'There were some wealthy people here in the 1800s,' she says, 'but the majority of the population certainly was not - especially since we had such a huge immigrant population. This reinvention of less-than-ideal materials - tough meat, stale bread - into delicious meals is a New Orleans tradition, Nobles says. The Italian version, she says, is stuffed with garlic and 'plopped inside a big pot of what we call 'red gravy' down here' - red marinara sauce, and it 'cooks for hours and hours, because it's a tough piece of meat.' Served over spaghetti, the dish is a Creole-Italian masterpiece, she writes. The French version is usually stuffed with pork fat and baked for many hours, Nobles explains. Nobles' cookbook also includes recipes for daube, a braised cut of tough beef roast. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Reilly's New Orleans Author Cynthia Lejeune Nobles That includes a Sicilian grandmother, a Cajun widower and an exotic dancer who eats canned Spanish rice and wine cakes.Ĭlose overlay Buy Featured Book Title A Confederacy of Dunces Cookbook Subtitle Recipes from Ignatius J. And food becomes another character in this observational satire - along with other oddball, 'starkly colloquial' characters defined, in part, by their eating habits. Indeed, Ignatius is a glutton in a city known for its legendary cuisine. The book offers recipes for the fare of Ignatius and his cohorts. 'He also likes to eat,' says Cynthia LeJeune Nobles, a food history writer, columnist for the Baton Rouge Advocate and author of A Confederacy of Dunces Cookbook. Reilly, an over-educated, rotund 30-year-old who lives with his mother in a tiny house and goes about ranting against the modern world while selling hot dogs from his pushcart.

Set in New Orleans in the 1960s, the novel centers around Ignatius J. Now, a new cookbook looks at the food and culture that help define the characters in the Pulitzer Prize-winning book. A Confederacy of Dunces has been called a love letter to New Orleans and hailed as a modern comedic classic.

A confederacy of dunces hardcover