, my grandfather inherited the restaurant. He and his brother ran it for a while and then my father inherited the restaurant and he ran it until it closed in—I can't exactly remember—1986 I think it was, but I’m not sure. It was opened in 1876.

Do you know how long it was a stag restaurant?

Until World War I, because an aviator, a female aviator, Ruth Law, came in the restaurant one day; this young Air Force person came in with a friend of my grandfather’s, and the--the young man kept his hat on the whole time. And Madam Esparbé happened to come through and say to the young man, Don't you know it’s impolite to wear your hat in the restaurant--in a restaurant, and so she knocked the hat off and with that all the hair fell down. and it was Ruth Law. And so after that they started accepting women.

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Where did you live growing up?

In the olden days the families lived above businesses, so at the restaurant they lived above one—in one of the buildings in two apartments. And so there were two apartments up there and one of the cooks had lived there for a while and she had left. And so my parents decided to temporarily move down to the restaurant, and they did have one of the apartments and it was a temporary thing, but it ended up permanent because it was so convenient. So I basically grew up living on top of the restaurant in the Business District.

Did you like that?

It was very unusual, and now that I look back on it, yeah; it really was—I had so many opportunities. The Civic Theater was down the street. I got to go to all the plays at the Civic Theater. I grew up going to the Civic Theater plays and meeting all the actors and actresses because they would come over to the restaurant. I—at night sometimes I’d sit out on the balcony and I could hear all the music from Rampart Street—you know, jazz music. And I remember the Italian grocery stores and the Jewish shops on Rampart Street, and it was convenient to downtown. And I could walk—when I got a little older I could walk downtown by myself and visit Sears and Holmes—all those old stores—and then go to the movies. My friends would come down on Saturdays and we’d walk on down to the theater, the movie theaters, and then come on home and mother would bring them home in the afternoon. So it was unusual but it was a great. It was really a great opportunity because I got to experience so many things that nobody else did.

Did you take meals in the apartment, or did you eat in the restaurant?

I usually ate downstairs early and then went up to supposedly study. But now my—and my mother did not cook at all. My mother had no idea how to cook, so we ate at the restaurant and on weekends we’d go across the lake to Mandeville, and my mother did know how to cook one thing: Spam. A can, she’d open a can of Spam and put brown sugar on it and fry it at night on Sunday nights. And then over there we had Beulah, who came to cook lunch for us. So my mother used to always say, You’ll never be able to say I remember my mother’s cooking, but you’ll always be able to say I remember her sewing, because she made me clothes.

Would you order off the menu or would you just be brought food?

No, I--I could have what I wanted that was back there. Yeah, I could have whatever I wanted that was back there, and sometimes also they’d bring the food up to me. They’d send a little tray upstairs with food on it, something.

Do you remember what maybe some of your favorite things were?

Yes, I remember they made an apple custard type thing in little individual containers, apple something with a meringue on the top, and that was one of my most favorite things. I loved that. I liked the boiled beef—the bouille—and the beef stew. I remember I liked the beef stew a lot. And the shrimp rémoulade.

Can you describe for the record what the boiled beef, the bouille, is, and at what point in the meal you eat that?

The bouille is--is brisket; it’s boiled. And it’s I think sort of a peasant kind of thing in France. It’s boiled, and usually you can put in some potatoes and maybe a carrot or two, and then it’s boiled for hours and hours and hours until it’s very tender and almost falls apart. And then it’s served with the potato and some hot sauce, almost like a ketchup and horseradish sauce. And basically when--when I was in Vienna somebody was telling me about this wonderful dish—this wonderful dish—and it had a different name, but it was basically the same thing. So I think it’s pretty—it’s just soup meat they call it, because when you finish with it you save the broth and you make vegetable soup out of it. So that whenever you had the bouille you were always making vegetable soup too. That was the specialty of the restaurant, the boiled beef.

Was there always vegetable soup?

Yeah, and the—basically it was a table d’hôte restaurant where you came in and sat down and the food was brought to you. And so you maybe would start off with a little shrimp or something cold, and then a soup, salad, a fish course, a meat course, dessert and coffee.

Do you remember gumbo at the restaurant?

Yes, I remember gumbo and—the seafood gumbo. That’s the only type of gumbo that I remember being served down there. In the past few years, I’ve developed a--a real taste for chicken-andouille and turkey-andouille gumbo, but basically when I grew up down there it was the shellfish gumbo, the seafood gumbo.

I’m assuming it had shrimp in it. What else?

Shrimp, oysters, crabmeat, okra, and I think we--we have a recipe in the cookbook for it, but it was always the seafood gumbo that I remember down there served with a little bit of rice—real rice, not fake rice.

What’s the difference between real and fake rice?

Real rice, you cook it for 20 minutes. Fake rice—what, you cook it for a minute or so? Instant rice, and it’s hard.

It looks like you have a register here that you were showing me where …your grandfather wrote down what they served every night. It’s so precious. And we found a mention of filé gumbo. Do you think that seafood gumbo had filé in it maybe?

I would think so. Yeah, I would think so.

Now where did these recipes originate?

Some of these recipes originated from Madam Esparbé, who ran the kitchen in the early days, and I’m not sure which ones—I think in the cookbook some of them are attributed to her, but I guess they just were picked up along the way. And in the last cookbook, there’s some things—one thing in particular: they used to always serve shrimp, shrimp cocktail, and about sometime in the late ‘50s, early ‘60s, shrimp became very, very expensive. And when you’re selling a complete meal for $1.50—because that’s how much these meals were—Daddy decided that shrimp was too expensive. So a friend of his, Mildred Costa, had gone to Europe and she came back and she said, Why don't you serve what they serve in Europe—eggs rémoulade? And so they started serving stuffed eggs with the rémoulade sauce over it, and that’s one of the things that the restaurant then became very famous—famous where people would come in and order the eggs rémoulade.

Do you remember anything about the cooks in the restaurant when you were growing up?

They were all black cooks. Florence was—I remember her so very vividly. And she ran the kitchen and she also had a drinking problem. And every couple of weekends Daddy would have go to get her out of jail. But that was okay. They were--they were really good. They had no training; they just learned how to cook and they were all there for years. Bertie was there for years and years and years. There’s pictures of Albert, who was there. I’ve got pictures of Albert greeting, toasting King Zulu on Rampart Street, and it was--was the whole staff in the kitchen was black.

Do you think any recipes originated from them?

It—they could have. Yeah, things that they wanted to try to experiment with, yeah. I think Bertie’s—there’s a recipe that’s attributed to Bertie in one of the cookbooks, and it might be Bertie’s Bread Pudding or Bertie’s—something that—I’ll have to look that up.

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Do you make seafood gumbo ever?

Occasionally, usually during Lent.

And what kind of recipe do you use?

I use this recipe in—no, I don't. I use the recipe from Richard Collins. But I also do gumbo z’herbes, which I don't think the restaurant ever did. And when I cooked it at the Hermann Grima House (an historical site in the French Quarter)—we did open hearth cooking at the Hermann Grima House—which they still do, and we discovered—my team really, we discovered this green gumbo, and we also discovered that it was—. You had as a Catholic household, you cooked it on Good Friday and you had—you ate it on Good Friday and it had no meat in it—strictly the greens, the herbs, and you had to put at least nine herbs or nine greens in the gumbo, and for every herb--for every green you put in the gumbo you would make a new friend the following year. And the first time I made it down at the Hermann Grima House and brought it home to my husband to eat for dinner, when it was—when he was finished I said, How did you like it? And he said, If you like grass you’re going to love this gumbo. And of that was many, many years ago—about 25 years ago—and so I worked up to, now I have 14 greens in the gumbo and use lots of pepper, seasoning pepper, 19th century kitchen pepper. I use a lot of that.

What do you mean by that?

It’s a recipe I got somewhere while cooking at the Hermann Grima House which has got pepper and spices and herbs, and it’s really-- it’s a highly seasoned little kind of—well today you might call it a rub or something. And you put some of that in and that--that jazzes up the taste definitely. And then later on, like the following day, then you can put potatoes in it, and every year—now I say I’m making 14 new friends a year, and every time I do meet somebody I love to say, The gumbo z’herbes is working; it’s kicked in. But we went to Vienna one year and I took a little tiny thing. We spent about two or three months there, and I took a little container of 19th century kitchen pepper with me. And when I got to Vienna on Holy Thursday I went to the markets, and I don't speak German. So I’d have to point at, you know, like radishes; point, There—well, little bag of those, a bunch of those, and I collected my greens. And at--at one point somebody tried to take the tops off the carrots. No, no, no! Give me the tops. I was more concerned about the green than the vegetable. And I came home and I had a little teeny-weeny kitchen and I cooked up the gumbo z’herbes—cooked it up, cooked it up, went out and bought some bread. And when Bob came back on Good Friday night he walked in and I had the gumbo z’herbes waiting. And he said I don't believe this. I do not believe I’ve come all the way to Austria and I’ve got to eat this damned stuff. [Laughs] But—and I have pictures of him sitting there eating it, but it’s--it’s funny, because I make it now and I give it to friends. And I say for every green you eat, you make another friend.

And Leah Chase makes it too. Leah Chase down at Dooky Chase’s. But she does it—hers is the best mainly because she makes it on Holy Thursday and they empty out the icebox in preparation for Good Friday. So you put chicken, you put sausage, you put beef, you put all the stuff that—the meat, you throw it all in the gumbo and it’s wonderful. So hers is the best, but we couldn’t—as a Catholic you couldn’t eat it on Good Friday because it had meat in it.

Do you have very specific greens that you use for those 14?

Just about. It gets hard. You have, like, parsley. I use celery leaves, carrot leaves, radish leaves, spinach, beet greens, thyme from the thyme bushes…the different herbs, the green herbs—green onions. And I’ve got--I’ve got it up to 14.

Do you use mustards and collards?

Oh yes, I forgot that. Oh very definitely yeah.

I guess you have a lot of cooking to do even after that because you have all the vegetables that all the greens were attached to.

Exactly. You have a beet salad that night. And the hardest part is chopping it all—cleaning it, because it’s dirty. Those greens are filthy.

Can you tell me a little bit about the process, what you—what you actually do with the greens?

You go out and you get the greens and then you wash them. And greens—there are lots of greens, when you get mustard greens, collard greens, turnip greens. And you’ve got a kitchen full of greens, and they have to be washed because they’re dirty, and then you chop and you don't throw them in the Cuisinart. You chop by hand, and you chop—I separate all the little greens until I get ready to cook them, and you make a little roux and you put the greens in with the kitchen pepper and onions and just cook and cook and cook. Yes, you make it the day before. You could make it a couple of days before, and really with age it gets a little bit better. You make a tremendous pot. You have to make a tremendous pot of it, so then you freeze—I freeze it and we eat a little bit here and a little bit there, and by July I throw what’s left out. [Laughs]

What do you feel when you’re making that for your Good Friday celebration?

I absolutely loved it--love it, because I feel like I’m carrying on a tradition, and not many people I know do that. And I get to share some of this with them, especially my neighbors. And I--I just like carrying on these traditions.

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