SFA | Oral History | New Orleans Eats

“One of the things that I do on a show day is get dressed up, and sometimes it’s silly. You know, I’ll have a pink cowboy hat or a tiara or bat wings or—or I’ll glue rhinestones on my face.”

– Michelle Nugent

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The first New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival took place in 1970 at Congo Square, across Rampart Street from the French Quarter. It was a revolutionary yet modest affair in the earliest years, with just a smattering of food vendors: Sonny Vaucresson sold hot sausages, Buster Holmes brought his red beans and rice, a city government worker made the noodle soup ya-ka-mein, someone sold Angelo Brocato’s cookies, and soft-shell crabs and catfish were there from the beginning. So was Nancy Ochsenschlager. She came down to New Orleans as a young woman to sell hand-crafted neckties in the French Market; there she happened to meet Quint Davis, one of the festival’s founders. From that meeting forward, Jazz Fest defined the structure of Nancy’s year. She has worn many hats—fair director, crafts director, food director. Even her official retirement in 2005 and a home in Guatemala haven’t kept her away entirely.

Michelle Nugent built her year around the festival long before Nancy became her boss. When interviewing for cooking positions in other parts of the country, she insisted that her employment come with one condition: vacation every year during Jazz Fest. On show days, Michelle wears a tool belt, a head of braids, and a bit of costume—maybe bat wings or a tiara. The ensemble represents her simultaneous workmanlike and joyful approach to the job, an approach that enables her to get hot water and electricity to each of the roughly 70 food vendors’ booths each festival day, and still find the energy to wonder whether turtle soup or hogshead cheese could possibly be added to the roster next year.

Two interviews, Nancy Oschenschlager and Michelle Nugent, are featured on this page. Jump to Michelle Nugent interview.

Nancy Oschenschlager Interview

Listen to this 1-minute audio clip of Nancy Oschenschlager talking about the first food vendors to participate in the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. [Windows Media Player required. Go here to download the player for free.]

What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

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Subject: Nancy Ochsenschlager
Location: Dumaine Street, Mid-City, New Orleans, LA
Date: July 13, 2006
Interviewer: Sara Roahen, writer and SFA member

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Sara Roahen: This is Sara Roahen. It’s July 13th 2006. I’m on Dumaine Street in New Orleans. Could you please state your name and your date of birth?

Nancy Ochsenschlager: Okay, Nancy Ochsenschlager; November 16th 1939.

And how you made and/or make your living?

I’ve been the associate producer of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival and as—of the heritage fair, and as such have dealt with—for 30 years—with producing the food, the crafts, the site aspects and fair operation aspects of the Jazz & Heritage Festival.

In the beginning, it [Jazz Fest] was at Congo Square. Do you know how many years it was there?

It was there two years—it was there ’70 and ’71; in ’72 it moved to the Fair Grounds.

And the food service was more limited than it is today, but certainly there were—there was quite a lot of stuff.

Yeah, well we—our original food vendor was the New Orleans sausage maker, the Vaucressons, Sonny Vaucresson. So he—Sonny has passed now, but his family—his son is running it and they’ve been there since the beginning; so that was 37 years this past year. And that’s quite a tradition. Brocato’s ice cream has been there. Brocato himself wasn’t in the first year, but then came—Angelo, and there’s always—Buster Holmes was there in the early days with red beans. We’ve always had red beans; some are long-time vendors doing that. We’ve had—the catfish and the soft-shell were there since the early days of the Fair Grounds, so there are some very old vendors and then we gradually added new vendors doing foods of very traditional nature. In the beginning, we had a lot of different things and, as I say, we had ya-ka-mein in the beginning, and that went away, and it came back just recently, which is a street food from the parades. So now it’s, you know—it’s a whole elaborate process though of really having been—having over the years recruited almost 70 vendors to do very traditional Louisiana cuisine.

You were saying that some people are restaurateurs and cook their food beforehand and bring it to the Fair Grounds; some people cook at the Fair Grounds—.

Some of them have to start cooking at six, you know—the barbeque fires and stuff like that. I mean, I’ve always traditionally gotten there, you know, 5:30—6:00 in the morning. And most of the vendors come in at 7:30 when our back gates open; they’re cooking the week before in the kitchen…they’re loading their booths the week before, you know, with all the heavy equipment and supplies and stuff.

And what are some of the biggest challenges of just getting through the day?

Well it’s sort of an elaborate operation now. You know, Michelle Nugent has been the food director most recently and is doing an incredible job of organizing; there’s a whole staff that—you know the staff that monitors each food booth; so the monitors come onboard, you know—well really they’re onboard by quarter of seven for people. They monitor the refrigerator trucks where we store everything, and they climb in and out and the temperatures are monitored. A shuttle delivering food is run by her staff. There’s just a lot of tremendous logistics: the fire marshals that monitor every booth that you work with, and then the Board of Health that we work closely with.

I imagine that in the beginning it was a much looser operation.

Well we’ve always followed Board of Health. The logistics have changed because it was a small—much more smaller operations in the old days, and I mean there were times then when we drove on the field and delivered food on the field, and then the festival grew and we couldn’t approach it that way.

So 2004 was your last Jazz Fest?

I retired at the end of the festival of 2005.

Michelle Nugent Interview

Listen to this 1-minute audio clip of Michelle Nugent talking about having calas or rice fritters as part of the traditional foods offered at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. [Windows Media Player required. Go here to download the player for free.]

What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

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Subject: Michelle Nugent
Location: Constance Street, Uptown, New Orleans, LA
Date: July 24, 2006
Interviewer: Sara Roahen, writer and SFA member

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Sara Roahen: This is Sara Roahen for the Southern Foodways Alliance. It’s Monday, July 24th and I’m in New Orleans, Louisiana on Constance Street. So if I could get you to state your name and your birth date and how you make your living?

Michelle Nugent: My name is Michelle Nugent; I was born December 1st 1969, and I am a producer for the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.

When you were growing up, since your parents weren't from here, did you eat New Orleans cooking?

No, I really didn’t. It took my mother a long time to fall in love with New Orleans, but—so we were strictly meat and potatoes and she worked a lot and my father worked a lot, so I did very rudimentary cooking. You know, Hamburger Helper and tuna casserole and things like that. [Laughs] Or, we would make a big pot of something and eat it all week. So I was never presented with much too challenging, and when we went to seafood restaurants or the Chinese restaurant, I just wouldn’t eat that; I’d, you know, eat the kids’ menu. But when I was 16, I befriended Arthel Neville. She was on the junior fashion board with me at D.H. Holmes, and we would go spend time at her father’s house. So Art actually taught me about New Orleans food; that was where I really learned about red beans and gumbo and all that kind of stuff.

And I learned to cook it and eat it there, so—and then, you know, once I figured it out it was like, Oh okay; now I get it. [Laughs] And I always worked downtown. I started working downtown when I was 15, so I discovered Buster Holmes pretty early on, and it was still really cheap and he was around, and just kind of slowly figured it out on my own.

At what point did you get involved with Jazz Fest?

Well I’ve always gone to the festival, you know, since I was able to, I think—you know, the first time was on a school field trip and then when I was able to sneak off or talk my parents into taking me or whatever. I’ve always gone, and like I said I was involved with New Orleans musicians, so I got that part of the city really quick. [Laughs] And then in 1986 I had met Nancy Ochsenschlager, who was the fair director for many, many years, and I worked with Nancy and her assistant, who was the food director—Sally Cobb—for one year—just a short seasonal job, and I actually ended up being the volunteer coordinator. But the festival was much smaller then, you know. Our trailers were all still on the infield and it was much—there were a lot fewer people doing a lot more stuff back then. And then in 19—let’s see—1999 I got a call from Sally Cobb…and she was retiring, and she said We’re not really sure what we’re going to do, but you should apply for my job ‘cause it would be perfect for you. And I felt like it would be perfect for me too because it—my cooking background would be very helpful, and my production experience of course would be helpful, and my love for the festival is pretty unswerving, and so [Laughs] I applied for the job and they were in the process of restructuring some things. So they didn’t think they had any room; they weren't quite sure what they were going to do. So I took off for the summer and went and ran a bed and breakfast in New Hampshire and came home completely not knowing what I was going to do. And the phone rang two days later.

And what year was that?

That was 1999.

Can you talk about what the sort of vision is for the food selection, or the objective and how you decide what food is going to be there and what kind of foods wouldn’t be there?

The overall philosophy—because like I said I inherited some of this stuff and I’m working towards some personal goals—but the overall philosophy is that the vendors be from Louisiana, which I strongly agree with. And we want to represent as broadly as we can all the different kinds of cuisines that we have here, so we have Creole, we have Cajun, and that. And we also have the ethnic vendors: you know, the Vietnamese community is represented and the different Latin American communities are represented, and we also don’t rule out what can be considered nouveau cuisine, so we have a crawfish enchilada, which is actually on someone’s menu in their restaurant and it sells like crazy. So you know they—sometimes we’ll get into a long philosophical discussion: Well what does a crawfish enchilada have to do with anything? But you can't negate the fact that there’s always going to be new food, so it’s a balance of both. And then we have very traditional things: red beans and rice; we have both kinds of jambalaya represented—we have the red tomatoey one, and then we have the dry kind of brown one. And I’m working getting back up to three gumbos; this year we just had two.

Which one wasn’t there?

The seafood gumbo from Ferdinand Johnson wasn’t there. We—I guess it’s unavoidable to—I guess we have to talk about the storm a little bit. I had 10 vendors that just weren't able to get it together, which out of 66 is actually stunning. It took me about a month to find everybody, and they all came [Laughs] for the most part, and I spoke with the producers early on and asked that we not replace the vendors that weren't returning this year and to hold their spot for next year. So I’m hoping that everyone will return, so some of the things we did this year were—were one-offs.

So the seafood gumbo that we normally have wasn’t there. The pheasant-quail-andouille gumbo, which has been there for years, which is one of my personal favorites, was there. And then fireman Mike Gowland, who normally does alligator sauce piquant and shrimp etouffée for us, added a shrimp and okra gumbo that was really, really delicious. So I think we’re going to keep that; it was really good. It was interesting to—to watch the process too because he cooks in his booth; some people bring things already cooked, but Mike cooked every day.

Wait, he would make his gumbo in the booth?

Yeah, he had great big iron pots and he gets busy every day. It’s an amazing process, and the first day it was good but by the end of the show it was exquisite. Like I was feeding it to the older Creole people I know and they were like, Okay, this works. Where’s my mama?

Is that because he kept doing things to it, or because it just sort of set?

Well a little bit of both. I think by the seventh day he just you know—he just kind of—and I think he talked to people and—and worked with the recipe. It was just interesting to watch it change. And we strive for consistency, but in that particular case I noticed that it was improving every day so that was acceptable and we—we—it’s not an easy thing to do to be a food vendor at Jazz Fest. They basically don’t sleep much for three weeks, and it costs a lot of money. We have a fee that we charge and it’s a one-time fee. They pay their fee and that’s it. And whatever they make they make—we don’t get involved in, you know, what they make every day.

And then but they have to buy groceries; they have to buy equipment and they have to pay a staff. And on a very busy day, depending on the booth, there could be 20 people working in the booth. So it’s—it’s a risk.

Are there any foods that aren’t represented current—I mean, aside from your vendors who couldn’t come back this year?

Well there are some things, and it’s difficult to say whether we’ll ever have them at the show because they’re—they are what I would call lost leaders. I would love to have turtle soup, but it probably wouldn’t sell very well. I’d love to have hogshead cheese or daube glacé, you know, the—the lost foods that you don’t find too much anymore. I really missed having the crawfish bisque this year at the festival, which is a very complicated dish, you know, and I live in fear that, you know, Wayne [Baquet] is going to come back next year and say I can't do it anymore. [Laughs] So there are some foods at the show that we don’t have because I’m not sure that it would be worth someone’s while to prepare them, so—but then on the other hand I have a vendor that does frog legs, but then they have two other food items that sell better and—and they kind of have the same philosophy that we do. So while they don’t make a lot of money on the frog legs, the people that get it, get it, you know, and I love having them there. So if I can find a way to work some of those dishes back in, I will.

One thing that I learned when I was talking to Nancy Ochsenschlager that I hadn't known and that surprised me, was that in the beginning—I don’t know if it was at the first Jazz Fest, but early on—there was a ya-ka-mein vendor, and that wasn’t the case when I first moved here.

We created a new stage two years ago called the Jazz & Heritage Stage, and it happens to be very close to one of the major food areas: Food One, which is the one that’s parallel to the grandstand, and that was one of the things that I thought was missing at the show, was street food. A lot of us that produce the show are very involved in the street culture and the second lines and the Mardi Gras Indian culture, and that’s what the focus of this stage was—Mardi Gras Indians, brass bands, and SAPCs, and that became the new parade base because there’s two second lines every day during the show.

SAPC?

Social Aid and Pleasure Club [Laughs], which are groups of men and women—men, women, young children—that participated in the second line parades, and they all have a theme and amazing outfits that they wear, and Miss Linda Green, who is the ya-ka-mein lady—any second line you go to, you will see her selling her dish out of the back of her van. And I had met her through that, and also because one of the things that the food department does at Jazz Fest is, we have two stages of cooking demonstrations, so Miss Linda had come and done a ya-ka-mein demonstration for us. So we added—that year she did ya-ka-mein and she did huckabucks, which are—it’s basically frozen Kool-Aid or frozen punch that if you know, you can go knock on the lady’s door in the neighborhood and she’ll sell you a huckabuck out of her backdoor for a quarter. And Linda was actually doing that, so we did that at Jazz Fest. And then we added smothered pork chops and cabbage, and cornbread, and a pork chop sandwich, which isn't really so much part of New Orleans’ street culture as it is if you go to a Zydeco festival anywhere in Southwest Louisiana, one of the things you’ll always find is a fried pork chop on white bread, and it’s one of my favorites. And I normally never eat that kind of thing, and I talked the pork chop vendors into doing it, and it’s taken off like a rocket and people love it.

And can you explain a little bit what ya-ka-mein is, for the record?

This is what I know. [Laughs] When the soldiers came back from Korea, they brought the tradition of eating noodles to their communities here in New Orleans and it got kind of incorporated into this soul food, Chinese, Korean thing. And—and in the sweet shops is mostly where you can find it. And it’s in the African American community, is where you find it now, and it’s also called Old Sober because it’s a dish that people eat when they’re either done partying or hung over, like they eat menudo in Mexico. And now it’s a very strong beef broth with spaghetti noodles and diced pieces of beef and scallions and hard-boiled egg.

And so in the profile that Brett Anderson wrote about you in the Times Picayune, he mentioned your tool belt. What on your tool belt?

[Laughs] Two cell phones, a Walkie-Talkie, a Leatherman, another little serrated knife, and my keys.

It just crossed my mind—something that I had this year was the calas. Is that a new item?

Yes, that was new this year. Again, one of those things that—that I thought would maybe not sell so well, but I was really pleased to have it be part of the show because it’s another one of our lost foodways. A calas is a rice fritter, and traditionally it was served—it’s rice and eggs and milk, and there was a little bit of sugar in the batter, and then it was served dusted with powdered sugar. But as we were talking earlier the—a nouveau twist on it is to serve the savory calas, and this particular one, the recipe was developed by Frank Brigtsen, who is one of my personal chef heroes here in town. I had the privilege of working off and on with Frank and doing—we did hunger relief together for many years. And this particular version was made with andouille sausage and had a green onion mayonnaise, so that was killer.

I’ve thought more and more, you know, the longer that I’ve lived here, that what happens in the food area at Jazz Fest isn't just a reflection of what happens in Louisiana the rest of the year, but…like it can actually help [the food culture] grow.

Oh yeah, I believe that. We also perpetuate that notion on our stages: not only do we have people doing cooking demonstrations, but we’ll have panel discussions, we’ll have talks about it. My father was an educator, and it turned out that the thing I liked best at Spice Inc., at the grocery store, was teaching. And I think it’s very sad that the last couple generations really don’t—they don’t cook at home; they don’t eat at home; they don’t hang out with their grandmothers, and there’s very little of that left I think. And it’s important not to lose that. So whatever opportunity we can to educate we—we take it; plus, you know, we want to embrace our culture because it’s so special.

Maybe you can tell a little bit for the record what the demonstration area is and what happens there during the festival.

In the grandstand, and then out on the—the apron in front of the grandstand, we have two small stages that are sponsored by a local spice company called Zatarain’s. And inside we focus more on restaurant chefs, and like I said we do panel discussions as well, and it’s a 50-minute cooking demonstration, and once again we try to focus on Louisiana food. It’s not always that way, depending on the chef. And then outside we have what’s called the Cajun Cabin, which is more rustic and it’s more pot cooking, and so we’ll have goat stew or [Laughs] something a little more, you know—from Southern Louisiana—and how it got there. And it’s fun; it’s one of my favorite things, and we have a great time programming it.
It’s a break from the hustle and the bustle of the festival. There’s a couple stages that—that—at the show that are like that: the Music Heritage Stage is like that too, which is one of my favorites, which is kind of an oral history stage, which also can have performance on it. So while I understand that the festival is not the little small festival that we grew up with, it’s still possible to go and have a quiet, spiritual experience there. And you don’t ever have to go to the big stage if you don’t want to, you know. You can eat something delicious and go to the folklife area and talk to some lovely lady from, you know, Southwest Louisiana who makes baskets for a living, and you know you can—you can connect with that part of our culture and not have to get in the throng if you don’t want to.

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