"Café lait?" says the coffee-man.
You nod assent.
Two long-spouted cans descend upon your cup. From one the coffee, from the other creamy milk come simultaneously, with a skill that comes of long years of practice on the part of the coffee-man.
That is all—café lait and doughnuts. They make just as good doughnuts in Boston, but New England has never known the joys of café lait. If it had, it would never return to its oldtime coffee habits. And the older markets of Boston do not see the fine ladies of the town coming to them on Sunday morning, after mass, negro servants behind, to do their marketing, themselves.
Hours of joy in this market—the food capital of a rich land of milk and honey. After those hours of joy—breakfast at the Madame's.
The Madame began—no one knows just how many years ago—by serving an eleven o'clock breakfast to the market-men, skilled in food as purveyors as most critical of the food they eat. The Madame realized that problem—and met it. So well did she meet it that the fame of her cookery spread outside the confines of the market-houses, and city folk and tourists began drifting to her table. In a few years she had established an institution. And today her breakfast is as much a part of New Orleans as the old City Hall or the new Court House.
She has been dead several years—dear old gastronomic French lady—but her institution, after the fashion of some institutions, lives after her. It still stands at the edge of the market and it still serves one meal each day—the traditional breakfast. It is sad to relate that it has become a little commercialized—they sell souvenir spoons and cook-books—but you can shut your eyes to these and still see the place in all of its glories.
A long, low room at the back of and above a little saloon, reached from the side-door of the saloon by a turning and rickety stair. A meagerly equipped table in the long, low room, from which a few steps lead up to a smoky but immensely clean kitchen. From that kitchen—odors. Odors? What a name for incense, the promise of preparation. You sometimes catch glimpses of busy women, fat and uncorseted. Cooks? Perish the words. These are artists, if artists have ever really been.
Finally—and upon the stroke of eleven—the breakfast. It shall not be described here in intimate detail for you, dear reader, will not be sitting at the Madame's hospitable table as you read these lines. It is enough for you to know that the liver is unsurpassable and the coffee—the coffee gets its flavor from an adroit sweetening of cognac and of sugar. What matter the souvenirs now? The breakfast has lost none of its savor through the passing of the years.
For here is New Orleans where it seems impossible to get a poor meal. There is many and many an interior city of size and pretentious marbleized and flunkeyized hotels of which that may not be said. But in New Orleans an appreciation of good cookery is an appreciation of the art of a real profession. And of her restaurants there is an infinite variety—La Louisiane, Galatoire's, Antoine's, Begue's, Brasco's—the list runs far too long to be printed here. Nor does the space of this page permit a recountal of the dishes themselves—the world-famed gumbos, the crawfish bisque, the red-snapper stuffed with oysters, the crabs and the shrimps. And lest we should be fairly suspected of trying to emulate a cook-book, turn your back upon the fine little restaurants, where noisy orchestras and unspeakable cabarets have not yet dared to enter, and see still a little more of the streets of the old French quarter.