Ralph Brennan’s cookbook on N.O. seafood covers it all

• By CHERAMIE SONNIER
• Advocate Food writer
• Published: Apr 17, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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Anyone who loves Louisiana seafood and would like a definitive guide to cooking it will want to get the newly released “Ralph Brennan’s New Orleans Seafood Cookbook” (Vissi D’Arte Books, $45, hardcover).

In addition to terrific recipes, the gorgeous book offers plenty of instructions and tips, almost everything anyone would want to know about preparing seafood.

Brennan, who wrote the book with veteran New Orleans food writer Gene Bourg, will be in Baton Rouge from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday for a cookbook signing and recipe tasting. He and Haley Bittermann, executive chef of the Ralph Brennan Restaurant Group, will be at the Barnes & Noble Booksellers location at 2590 CitiPlace Court.

The hefty, 432-page book includes 170 classic and contemporary recipes in 10 chapters, including those for desserts, accompaniments, seasonings, sauces, stocks and spirits. Individual recipes pack a lot of information into concise instructions.

Besides the usual, such as yield, they provide interesting tidbits about the recipe, its history or how to use the leftovers; give recommendations for possible substitutions for the Gulf of Mexico fish species used in the recipes; tell if a dish can be prepared in advance; suggest the cookware and tools to use; offer food sources; and make serving suggestions.

The chapter called A Seafood Cook’s Manual provides extensive help on how to select seafood, determine freshness and quality and store, and how to keep from overcooking. There are step-by-step instructions and full-color photographs showing how to fillet a whole raw fish, how to open and remove the meat from crabs, how to prepare soft-shell crabs for cooking, how to shell crawfish and shrimp, and how to open oysters. There is also information on alligator, frog legs and turtle.

Among the recipes are Seafood and Okra Gumbo With Alligator Sausage; Spicy Boiled Shrimp With Cocktail Sauce; Fried Oyster Salad With Garlic Mayonnaise; Redfish Court-Bouillon; Garlic Lemon Shrimp; Crawfish Etouffee With Green-Onion Rice; Bread Pudding With Whiskey Sauce; Crème Caramel; Seafood Cocktail Sauce; Chicken Stock; Ramos Gin Fizz; Potatoes Pontalba; and Creole Cream Cheese.

There is a recipe for Maque-Coux, which the book claims “may be the oldest dish in the entirety of Louisiana-Creole cookery.” I was surprised by that description since I have always thought of this dish as Cajun, not Creole, and most sources that I checked also refer to it as Cajun.

Brennan operates the Ralph Brennan Restaurant Group, which includes New Orleans French Quarter restaurants Bacco and Red Fish Grill, Ralph’s on the Park in New Orleans’ Mid-City, and Ralph Brennan’s Jazz Kitchen at the Disneyland Resort in Southern California.

He and his culinary team, which in addition to Bourg and Bittermann, included chefs Gregg Collier, Chris Montero, Gus Martin and Darrin Finkel; photographer Kerri McCaffety; and recipe tester Paulette Rittenberg, spent the past four years creating “Ralph Brennan’s New Orleans Seafood Cookbook.”

McCaffety’s beautiful full-color photographs can be found throughout the book.

The cookbook’s introduction says its recipes are from the chefs at the four restaurants. But, unlike many cookbooks based on chefs’ recipes, this book’s recipes actually can be reproduced by a home cook in his or her own kitchen.

In the introduction, Brennan writes that the book was produced “to communicate the authentic flavor and spirit of New Orleans cuisine, whether it comes from a Creole dish from a hundred years ago or one that was thought up yesterday.”