THE FONVILLE WINANS COOKBOOK

Fonville Winans began his career by documenting the lives of Depression-Era Cajuns in the coastal town of Grand Isle and later became the official photographer for the state of Louisiana. An enthusiastic tinkerer and occasional inventor, Winans experimented obsessively with recipes. The Fonville Winans Cookbook incorporates recipes he found or invented in the 1950s or 1960s, recorded in two journals that his daughter-in-law, Melinda Winans, found after his death. The recipes range from the Cajun cuisine that he claimed as his favorite to Mexican and Chinese recipes that he brought home from his travels at a time when tamales and fried rice where virtually unknown in Baton Rouge. No book on Fonville Winans would be complete without his photographs, and this cookbook features many that have hitherto gone unpublished. Readers will be fascinated by the photos and the biography of this extraordinary man, and home cooks will enjoy cooking his easy and satisfying recipes.