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MEANWHILE IN NEW ORLEANS…

ARROW-CIRCLE-RIGHT Back in college, I knew there was something different about my New Orleans upbringing the first time I suggested to someone that we cross the street to the “neutral ground.” He looked at me as if I were from Mars and asked, “The what? Do you mean the median?” Until that moment, I don’t believe I’d heard that word before. I only knew that grassy strip as the neutral ground. The same style of New Orleans idiosyncrasy holds true when it comes to shallots vs. green onions. First as a student and later as a teacher, I would hold up the green shoots in question and ask the assembled: “What do you call this?” Inevitably, non-New Orleanians would answer “green onions” or “scallions,” while locals definitively pronounced them “shallots.” This anomaly passed all class and neighborhood distinctions. If you grew up anywhere in New Orleans, those green onions were shallots! While a little historical research quickly yields several plausible explanations for our neutral ground vernacular, the same does not hold true for the shallot. As a child, I first learned about those little bulb onions, French shallots, from Julia Child on PBS. Even then I was puzzled, but no one could offer an explanation why — despite what Julia said — in New Orleans green onions are shallots. Then one year I planted French shallots in my garden, and up from the ground came green shoots that looked and tasted much like green onions. That’s when it dawned on me that those original French settlers must have brought root vegetables and seeds with them to plant in New Orleans. It seems very plausible that, when old Creole recipes called for shallots, they were using the green, shallot tops, likely from their own gardens. Some Creole recipes even specified using only the green shallot tops while discarding the white bottoms with roots. So…why do we call green onions shallots? Let’s just say it’s a neutral ground kind of thing! – Poppy Tooker, Producer and Host of “Louisiana Eats!”

Cookin’ on Hwy. 1 By Tim Acosta, Advertising & Marketing Director

A s we’ve been gearing up for our 100 Years of City Produce celebration, we’ve spent a lot of time talking about shallots. While some may argue that what much of Louisiana calls a shallot is actually a spring onion, I challenge anyone to convince the farmers in Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes, where sprawling fields of shallots were grown for generations. In photos, the shallots really are a sight to behold, with their giant green onion-like stalks and flowering bulbs. We looked through the Packer Produce Red Book from 1927, which is like a phone book for farmers. It lists scallions and shallots, but no spring onions. We also looked at our old City Produce ad, which screams: “All shallot growers, we are now buying Shallots bunched or in the field, see us before you sell!” The City Produce phone number was only a few digits long. My father-in-law and our founder, Anthony J. Rouse, Sr., worked at the T&P Shed washing and sorting shallots for his dad’s company, City Produce, and he was always telling old stories about loading shallots onto the railcars in Thibodaux to be shipped north. I can remember passing fields of shallots in Chackbay and Schriever, and seeing the old trucks parked beneath the stately oak trees, loaded down with bushels of shallots

alongside crisp heads of cabbage and other vegetables. Mr. Anthony really was a farmer at heart; he had his own backyard garden. I would sometimes help with harvesting the shallots. We would separate them into similar sizes, and secure them into a neat bunch with a blue rubber band. (They still bunch them that way today.) What the family didn’t need, Mr. Anthony sent to the Thibodaux store. All of this talk about old-time shallots has our produce team working with today’s growers to regionally source spring bulb shallots throughout the year. Stay tuned.

ARROW-CIRCLE-RIGHT Elmer’s CheeWees are a snack made in New Orleans. Unlike most cheese curls, they are baked instead of fried. The Green Onion flavor is crafted using a blend of aged sharp cheese and Elmer’s own mild, sweet green onion spices.

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