In the late 1990s, “Louisiana Eats!” podcast host Poppy Tooker began working to revive a New Orleans delicacy: Creole cream cheese. She’d come across this fresh cheese, a French-influenced style indicative of New Orleans’ rich and diverse population, by way of her grandmother, but noticed it was on the decline as local dairy farms were overtaken by conglomerates. The motto of her campaign to get this local product back onto the table: “Eat it to save it.”
Today, thanks in part to Tooker’s advocacy, Creole cream cheese is once again commonplace, represented in markets and grocery stores in and around the coastal town and in establishments like Emeril Lagasse’s storied Creole restaurants. But in bringing a favorite New Orleans classic to new audiences, Tooker was also helping introduce Americans to a nascent (but historically rooted) approach to cooking and eating. Creole cream cheese couldn’t be the only delicious food that was both accessible and deserving of a reintroduction into the country’s culinary canon, she thought. Surely, there were other cheeses, other fruits, other recipes. “They were these precious indigenous ingredients with significant cultural ties that I knew I wanted to know more about,” Tooker says.
