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Camellia Beans by DAVID W. BROWN

kitchen for the downtrodden? Both serve red beans and rice. Ravenous carnivore or devout vegan? You guessed it. “Everybody from our area eats and enjoys red beans & rice,” says Vince, “and usually they do so with others for some type of gathering. That’s one of the things I tell my team all the time: We don’t sell beans in a bag. We sell the opportunity for friends and family and loved ones to come together and enjoy a meal. It’s something that we are really proud of.” The Shelf Where It Happens Any reader of this magazine is likely to close each issue, reflect for a moment and say: “Those people at Rouses are obsessed with food.” You’re not wrong. When we aren’t writing about it, we are eating it. When we aren’t eating it, we are checking the shelves just to see what’s new and what’s changed. Before we open a store in a new market, we eat at every restaurant, talk to the locals, live in the community, see what they eat, and eat it ourselves. For Rouses, food is everything — but not just any food. We want the best food at the best prices, and more than anything else, we love local products. You can’t get much more local than Camellia. When you bought your red beans from Rouses, that’s almost certainly the pack you picked up — and not just today, but any time over the last 60 years! Rouses Markets has proudly worked with L.H. Hayward & Co. to carry their products even when we were but a single small store, and Anthony Rouse himself — the founder of the company — was the one on his hands and knees unpacking boxes of Camellia Brand red beans and stocking the shelves. His son, Donald, would later do the same thing, and his grandson, Donny, would again do the same. Three generations of the Rouse family are proudly part of the four-generation Hayward legacy.

Like so many Louisiana culinary success stories, Camellia Brand beans began at the French Market. In 1850, a ship carrying a West Indies immigrant named Sawyer Hayward docked in the port of New Orleans. Industrious and looking to make a living for his family, he grew cotton, but soon moved into dry goods and beans, which he sold to French Market vendors. Even then the French Market was old — it had been the city’s produce hub for nearly 60 years. And Sawyer’s crops were a success.

The Monday Night Meal For generations in the city of New Orleans, Monday was laundry day, which meant if you were a homemaker tied up with the wash from dawn to dusk, you needed a meal that could take care of itself. Camellia was there to help. Red beans and rice thus became a Monday night tradition in the city: The beans could sit all day on the back burner, with the remains of Sunday’s ham simmering inside the pot and infusing the beans with a savory flavor. When the laundry was done, so too was dinner. The meal would eventually become as emblematic of the city as Mardi Gras, humidity and Louis Armstrong (who signed his letters Red Beans and Ricely Yours). “When people think of New Orleans,” Vince says,“ they think about red beans and rice. It’s genuinely one of the many things that makes the city a very special place, because the dish of red beans spans all divides.” Indeed, it is a food that unites, in a city for which unity is everything. It crosses cultures and classes, cares not for one’s education or upbringing. There aren’t many meals that can feed a whole family for five dollars: The economy goes up, the economy goes down, and red beans and rice doesn’t notice; it is always there to keep bellies full. The most expensive restaurant in town, or a soup

“My family came to the United States through the Caribbean islands,” says Vince Hayward, the CEO of L.H. Hayward & Co., which owns Camellia. “It is there, we surmise, that they gained an appreciation for beans, how to cook them, how to eat them, the health benefits — and the city of New Orleans was a great melting pot of its time with an assimi- lation of many cultures, many of which had beans as a big part of their traditions.” Sawyer’s son and grandson, Lucius Sr. and Jr., eventually joined the now-burgeoning business of beans, and in 1923 they founded L.H. Hayward & Co., naming their brand Camellia after the favorite flower of Lucius Jr.’s wife, Elizabeth. That same year, the company moved into an old cotton warehouse on Poydras and South Front streets in New Orleans — present-day Convention Center Boulevard. At the time, you bought beans in brown paper bags that were filled with a scoop from big burlap sacks. With supermarkets growing in popularity in the 1940s, William Gordon Hayward, son of Lucius Jr., had a stroke of genius: Why not pack them in store-ready, individual, one-pound bags? Gordon’s revolutionary cellophane packages, each adorned with a camellia flower, soon became synonymous with premium-quality beans.

28 MARCH•APRIL 2020