I couldn’t believe that the letter writer wasn’t telling a lie. Bill, worldly at ten and eight, told me that the title was French, the language spoken on the island of Martinique and in Louisiana, the state where we both had thought that Mr. Pat had lived and died. I recognized “Cuisine” as a fancy word for cooking but not “Creole.” Bill said that the word meant white people descended from the French or the Spanish or it could mean colored folks descended from the same. Down in Louisiana, if they were light-complected enough, then they called themselves “Creoles of color,” he said. The white in them had to come from France or Spain though, he repeated.

“Not Ireland or Scotland?” I asked, and he replied no.

Bill has tried to find that cookbook, but over the years he hasn’t been able to locate a single copy. He even wrote to some of the secondhand bookshops in New Orleans. One wrote back to say that they knew of it, but that there were very few copies in the city because few had been printed in the first place.

No, I’m not curious to see it, Miss.

Truth be told, I’m taken aback that someone would trust Pat or Lafcadio—or whoever he was at the time—to know enough about the kitchen to write an entire book about it. I don’t know what Creole cooking is, but if these are colored folks, then I think I know a thing or two about what’s on their tables. What I want to know is whether these were the dishes that they cooked in their own kitchens or in the kitchens of others. The two aren’t the same. The first is what they hunger for, and the second is what their hunger will make them do.

You don’t understand the fullness of my meaning, do you, Miss?

Listen, take pork neck bones, for instance. Long-simmered and served with pan gravy, it’s humble fare that we in the kitchen eat. I would never prepare it for Mrs. Haslam and her boarders, and they are poorer for never having tasted it. Like an oyster stew, I can make this dish in my sleep, not because my hands remember it but because my heart remembers it. I ask you how could a white man, Pat or Lafcadio, know how to cook something like that?

Do you know that he’d owned a restaurant, Miss?

Bill doesn’t remember reading it in the letter from Martinique, but I remember hearing it. The letter writer claimed that he’d been part owner of a restaurant that served cheap but wholesome fare.

Yes, in New Orleans, Miss.

He thought about calling it The 5-Cent Restaurant, the letter writer began.