True Blood: Eats, Drinks and Bites from Bon Temps is a TV tie-in book that seems like a cross between The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer and a southern community cookbook like Talk About Good!
The recipes are "contributed" by show characters like the main character, mind-reader waitress Sookie Stackhouse (Crawfish Dip, Melt My Brother's Heart Tuna Melt), her best friend Tara Thornton (Blackened [Rib-]Eye) and psychic short-order cook Lafayette (Get You Some Wings and Fly Away, Ruby Jean Hash). Even the vampires of the show share recipes. Sookie's sometime love interest Bill Compton reveals his Chicken Comes Home to Roost entree and vampire Pam offers her Vampade, perfect for a long night of Eric Northman watching at Fangtasia.
As we're already True Blood fans (Exhibit A: Our True Blood TV Dinner), we were an easy sell for this cookbook. But when we saw that the recipe developer for True Blood was none other than Marcelle Bienvenu--author of Cooking Up a Storm: Recipes Lost and Found from The Times-Picayune of New Orleans and Who's Your Mama, Are You Catholic, and Can You Make a Roux? and an instructor at the Chef John Folse Culinary Institute at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, Louisiana--we got truly excited because we knew the recipes in this tongue-in-cheek tome would work.
We spoke to Bienvenu about developing the recipes, southern Louisiana cuisine, and her last meal before becoming a vampire.
Epicurious: Were you a True Blood fan before working on this project?
Marcelle Bienvenu: No, not really. I had heard about it. At school where I teach all week, I don't have HBO, but I heard the students talking about it. So when they [the publishers] called, I went, "I don't know, vampires? I don't know, I'd have to think about that." They sent me the series, so we went through the series and made notes of every time some kind of food was mentioned in the episodes. We had a long list to work from. I had no idea when I took it on that a lot of it is set at Merlotte's and then there's the two bars and all this. It was really kind of fascinating to watch it, to see how well they showcase south Louisiana, Louisiana food.
Epicurious: With the show set near Shreveport in northern Louisiana, did you look at regional difference in the state's cuisine?
MB: North Louisiana and South Louisiana can be really different. So although the [show's] set is near Shreveport, I really kind of felt that it was more southern Louisiana than anything. But a lot of the stuff is traditionally just southern, Deep South: corn bread and biscuits and sausages and stuff. So I just had to rely on what I had in my repertoire and what I could think of that was really more authentic than anything else.
Epicurious: With Louisiana constantly being the backdrop for fictionalized tales of the supernatural, do you think there is some kind idealized Louisiana cuisine?
MB: I really am amazed. Even 30 years ago with Paul Prudhomme preaching the gospel of south Louisiana food, I said "Oh, it's just going to be a faddish thing." I keep being so surprised that people are still curious about our food.
I think they think there's this mystique about something as simple as making a gumbo. Wherever I travel they go, "Tell us how you make your gumbo?" and I go, "It's only flour and oil to make your roux, and then you put some stock and you put whatever." And they're in some kind of awe.
In the last few years, southern cuisine has become very popular, and I think it's kind of fun because when you think about southern food, especially in south Louisiana, it's all very humble ingredients: cornbread, seafood, which is in abundance all along the Gulf rim and the Atlantic coast. I think people are just curious and entranced about what we do with such humble ingredients: rice, ham, collard greens.
Epicurious: What are some of your favorite recipes in this book?
MB: The cover photo of the cake I think was a wonderful idea. We do gumbos, we do a jambalaya, we do onion rings, and we do cole slaw and hush puppies, fried chicken, blackened rib eye, snapper, all kinds of things that are classic, traditional dishes. We just have to kind of jazz them up a little bit. But it's real food.
Everybody always says, "What are you going to put in the book, a bloody Mary?" (which we do have). I say "No, they really talk about real food in the series."
The fun thing was doing the drinks because we had a Tequila Moonrise. We have a Moonshine Rising. There's a thing called Lovin' in the Coven. And they're real drinks. The only thing that I found odd was that we had to use that Tru Blood drink that's sold like soda. We had to make a faux mix to look and taste like the bottled drink. We made it with carbonated orange soda, grenadine, and lemon juice.
Epicurious: Is this the first cookbook based on a fictional thing you've written?
MB: Yes. It was fun. I'm glad they found me. Now I'm a big fan of true blood. I have to get HBO so I can keep up.
Epicurious: Finally, if a vampire was going to turn you tomorrow, what would be your last meal as a human?
MB: I think I would take a gumbo and potato salad on the side. Then I'd have bread pudding. And I'd probably start with a co*cktail, and it would have to be a cool gin and tonic with a good splash of lime juice.
