It was nearly 10 years ago when I shared a holiday meal with Celestine “Tina” Dunbar and her family in their Carrollton-area home in New Orleans. I met Tina in the mid-1990s when I became a regular patron of Dunbar’s, her Creole Soul restaurant on Freret Street.

I loved it there. Tina was always warm and engaging and I could eat like royalty for $5 or less. We became friends. Back in 2002 Tina and her brood invited me to share their holiday table.  It is a meal I will never forget.

This holiday remembrance is based on something I wrote about her back then.

Life Lessons Learned from She of the Smoldering Bosom

A holiday dinner at Celestine Dunbar’s home is an occasion for stretch pants with an elastic waist.

“When I cook I can draw a crowd in a second,” Dunbar says.  She beams knowingly as yet another visitor materializes at her kitchen door. Her ladle plunges to the depths of a simmering pot of “kitchen sink” gumbo, breaking the transparent sheen atop the liquid surface to reveal a deep, rich bayou stew crowded with shrimp, crab, hearty pieces of chicken, andouille and smoked sausages. She declares Vernon’s brand of sausages from Vacherie to be the best. As she stirs a newcomer appears to swoon, breathing in the rich co-mingled aromas of sea, smoke and ground file.

“I like to use fresh and dried shrimp,” Dunbar says. “The dried shrimp are for flavor only.  They make the flavor much more intense. I add them early on.  Before they’re added, the gumbo smells just like any other stew. When the dried shrimp hit it really starts to smell good and gumbo-ish.”

As the day progresses, Dunbar’s bright cobalt blue Carrolton-area home steadily fills with talkative guests and the dining room tabletop crowds with dishes fresh and steaming from the oven. There’s creamy Irish potato salad; smothered Creole green beans laden with chunks of pickled ham; a steamship-sized baked ham, fragrantly studded with clove; a flock of golden-skinned Cornish hens; and rich, dark built-from-a-roux gizzard gravy with mushrooms. In the world of real-deal home cooking, gravy such as this one carries a big stick, whupping ass on thin, brothy-y au jus drizzling sauces. This is the stuff you pour all over everything on your plate so there’s something left to mop up with bread to make the plate shine. Then you go back for more, this time eating it as a stew over rice so nothing else gets in the way.

“By the time we’re ready to sit down we’ll be standing fanny-to-fanny in here,” Dunbar says, breaking into the daydreams of the quiet people lurking around the table. She’s expecting each of her seven children, their spouses, her 13 grandchildren, some of their spouses, and five great grandchildren.  Some will bring friends. Some of Tina Dunbar’s friends will drop by, too.

Her daughter, Lisa Merrette, has brought her casserole of zucchini, shrimp and crab.  Another daughter, Peggy Ratliff, a fine baker and candy maker, came with candied yams and a clutch of her special pralines. They have their Mama’s passion for the kitchen. Paula Groves, yet another of Tina’s five daughters, always shows up with bundles of soft drinks.   

“I don’t like to cook. I don’t like to clean,” Groves says. “Just tell me when dinner is ready.”

It’s a familiar story, “Everyone else will show up early to hang out and goof off, visit, stir a pot,” Dunbar says. “Not Paula. She won’t show up until she thinks all of the work’s been done.” She looks at her daughter, “Now come help me in the kitchen. Paula, I need some dishes washed. I’m runnin’ out of room in here.”

“But Maaaama, I’m huuuungry,” Groves moans.

“You don’t start washing, I might just stop cookin’,” Dunbar says.

Her home is bright, cheery and filled with love, light-hearted chatter and laughter. Children hear the words, “I love you,” several times each day.  The group absorbs new additions effortlessly, pulling them into the pack, handing them dishtowels to use when all the oven mitts are gone and the oven is still working overtime.

Next out of the oven is Tina’s “cornbread” dressing, a casserole of generous chicken pieces nestled within a blend of aromatic vegetables, Reising’s seasoned French bread crumbs, leftover cornbread from the restaurant and Stove Top Pre-Seasoned stuffing for chicken. “It’s that herb-y smell from the Stove Top that I just love,” Dunbar says.  “There’s just something about it.”   

A deservedly confident cook, Tina does not own measuring devices. She works bare-foot, tossing ingredients into a pot, eyeballing amounts, and incorporating pre-packaged mixes into grand creations without a second thought. There’s no discernible method here other than a complete lack of one yet there is continuity in her results. The food she serves is always lovingly crafted, eagerly anticipated and simply sensational.

The bubbling, golden macaroni and cheese she has prepared today was built around spaghetti that’s been bound together with a fragile, quivering custard, rich with eggs, cream and cheese. On another day the pasta base might be bowties, shells, rigatoni or something else. 

“Whatever’s in the cupboard,” Dunbar says, “that’ll do.”

With Dunbar in the kitchen, guests - their numbers now inching well past 20 - circle the table, gaze longingly at the bounty, then retreat, awaiting her beckon to sit down. Some sneak little “tastes.” They “ooh and aaah,” say, “I didn’t quite taste that,” and sneak a larger sample.

Dunbar spots them and lets loose a burst of her abundant laughter. She’s busy whipping the batter for her ethereal honey peach pound cake, an amazing incorporation of Betty Crocker cake mix and sweet, fresh Southern peaches she put up in their season after stewing them with ground cinnamon and amber Acadiana honey. She uses the contents of the box as though it is flour.

The cake, assembled as alternate layers of the stewed peaches and batter, will bake for two hours, cool for two hours, then soak in the strained honey-peach-cinnamon syrup. Its slow arrival gives guests time to recover from the massive dinner feast. 

It’s well worth the wait.

Dunbar calls her cooking style “Creole Soul.”  It’s a culinary style birthed in the innocent mind of a six year old girl, its kin the blood of freshly slaughtered country hogs, pungent pipe tobacco, produce from the family farm and her Daddy’s passion for good gumbo.   

Hers is a style that moves beyond the kitchen, beyond family lineage and geography. Beyond her awareness, even. It’s her robust, spontaneous laughter, her intensely personable manner, the candor and warmth she inherently invokes in others. It’s her passions for Jesus, her voluminous family, bright colors, girl talk and, by God, whatever she happens to be cooking at the moment.            

“You don’t take short cuts when you’re making roux,” Dunbar says. “That’s the first thing Daddy taught me. It’s the foundation for the house.”

Tina’s Daddy, Louis Morris, was a dedicated husband, father and farmer. He had equal passions for liquor, the racing ponies and good cooking.

“Mama was a church-going woman,” Dunbar says. “Every Sunday she would get up and head to Evergreen Baptist Church in Paulina where I grew up.  Daddy would be coming in from the night before at about the time she was leaving. She would not cook for him on Sundays.

“He told Mama, ‘Ok, then I’ll just teach my little girl to cook.’ He built me a little stool so I could reach the stove and he taught me to make gumbo. I’m still making it just like he taught me,” she says. The youngest child and the only girl in a family of five children, though only six years-old at the time she quickly took to cooking and, much to her family’s pleasure, did so every Sunday.                         

She found fodder for her new craft in the family larder, filled as it was with the produce her father grew: bell peppers, green beans, Creole tomatoes, green onions and watermelon. In the winter there were cabbages, mustard and collard greens to be smothered with onions and either pickled pig tails or pickled rib tips.    

Inspiration often came to young Tina from her grandmother, Elnora Bourgeois, “a hog killin’ cook who also delivered babies.” The neighborhood slaughterer, Grandmother Bourgeois fashioned her kill into fresh boudin, andouille, fresh sausage patties, hog’s head cheese and crisp cracklings.

She was a wonderful woman,” Dunbar says. “She could not read or write. She married my grandfather, Joseph Bourgeois, a white Frenchman from Vacherie, when she was very young.  She was a hoot.  She smoked a pipe but she didn’t want him to know so when she heard him coming she would stash the pipe, sometimes lit, into a towel she kept in her bosom. It’s a wonder she never set herself on fire.”

It was from She of the Smoldering Bosom that Dunbar learned the art of improvisation. “My grandfather - he loved liver but my grandmother - but shere couldn’t always find good beef liver in a little town like Paulina so she would go to the store and buy those big beef kidneys and slice them thin, thin and smother them down and, let me tell you, when she served it, it was liver.

“He also loved field peas. “When my grandmother couldn’t find field peas she would smother crowder peas down in dark gravy. My poor grandfather, he had always said he didn’t like crowder peas but he never knew he was eating them. He was always talking about how he loved my grandmother’s liver and field peas. He never knew. He died, and he never knew.”

NOTE: In 2005, Katrina hit Tina’s restaurant hard, filling it with several feet of greasy, brown muck.  She had no flood insurance and no money but she was Hell-bent on reopening her restaurant.  Calling on her improvisational skills once again she re-invented Dunbar’s in the cafeteria of the Loyola University Law School in the student union on the Broadway campus. She and her family opened the doors on their new operation in 2006.

Dunbar's Creole Cooking

 (504) 861-5451

501 Pine Street (Loyola University's Broadway Campus) 
New Orleans, LA