26
MY
ROUSES
EVERYDAY
JULY | AUGUST 2014
real person dressed as a stuffed animal as its
mascot, it’s not a po-boy.
If the lettuce was factory shredded, the
gravy came from a powdered mix, or the
crawfish came from China, it’s not a po-boy.
A po-boy is not vegan, free range, kosher,
gluten-free, meta, uber, postmodern or
millennial.
A po-boy leaves a big messy carbon
footprint.
A real po-boy just doesn’t give a damn what
you think it is.
Everyone has their own idea of what a po-
boy is. And maybe that’s OK. But maybe
not; the future of this endangered cultural
touchstone should not be left vulnerable to
cultural appropriators, corporate profiteers,
culinary school graduates and other assorted
philistines and defilers. Think: Quizno’s.
Maybe we should be more like the French
and make rules and standards to protect the
integrity of the po-boy. (For one, they could
tell us how to say and spell it.)
But there is no such council to preserve and
protect the po-boy so a clear and perfect
definition eluded us in the past, eludes us
now, shape-shifts and morphs into the
future with all sorts of gustatory possibilities
finding it’s way between the sliced halves of
these loaves of joy.
In the end, to understand the true essence
of a po-boy, all you need to know is how it
got its name.
True story:When theNewOrleans streetcar
company hired outsiders to break the will of
striking streetcar operators in 1929, a crowd
of 10,000 gathered downtown to support
the laborers. The first car out of the barn
was set on fire while the throngs cheered.
The strike dragged on. Tension beset New
Orleans as hundreds of families began to
suffer. Restaurant owners, and brothers,
Bennie and Clovis Martin had both once
been streetcar conductors. In a show of
solidarity, they began stuffing loaves of
French bread with meats, cheeses and
whatever nutrition was available, and began
to give them to the strikers.
Bennie and Clovis, upon seeing their proud
but weathered customers approach their
door, would call out to their own
workers: ‘Here comes another
poor boy.’
And the essence of New
Orleans was never the
same.
The hoagie has no
such pedigree. The sub
has no such valorous
beginnings. Though a
million barfights have
occurred over cheesesteaks
in Philadelphia, they were
not for noble causes but likely because the
Eagles blew another game to the Cowboys.
What other food product here in these
United States or elsewhere across this planet
got its name from an incident wherein the
powerless and disenfranchised spoke truth
to power, took righteous justice into their
own hands, and exacted a blood oath from
the powers that be?
What other meal can claim provenance
from the timeless struggle for freedom,
justice and equality; what food was born
from the loins of history’s most notorious
conflict: Man’s inhumanity towards
mankind.
I ask you.
And if that’s not enough to convey more
“essence” in heaps and doses upon this
proud New Orleans tradition, let me offer
this as lagniappe in closing:
Name one other food that, upon ordering
it in a restaurant, prompts a pretty little
waitress to fix her gaze upon yours to
inquire: Would you like that dressed?
Or not?
That, my fellow Americans, is a po-boy,
essence and more.
the
Gulf Coast
issue
photo by
Frank Aymami
