Saveur

How did you become interested in food writing?

I didn't realize how much I cared about food until I left my home in New Orleans and went to college in St. Louis.  Food happens to be something that New Orleanians talk about a lot.

What do you miss about Louisiana, and what do you appreciate about New York?  

Well, the benefit of being in New York is that you can get almost anything you want. Still, you can't really get true New Orleans cuisine up here. I miss cracklins and the roast beef po'boys. It's not for a lack of culinary know-how, but there are things, peasant food, that no one in New York thinks to make. Like boudin sausage, for example.

What's the first meal you have when you go home?

I always go straight to R&O's restaurant in Bucktown or to Acme Oyster House. I'll have an oysterpallooza, with a whole bunch of raw oysters and a fried oyster po'boy or an oyster plate or a big old roast beef po'boy drowning in gravy and lettuce tomato and mayonnaise, lots of mayonnaise. It's a heart attack on a plate. It's beautiful.

In The Shameless Carnivore, you also wax poetic about turkey sandwiches. How often do you have one?

At least five times a week.

Always the same kind?

Oh, no, I'll vary it up.  Sometimes pepper turkey, sometimes honey turkey, or sometimes a turkey club. There's a beautiful simplicity to a humble turkey sandwich.  

What would be your fantasy meat travel destination?

There are so many. I would love to go to Japan because they put a premium on really good meat, like Kobe and Wagyu. I also love the yakitori and the fish. But if I had to pick one fantasy destination, it would be Scandinavia. They eat reindeer and puffin up there. I also love Russian food.

And vodka?

Absolutely. I love going to the Russian Vodka Room [in New York].  They have huge tankards of infused vodkas in flavors like pepper and horseradish and garlic, all of which go really well in a bloody mary.  

I've even heard of bacon vodka.  Have you tried that?

I haven't. I have bacon toothpicks and bacon breath mints—I get the weirdest gifts. No one ever actually gives me meat, though. Well, except for Leroy Nuckolls [a hunter in Louisiana]. He and his brother, Vernon Crawford, saved everything that they killed. Once they sent me home with a shopping bag full of wild turkey.

How was it?

The best meat I've had in my entire life.  I made it with my mom; we brined it and then cooked it with a little liquid in the pan, covered, to make sure it didn't dry out.  In the end, it was moist and tender and really, really, really turkey-y.  Take a turkey sandwich or even regular roast turkey and magnify that by ten. The meat was also a darker color, slightly more gray, not bright white like that of a bird that obviously hasn't been running around, flapping its wings.  We kept going back into the refrigerator for it the whole weekend.