Eating While Poor, New Orleans
Shrimping, Courtesy of the New York Public Library
Here is another story in our series Eating While Poor. “My whole family had always been poor” says New Orleans Native Louie Armstrong. To put food on the table as a young child Armstrong would forage for food in the garbage bins of food wholesalers where “spoiled products were thrown into big barrels which were left on the sidewalk for the garbage wagons to take away.” Armstrong found ingredients his mom turned into jambalaya. With has little as 15 cents worth of additional ingredients and his mother could make her sensational jambalaya. “It is a concoction of diced Bologna sausage, shrimp, oysters, hard-shell crabs mixed with rice and flavored with tomato sauce,” writes Satchmo. He goes to say, “If you ever tasted Mayann’s jambalaya and did not lick your fingers my name is not Louis Satchmo Daniel Armstrong.”
