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Dunbar’s Creole CookinG Celestine Dunbar & 501 Pine St. "Intestines is nothing but skin. It’s nothing but a long skin, and they’d clean it and scrape it. That’s where chitterlings come from, the skin of the intestine—that’s all it is. So anyway, they used to scrape them and clean them until they’re snow-white, and you could almost see through them they were so thin."
"Those intestines you’re talking about, I had stole one and blowed it up like a balloon. It looked like a balloon and it blowed up like a balloon."
Celestine Dunbar came up in a country-Creole family in Lutcher, Louisiana. Her father farmed whatever was in season, from greens to knee-high green onions (often called “shallots” in Louisiana). He was the family’s primary cook and taught Celestine to make gumbo when she was just six years old. While she is well known for the Creole seafood gumbo recipe that she adapted from her father’s original recipe and serves every Friday at Dunbar’s Creole Cooking, her family’s food history runs much deeper than gumbo. Her grandmother, for instance, was known in the Lutcher area for her expertise in hog-killing. A traveling butcher of sorts, she made house calls. At the tail end of our interview about gumbo, Celestine revealed that her grandmother didn’t stop at hog killing; she knew how to cook the entire animal, and did. Celestine’s daughter, Peggy Ratliff, remembers eating one of her great-grandmother’s final batches of boudin.
Subject: Celestine Dunbar and Peggy Ratliff --- Sara Roahen: This is Sara Roahen for the Southern Foodways Alliance. It is Friday, September 7, 2007. I’m in New Orleans, Louisiana, at Cannon’s Restaurant where I’ve just taken a seat with members of the Dunbar family. And so if we could get started by your telling me your full names and your birth dates, I’d appreciate it. Peggy Ratliff (Celestine Dunbar’s daughter): My name is Peggy Ratliff and my birthday is October 27. Celestine (“Tina”) Dunbar: My name is Celestine Dunbar, and mine is November 10, 1943. [To Celestine] Where did you grow up? CD: I grew up in Lutcher, Louisiana. We were talking over our meal about when you opened Dunbar’s and what you did before that. Can you tell me a little bit about that? CD: Yes. Before—before Dunbar’s I had a boutique shop, and I was working at Ochsner Hospital first, but during the time I was working at Ochsner Hospital I had the boutique at the same time, because my daughter went to beauty school and we opened up her a beauty shop. So we combined the beauty shop with the boutique. And a friend of mine across the street from the boutique had this little deli restaurant and he took sick—took ill. And the doctor advised him not to go back into that business. It was stressful, and—and he wasn’t strong enough to run a business, so they advised him not to do it anymore. So he was going to close it down and not open it up no more. So I—behind raising seven kids and cooking for seven kids, I said, I’m a pretty good cook. I’m going to try to give this a try. So I talked to him and everything, and he told me, Sure; he didn’t mind me taking it over. So we talked to the landlord and we took it over, and it just was a little small place—that I used to cook in my house and transfer the food across the And so meatballs and spaghetti—it seems like that is a Wednesday thing in New Orleans. CD: It is a Wednesday thing. I didn’t know it. I didn’t know it at that time, but that was the first meal that I prepared for the restaurant. PR: I believe that she set the pace for a lot of things that happen. A lot of people patent after her menu, and it wasn’t done on purpose. It was—she just, Okay tomorrow I’m going to cook meatballs and spaghetti, and then people would ask for a certain thing, and then she’d say, Well I’m going to do that. So I believe that’s how a lot of people have patent behind her. Like you never got sweet tea before her. Now you can get sweet tea in the city. At what point and why did you move to Freret Street? CD: Why? [Laughs] Because the place where I was, they had a—they had a lady that used to come in my restaurant every day, every day, and she said, This is a well-hidden secret. She said, You should be somewhere where you can get exposed to stuff. People don’t know you’re here over in this corner. So she kept bothering me and bothering me to move, but I told her I have no money to pick up—it was a little bit, you know mom and pop little place. So she said, Come and look at this building that I have on Freret Street. So we went and we looked at the building and I told her, I don’t have any money to just move this restaurant to this one. So she said I’ll do this and I’ll do that and I’ll do this; she literally almost paid for everything for me to transfer—you know, brought everything over there. So that’s how we got to Freret Street. And did she own that building? CD: She owned it at that time—at that time, and seven months later after she remodeled it. My husband was a carpenter; she paid for all the materials and my husband did all the work, and we left from one location to the other one, and seven months later the building caught on fire. So she pocketed the insurance money, sold the building from me—to me. And that’s how I become the owner of the building. What year was [it] that you moved to Freret? CD: Eighty-four. I would say 1984, uh-hm. The restaurant flooded in Katrina. And what’s the current state? CD: Right now they—they analyzing everything and they said that it couldn’t be rebuilt. The structures wasn’t strong enough to rebuild on that structure, so it should be torn down and rebuilt over. So—so we’re waiting on more funds to do that with. And can you tell me then how you came to be on the Loyola Campus where Dunbar’s is right now? CD: Yes, it’s kind of a spiritual thing. I mean some people don’t believe in spiritual things, but I do. And after the storm, it was a year or so after the storm, and it looked like everybody around me had gotten some money or gotten good jobs or was replaced somewhere else, and just everybody was doing well—except me. So here I am, restaurant owner, and then took care of all these employees and done—done took care of the neighborhood of New Orleans all these years, and I’m sitting there with no income, no job, no restaurant. So I was praying. I started praying and asking the Lord, I said, Well why me? Why—what’s going to happen to me? And I prayed and I prayed and I prayed and I cried and—and so when I finally settled down and just sit a while, I could hear the spirit of the Lord say, Call Tulane—Tulane University. I said, Call Tulane? I said, I’m not going to call Tulane. Tulane don’t have nothing for me. It said, Call Tulane. And I could just—just over and over and over in my spirit. So I kind of like obeyed the spirit, and I picked up the phone and I called Tulane. And I was talking to a young man and I told him who I was; I said, I’m Miss Dunbar with the restaurant down the street on Freret Street. He said, Miss Dunbar, I know who you are. So evidently this young man knew who I was, so I was saying, I’m trying to find a location to have maybe some red beans and rice and fried chicken—just a little small spot that I could lease. He said, Miss Dunbar, I’m going—I don’t know how to do this, he said, But I’m going to give you to a guy that might can help you. So he gave—he transferred my call to this man, and I was explaining to the man who I was again. This man knew who I was too. So I was telling him who I was; he said, Miss Dunbar, I eat in your restaurant all the time. I know who you are. So he said, Miss Dunbar, he said, We don’t have anything. He said, Everything is contracted out. He said, But I have a friend at Loyola University who is looking to put a little restaurant in on the law campus at Loyola. He said, I don’t know. I can't promise you anything or nothing; he said, But I’ll get back with you. He said, So don’t—don’t take this as a promise. He said, But I’ll see what I can do and I’ll talk to my friend. So it—about a week later he called me back and he gave me this guy’s number that—I mean this man is over so many things. You ever heard of Sodexho? Big huh? This is the owner of Sodexho. I talked to him. This is the man who’s over everything—over—yes, he is. So I talked to him and he told me to put a menu together and put an equipment list together and bring it to his office. He say, I got to go out of town and I’ll call you when I get back. When he called me when he got back he said it’s a done deal. He said, I got one, one Well your cooking helped. CD: Yes, it did. [Laughs] But [He] guided me to that place. --- Okay, so Tina Dunbar just told me that her grandmother used to make boudin, so I have to add a little—a little something to her oral history interview. Can you tell me about your grandmother making boudin? CD: Yes, my grandmother used to actually kill the hog, okay, that you make the boudin from. Okay, so then it used to be a blood boudin—and the white boudin—but they banned the blood boudin because of so much—I guess so much disease and stuff in boudin. So I just imagine—but they used to have a blood boudin. But anyway, my grandmother used to take the liver, the gizzard, and different parts of the—of the hog and grind it up and cook it with all kinds of really, really spicy seasonings. And believe it or not, now they put it in these skins that you buy, but not at the time my grandmother was making it. My grandmother was making it with the intestines, where you scrape them and clean them until they’re so thin and so white and pretty, and then they’ll stuff it. They used to have a funnel— PR: And let them dry. CD: Yes, that’s right. They used to let the intestines dry? CD: Uh-hm, yes, and it was just—intestines is nothing but skin. It’s nothing but a long skin, and they’d clean it and scrape it. That’s where chitterlings come from, the skin of the intestine—that’s all it is. So anyway, they used to scrape them and clean them until they’re snow-white, and you could almost see through them they were so thin. And then she would take that stuff that she cooked—the liver, the gizzards, the kidney, all that—and they’ll grind it up and cook it. PR: But there wasn’t no rice in it then. CD: They—they used to put a little rice in it, uh-hm, but lots of seasoning. I’m talking about shallot, onion, garlic, bell pepper, lots of spices, and they would make it up and they would slip—put it on a funnel and stuff the funnel, and it would go back down into the skin. So I used to watch her as a little girl make the boudin. I used to help her. And you liked that? CD: Yes, it was delicious. Boudin, hogshead cheese and cracklings—they used to do all that from this, from the hog. The hogshead cheese came from the head of the, of the hog, and they would boil it in this big iron pot until it just fell apart, and they—they’d put some, all kind of ingredients, which I don’t know about at that time, and they would put it in pans and stuff—little square pans that look like little shoeboxes. And they would bring it to the market and they would buy it. The different markets would buy it, uh-hm…My grandmother was a neighborhood person. My grandmother would go to different houses—. Like okay, it’s—not farms, but different houses had like raising hogs and stuff in the backyard. And [when] it was time for to harvest the hog, like kill the hog and cut him up and stuff, my grandmother used to go to neighborhood—the neighbor houses. They used to come get her and— To kill it? CD: Yes, kill it, clean it, cut it up, and steaks and everything else, or whatever portion—roasts and everything else, and cook the hogshead cheese and cook the boudin and—and the cracklings. My grandmother used to do that. She was like a traveling butcher? [Laughs] CD: Yeah, whenever—yes, that’s what she was. They used to come get her 4 o’clock in the morning when it’s time to kill that hog. They would—they would raise that hog. They would raise that hog from a little pig, and when he got to be—be a big huge hog they would put him in a pen and close him up where he couldn’t eat no trash. He had to eat like raw corn and different stuff then—then they was cleaning him out before he got killed. And then they used to—the men, Well that feeds a lot of people if you—. CD: It fed lots of people, and all the neighbors would get a steak or a roast and some cracklings and some hogshead cheese, and they would share. That’s how we grew up. As you remember it, Peggy, it didn’t have as much rice in it? Did you have—you wouldn’t have had your great-grandma’s boudin? PR: Yeah, I did, because when they—when Gram and them had the hog—the last hog that they had, I was big enough to know because those intestines you’re talking about, I had stole one and blowed it up like a balloon [Laughs]. It looked like a balloon and it blowed up like a balloon. So the last hogs, I was big enough to see them killed, and I don’t remember there being as much rice. It was more meat. CD: It was a lot of meat, but they started adding rice to it. Does any of your family still in Lutcher? CD: Uh-huh. I have an aunt that lives there, and I have two brothers that live there; relatives, cousins. My mother and father is gone. Grandmother is dead, and my grandmother died after my mother but she was 96 years-old. My grandmother was a wonderful person. She was—was strong. She was a strong lady. Too strong. PR: To kill a hog, it was going to be kind of hard to kill you. [Laughs] --- To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.
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street on a hot table. So my first dish was meatball and spaghetti. It was. We opened on a Wednesday, and it’s still meatball and spaghetti day today—now. 
little person, he said, I got to sign off, and he said, I’m sure it’s not going to be a problem. Within the month I was in Loyola. I was—on the 28th of August, which is the day before Katrina—you know the anniversary, the first year anniversary—I was over on Loyola campus, and it was like, just like—it just went so smooth. Like everything, everything. Like they told me I had to have $5,000,000 worth of insurance. I said, What? It was like, I can't even count that far; it was like, What? [Laughs] And just quick like that [Finger Snaps], it looked like my spirit quickened, and he said, Don’t worry about it; you’re going to have it. I told him, Okay, no problem, and went—and when I got ready to get the insurance, we had dealt with this insurance company before. We went back to that company and we only had to come up with like $5,000. I didn’t have any money; my family together got together and put the money up, and a friend of mine put the money up for all the groceries. So everything just went—God said, Yes, and it just went—just went to plan. So I—I give all the credit to my spiritual Father. This—that is absolutely the truth. So many people wonder the same story. Well how you do—how in the world did you do this? This has never happened in the history of nowhere. Not just New Orleans—nowhere. Soul-food, Creole food, on a college campus. This have never happened. I made history. So it’s nobody but God that did it for me. Nobody.
the men of the family would put him on this long big table, and they would kill him and cut him up and clean him. That sounds cruel, but that’s what they did. 
