from the Southern Food and Beverage Museum
BELLES CALAS
By Liz Williams

“Calas, belles calas, tout chauds!” While that cry can no longer be heard in the streets of New Orleans, it can certainly be heard wherever Poppy Tooker is demonstrating calas. Poppy is the head of the local Slow Food Convivium and a noted proponent of local cookery. She is credited with reviving this rice fritter from the brink of oblivion through her enthusiastic inclusion of the cala in her cooking classes and demonstrations. She reminds those who have almost forgotten and teaches a new generation about the heritage of the foods of the city.

Calas are not yet lost to memory.Many people eating Poppy’s calas are transported back to the kitchens of their late mothers, grandmothers and aunts. Some remember the sweet calas, dusted with powdered sugar and eaten with a cup of café au lait for breakfast. I recall the savory calas served in place of bread with lunch at my great grandmother’s house in theTreme, sometimes mixed with bits of ham or sausage leftover from the night before. In both forms, they reflected the thrift and good taste of Creole cuisine.

Rice fritters appear in old French “receipt” books from as early as the seventeenth century, but, inNewOrleans, calas weremade and distributed primarily by people of African descent. They are the descendent of a cooked rice fritter found inWest Africa and are similarly named in several West African languages—kárá, for example, in theNupe language ofmodern- day Nigeria. Although generally cooked and eaten at home, the calas of New Orleans were also street food sold by women of African descent, some of themslaves earningmoney to buy their freedom.Over time, calas gained easy acceptance as part of French Creole tradition. And, because of their familiarity as a cousin of the Sicilian rice fritter, arancini, the wave of Italian immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century further
expanded the place of calas at the city’s table.

Early African calas were leavened simply by leaving the batter uncovered overnight to collect wild yeast from the atmosphere. Later recipes used baker’s yeast, andmore recent versions use baking powder in place of yeast.This quick leavening agent allows for calas to bemade “à laminute.”

Their renewed popularity has led to the introduction of calas on restaurant menus all over New Orleans. Elizabeth’s Restaurant on Gallier St. in the Bywater makes them with powdered sugar as a brunch appetizer. The Coffee Pot Restaurant on St. Peter Street in the French Quarter serves traditional calas as well. Frank Brigtsen makes savory
crawfish calas, and Cochon restaurant featured a savory pumpkin cala on its fall menu. In these restaurants and in home kitchens, if no longer in baskets on the streets, belles calas are not only being remembered but once again eaten and enjoyed.

Liz Williams is the President and Director of the Southern Food and Beverage Museum. Visit the museum in the Riverwalk Marketplace or online at www.southernfood.org

Two cala recipes, an old and a new