Edible New Orleans Winter 2011 : Page 29
and rebuild the place himself. Working by generator, he salvaged what he could and replaced what he couldn’t, wheelbarrowing debris out to the neutral ground as neighborhood regulars came by to offer any help they could. The only place open in the area at that point was a tire shop. When Mr. Henry re-opened, folks lined up down the street. “People were so glad, they were tired of eating Red Cross,” he remembers. “And it meant so much to them that somebody was able to fight through all the problems going on. We did it as a small busi-ness, not a big franchise—we were from the neighborhood.” Mr. Henry succeeded with a unique mix of innovation and tra-dition. He made king cakes for Carnival season, of course, but ex-perimented extensively to make them unlike any other in town, and his impossibly soft cakes, moist and abundant with cinnamon flavor, became a new favorite among king-cake connoisseurs. “I want you to know it’s mine,” he says. “I don’t want you to think about nothing else but, ‘oh, this is Henry’s, I gotta have one of these.’ Certain people that are making them commercially, they end up dry because they’re making too many, they got to make them quick. I ain’t naming no names but you know what I’m saying. I put love into mine. I ain’t making millions. I take pride in each and every one. Mine stay soft, even after you’ve had it for days. You don’t have to have no milk or nothing.” Mr. Henry’s true knack, though, was for re-creating old favorites. He brought back raisin squares, an old hit from the beloved bakery at the old Woolworth’s on Canal. And, most enticingly for local sweet-tooth fanatics, he set out to re-create McKenzie Bakery’s famous but-termilk drops. For years, folks had been bemoaning the loss of the now-defunct bakery chain’s little round cake-doughnut holes, sharply crispy on the outside and dense and velvety in the middle. “That’s a pastry that people really, really missed,” Mr. Henry says. “I’d tasted them, I’d loved them, and I knew I had to come up with my own version. I don’t know how they did theirs, so I tried this way and that way, and kept experimenting until I had it perfect. When people bite into it, I want them to go back fifteen, twenty, thirty years ago to what they used to love at McKenzie’s. People that used to eat there have tried mine and they tell me—I got it. We’re running neck and neck.” “We realized we had a choice to make. We could go with a professional guy who does this for a living, or we could go with Mr. Henry, a guy who’s a dynamic screen personality, who’s kind of volatile and wild, and we all loved him— but he’s never acted a day in his life.” www.edibleneworleans.com 29
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