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La Bonne Cuisine:
Cooking New Orleans Style |
 La Bonne Cuisine: Cooking New Orleans Style began as a fund raising dinner, La Bonne Cuisine, in 1974 . People enjoyed the food and another dinner was held the following year. Soon, people were buying mimeographed copies of the dinner recipes for $1 each. Members of the parish began to wonder if they could create a first-class, marketable cookbook. After careful research, the idea emerged with wide appeal in the congregation. Recipes were submitted by church members, evaluated and edited. The church members ate their way through each trial dish at least three times – and gained at least five pounds during the try-out phase. Then in 1980, after more work than anyone imagined possible, the cookbook was born and La Bonne Cuisine became an incorporated arm of the Episcopal Church Women of All Saints Church. The resulting La Bonne Cuisine was a beautiful book with a sharp, professional cover; recipes for typical New Orleans food; photographs of New Orleans scenes; a chapter of recipes from famous local restaurants – in short, a cookbook aimed at locals, tourists, and a national market. La Boone Cuisine is now in its 13th printing with over 160,000 copies sold. Profits from the cookbook originally were dedicated to retiring the mortgage of the church building and to mission work. In 1989, La Bonne Cuisine reached the milestone of 100,000 copies in print and $100,000 in contributions to the church mortgage, which was paid off that year. Profits, which now have exceeded $260,000, continued to be dedicated to various mission projects, to our diocesan Solomon Episcopal Conference Center in Loranger, Louisiana, and have contributed to paying off the mortgage of the office building shared by La Bonne Cuisine and All Saints Church office. Today, La Bonne Cuisine’s success continues with two sister cookbooks: Cooking New Orleans Style and Lagniappe. Following Hurricane Katrina, the cookbook tithed of its retail profits to support All Saints hurricane repair efforts and to Episcopal Relief and Development for hurricane response work in the Gulf Coast region. The La Bonne Cuisine dinner that gave birth to the cookbook continued as an annual fund-raising event for All Saints Church for 25 years. The dinner raised approximately $2,000 each year for the ministry of the Episcopal Church Women and their many outreach projects. La Bonne Cuisine the dinner is currently in retirement but one never knows what the future holds when it come to good food in New Orleans!
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Updated 6/10/2007 |