Essence Of Emeril
Emeril Lagasse wasn't always the ragin' Cajun he plays on TV. On a homecoming trip to New England, he reveals a more soulful side.
The accent gives him away.
You might expect America's most famous Creole-Acadian chef to speak in a bayou drawl. But when Emeril Lagasse shows his adoring TV audiences how to "gahnish" a dish with "pahsley," or "kick it up a nawtch" with "gahlic," you don't have to be Henry Higgins to know it's not the Big Easy talking. Lagasse's roots lie in a world far from the languor of New Orleans, where he owns the restaurants Emeril's, Nola and Delmonico, and far from the glamour of television: They lie in Fall River, Massachusetts, a hardscrabble mill city of 93,000 on an arm of the Narragansett Bay. It's been 23 years since he crossed the Braga Bridge to seek his fortune elsewhere, but Lagasse hasn't forgotten, and recently he returned to visit the people, and the food, of his youth.
Fall River is a city of bricks and steeples, the mill and the church. A century ago, 26,000 textile workers lived here in a patchwork of immigrant villages: Irish; Polish; French-Canadian like Emeril's father, John Lagasse, who spent 35 years in the mills; and Portuguese like Emeril's mother, Hilda Medeiros Lagasse, who worked in a curtain factory and raised three children. Today the mills stand idle, and of the city's old ethnic presences, Portuguese is the most visible. Walk down Columbia Street, past the iron lampposts and triple-decker houses, and you enter a world of old women in black with lace mantillas, travel agencies touting specials to the Azores, and stores like Chaves Market selling everything from dried salt cod and Vinho Verde to ornate porcelain samovars.
Thanks to his mother, Lagasse was brought up "Portuguese all the way," he says--speaking the language, attending Santo Christo Church, playing in what he calls a "Portuguese oompah-pah band." And falling in love with the food. These days, fans of Emeril Live, his show on the Food Network, relish Hilda's drop-in visits to supervise her son, but 30 years ago, in the modest wood-frame house on Baker Street, it was the son who watched the mother--an unusually eager boy standing on a little bench at the counter, learning how to roll dough or soak dried cod. Hilda got Emeril his first kitchen job, at Carreiros Barcelos Bakery (the Moonlight Bakery back then), washing pots and pans after school at the age of 10. Hard work started young in Fall River, but for a boy whose improbable two heroes were Red Sox great Carl Yastrzemski and Julia Child, working in a kitchen offered something special. "The bakers took a liking to me," Lagasse explains. "They let me start baking." One of the bakery's current owners, Margarida Botelho, proudly displays the racks of massa and corn bread, and the pastries that were Emeril's favorites: malassadas, fried dough in a pretzel-like weave, and queijadas, cupcake-shaped tarts filled with custard or coconut.
After work young Emeril would run down the block for a chouriço sandwich at Billy's Café. Fall River serves up this peppery sausage in every conceivable form: simmered in soups, strewn on pizzas or stuffed into peppers, piled on a platter with melted cheese, splashed with Portuguese moonshine and set aflame, à Bombeiro, fireman style. At Billy's, where regulars sit around smoking up a storm and razzing each other, your sandwich comes heaped with sliced sausage and fries. "There's not a lot of vegetables when you eat in Fall River," Lagasse says with a laugh.
Life in Lagasse's Fall River revolved around the St. John's Athletic Club, a restaurant and lounge where even now a frosted mug of beer costs $1.10, rules for pool players adorn the wall ("#7--no profanity"), and huge plates of fried squid rings get kicked up a notch with pickled hot peppers. Emeril and his family lived right next door. "I'd wake up and tumble out of the house into this major Portuguese world," he recalls. He'd wander into the kitchen at St. John's, where Ines de Costa showed him how to fry chouriço and stuff quahogs. "Between her and my mother, it was like a tennis game: back and forth, watching the two of them cook." Asked in turn about the kale soup her famous protégé credits her with, de Costa, a feisty woman in her sixties, grins. "The way he does it," she teases, "it's not Portuguese!" But then she turns serious. "God gave Emeril a gift," she says. "Wherever he goes, good food follows."
And Fall River's good food has followed Lagasse to this day. While the plat du jour on Emeril Live may be a foie gras and porcini mushroom stew with mascarpone dumplings, Lagasse's chef-as-regular-guy persona goes straight back to the homey foods of his Fall River boyhood. Foods like the Coney Island hot dogs at the King Philip Lunch Counter ("An orange soda and two Coney Islands--man, that was heaven!"), or the breakfast of corned beef hash at Al Mac's, a vintage stainless-steel diner. Or the after-school Italian grinder he'd get at Marzilli's, where the bread and pizzas are baked in an antique brick oven so cavernous a 20-foot-long pizza peel hangs at the ready.
Back home in New Orleans after his recent trip, Lagasse developed the recipes on these pages to cook up old New England memories. There's Fall River boiled dinner--"a Dad memory," he says, speaking of his father, who cooked it slow and served it with plenty of mustard--and Madeira-braised short ribs, which reminds him of the days when grapes grew in every backyard and people made wine in their cellars. Lagasse's rice pudding conjures up the light and lemony version at Lusitano, a favorite of his mother's, a place that typifies the Fall River Portuguese passion for hearty food. On Saturday nights, Lusitano swoons to the bittersweet melodies of fado music, and if you order the lavish bife à Portuguesa, owner Maria Soares will tell you how she and her husband Horacio fretted over substituting regular ham for the slice of presunto on top. It's tradition, she explains, and they wanted to do it right.
"If you understand a tradition," Lagasse likes to say, "you'll understand the people. Then you can understand the food. It's a triangle." The Fall River Portuguese cling to the language, music and food of the old country, and for those who move on, as Lagasse did, Fall River itself becomes another home to love from afar, the more powerfully for knowing there will be no going back. On foggy mornings, the Braga Bridge climbs steeply into the dense mist and disappears, so dramatically it seems less a bridge than an illusion, or a metaphor. The Portuguese sometimes call it the Ponte da Saudade. "Saudade is what people feel when they're far from home," Lagasse explains. "They go to a fado house and eat and drink and listen to the music, and feel the love." Ponte da Saudade. The bridge of heartache.
Local sausage makers like Furtado's often ship abroad to American soldiers, sons and daughters of Fall River for whom chouriço and linguiça truly are links to home. It's testimony to the deep nourishment of food, which tells you who you are, no matter where you are. Every time Lagasse livens up a dish with a bit of chouriço, or substitutes codfish in a Louisiana crab cake, he's paying tribute--and working out his personal saudade.
"I built on the tradition of Fall River," he says. "I never disrespected it. And I kept it close to my heart."
Rand Richards is the author of The Last to Go (Harcourt Brace) and Big As Life (Dial Press). He lives in Connecticut.
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