The
day started with Beignets and café au lait at Café Du Monde. The place is always busy and you have to lurk
to grab a table just as people are leaving. I was keen to see how beignets are
made, so we headed outside to see if we could see into the kitchen area. Success !
The beignet making process can be seen through the outside window. There is a huge mixer full of magic beignet
dough, which gets patted out on to a conveyor belt. The conveyor feeds the dough through rollers
which squish it out to an even thickness, and the dough is then fed onto
another conveyor belt. This one has a
roller with a grid pattern, which cuts the dough into squares as passes
underneath. From here, the squares are
picked up by hand, and literally flung into a vat of bubbling oil about 1-2 metres
away. Oil splashes up the back of the
vat, all contained within a stainless steel structure, but I’m sure the floor
must be pretty slick with whatever isn’t contained. Once a whole batch has been dispatched to the
oil, the guy makes sure they are not stuck together, then lowers a large grid
onto the beignets, as they are floating on top of the oil at this point, and
this submerges them below the surface.
Then he moves on to start processing the next batch. After about 5 minutes in the oil, he scoops
them all out into a basket and dumps them into a big tub by the icing sugar
bin. From here, the waiting staff pick
them up with tongs and plate them, 3 to a saucer, and they are doused heavily
with icing sugar using flour sifters.
The tub of icing sugar is probably the size of two kitchen sinks and
about half as deep. Everything is bigger
in America ! And that’s it, a pretty
simple dough, cooked in very hot fat and smothered in sugar, what could be more
delicious?
Once
I could drag myself away, we headed off to a shop selling Civil War memorabilia
that we had seen on Royal Street the evening before.
We
kept wandering along Royal Street to Canal Street, a big double wide boulevard
with a tram running down the middle.
This is the more “regular” part of town, with Walgreens and CVS type
stores, Shoe Warehouse, Footlocker and the like. We went our separate ways at this point, Joe
to the World War II museum and Deb to wander down to the river and walk along
it.
I (Joe) had decided to go & see the National WW2 Museum,
a few blocks (about 30 minutes’ walk). The museum was initially opened as the D-Day
museum, and focused on the D-Day invasion of Normandy. New Orleans was the
chosen location as the amphibious craft, Higgins boats, which were crucial to
the invasion, were invented by a local manufacturer ( Andrew Higgins who also
has a street named after him) , but also because a well-known American
historian, Stephen Ambrose, lived in N.O and led the efforts to create the
museum. Over time its brief has expanded and now focuses on the, primarily, U.S
experiences in WW2.
The museum is easy to find, just head straight down Magazine
St till you see the building. Its actually four separate buildings sectioned
into significant campaigns, and one large hall housing some significant
aircraft. The ticketing building is dominated by a C-47 Dakota & Spitfire hanging
overhead, and a Higgins boat ( naturally) as well as some military equipment (
like artillery pieces and vehicles) dotted around the floor.
Overall the experience was very well done. Walking through
the sections, there were dioramas and screen & overhead narration that
talked the visitor through the campaigns as well as having oral histories from
surviving veterans. The equipment and vehicles on display were well presented
and thought out.
The aircraft hall was amazing, with the ceiling being dominated
by a genuine B-17 Flying Fortress. The aircraft had crash landed in Iceland
during a ferry flight across to the U.K. It was later recovered and restored
and is now on display ( fully crewed as well) with other significant aircraft
as well, like a P-51 Mustang, Avenger, B-25 and Dauntless.
After an hour or so there (forgoing the chance to buy two
excellent but oh so heavy books (I have learned my lesson) I headed back down
Camp St into town to meet up with Deb. Just outside the museum was a reasonably
good fender bender with New Orleans’ finest in attendance, it looked like
someone had gone straight ahead and t-boned a turning car, ouch.
Tonight
we headed down to Frenchmen Street, which is supposedly the part of town to
locals head to avoid Bourbon St. We had
a very average tasting but huge meal that felt overpriced for what it was. I’m beginning to resent the 18% minimum tip required,
it actually adds quite a lot to the bill for not very much value. $15 tip which was earned in about an hour for
one table, not a bad income really, especially when you add up the other tables
being served at the same time. Still it’s
the custom here. Sigh.
We
made our way back to the hotel dodging very drunk people and very stinky homeless
people, and were woken about 1am by a very noisy crowd who had settled in to
socialise at the tables in the courtyard outside our room.
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