In Louisiana kitchens for June 5, 2008

• By ANNABELLE ARMSTRONG
• Special to Food
• Published: Jun 5, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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Most of Marianne Tansil’s friends have favorite foods they like her to cook when they come for dinner. The favorites are familiar dishes, such as Grits and Shrimp, Mustard Greens and Cornbread Dumplings and gumbo.

Tansil doesn’t mind fixing the traditional dishes for her friends, but she likes to experiment with new dishes, too. Her friends know that dinner at her table is likely to include at least one “culinary experiment,” Tansil said.

Chrystal Hills and Joan Daigre, Tansil’s friends since junior high, said they are always happy to be guinea pigs trying one of their friend’s culinary experiments. “Marianne will call me at work and ask me to stop by on the way home to sample a new creation,” reported Hills, facilitator and visitor services manager for the Southern University Museum of Art.

Although Hills and Tansil live at opposite ends of the city, Hills said the distance is inconsequential when her friend Marianne asks her to come and sample her latest recipe.

Other friends Joan and Sergai Daigre live out of town, but every three weeks they return to their hometown of Baton Rouge to visit. On the Sunday before they leave, they dine at the Tansil home. Sergai Daigre’s favorite dish at Tansil’s is Grits and Shrimp served with flaky biscuits. Other longtime friends who often join them are Russia Battieste and Linda Joseph. Throughout the week, family members drop by to enjoy Tansil’s new or adapted recipes.

Tansil has been collecting recipes and cookbooks for more than 30 years. Last summer for the 35th reunion of the Capitol High School Class of 1972, she received a basket full of cookbooks from Hills and Daigre. She often receives cookbook gifts, plus she inherited the cookbook collection of her mother, Florence Tansil, and recipes from her grandmother, Mary Dupuy Washington. Tansil also has a copy of a cookbook containing her grandmother’s recipes, which were compiled for a Dupuy family gathering in  2000.

“I love reading recipes and changing them around to something totally different,” Tansil said. Nonetheless, there are some oldies but goodies, such as mustard greens and cornbread dumplings, that friends repeatedly request.

“I watched my grandmother and mother make this dish. Neither one measured the ingredients. They had no recipe. I think I have it down pat now,” Tansil said.

A favorite dessert with friends is blackberries and dumplings, which Tansil likens to a cobbler.

Tansil said there are few pleasures greater than feeding her friends. Her home is open house. She calls it “the house on the side of the road,” as did her father, Isadore Tansil Sr. .

She especially delights in having friends learn to develop a taste for foods they have not enjoyed before. “Joan (Daigre) did not like carrots until she ate my glazed carrots, and Chrystal (Hills) never ate asparagus until she tried my tomato marinade with asparagus,” she said.

Hills added that her favorite drink is Tansil’s “Wedding Punch,” a nonalcoholic drink that tastes like champagne. She also enjoys making Chicken Penne Pasta. Universal approval goes to Tansil’s jambalaya and gumbo, made from scratch, and her jalapeño and crackling cornbreads.

The third of six children, Tansil grew up in a home with sit-down family meals. “We never ate fast foods,” she said. “My mother was a food production manager with the EBR public schools. We always had balanced, nourishing meals, and we ate together as a family when possible. Usually on Sunday people dropped in for Dad’s pound cake and coffee and good conversation.”