My grandmother, who everyone called Bootsie, lived in a little house in Convent, Louisiana. From her front porch, you could see the levee and a couple of ancient oak trees whose gnarled branches reached wide in every direction; she was convinced they would one day come crashing down and destroy her home. Some 40-something years after I first learned of this impending doom, and almost 20 years after her death, the branches remain outstretched, and her little house remains standing. I believe the sheer force of her anxiety continues to protect the house.
In my earliest years, we lived in a little trailer a little further down River Road. Even after we moved a few miles away, I still recall spending most of my childhood at her house and, as a young man, even moved in with her for a few months after 9/11, before shipping off to boot camp.
Twigs that fell from those trees provided countless childhood guns and swords. In those pre-video game days, I made a thousand paper airplanes of various configurations and colored them with crayons my mom bought from TG&Y. My grandmother didn’t have a car. In those days, she didn’t have cable TV either. There was a brown, plastic box next to her window with a dial on it the size of a mayonnaise jar lid, and you could turn it this way or that, and somehow — it was magic then, and a mystery now — it would adjust the direction of an antenna on her roof. It’s how you could watch Morgus the Magnificent or Scooby-Doo on WGNO (channel 26 on UHF, the top knob) or the Saints on WWL (channel 4, the bottom knob). When we got cuts or scrapes, she would coat the injuries with Mercurochrome. It felt like a treat, that red dye you applied with a little plastic stick — you could just tell it was working and, in retrospect, so often was it applied that I probably should have died of mercury poisoning.
Bootsie always had pickles in the refrigerator. She made lemon pies from scratch. And in a large pitcher in her refrigerator, there was always root beer that she made from a little brown bottle with a bright yellow label emblazoned with a large letter Z. Today when I think of Zatarain’s, I think of breading mixes, spices and seasonings, but in those days, there was only the tiny bottle of root beer concentrate. When I stayed at her house during the summer and long school holidays, there was always the chance that we would finish the pitcher, and I could help make more. Refill the pitcher with water, add a half-tablespoon of the inky liquid and some sugar, and stir with a big wooden spoon. It might be the first recipe I ever knew. I still recall what it smelled like, and after the interminable wait while it cooled in the fridge, what it tasted like.
That root beer, inseparable from my childhood memories, was created in New Orleans nearly a century before I was born. At the time, Emile A. Zatarain, Sr. owned a grocery store in the city. Emile Zatarain was a forward thinker. Zatarain’s store was the first in the state to use a mechanical register made by National Cash Register — similar to how Rouses Markets was the first store in Louisiana to use barcode scanners. Before then, stores used pen and paper to tally customer purchases. Zatarain even invented a 19th-century version of Instacart — just like Rouses uses today — to get groceries to their customers. (Theirs was a horse-drawn buggy, however.) A few years after opening for business, Zatarain got to work developing a root beer, hoping to premiere it at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, an international exposition to be held in St. Louis, Missouri. In the fair’s first two weeks, Zatarain served 16,000 glasses of his root beer — almost one per minute, if the fair were open 24 hours a day, which of course it wasn’t.
Back in New Orleans, he also sold root beer in his store, but soon switched to selling root beer extract — it was more efficient than selling by the glass — and he also started selling spices, olives, pickles and mustard. In those days, he sold them under the label “Papoose,” but everyone knew it was Zatarain’s and, eventually, they changed the name. He built a factory in a little brick building on Valmont Street, right off Magazine, near the place where Guy’s Po-Boys is today. Zatarain had five sons, and each of them worked there. One son eventually took over when his father retired — a true family business. In 1922, they reincorporated as E.A. Zatarain & Sons. The company was active in the community, sponsoring Little League teams and local events, and was one of the forces that helped found the Sugar Bowl at Tulane University.
No longer a grocery store, in 1963 Zatarain’s moved to Gretna, where it built a large facility to create its many products, which expanded now to include other Creole foods and rice mixes. That year, the family sold the company to James Viavant, who cofounded Avondale Shipyards. (Viavant acquired other food businesses, including Pelican State Lab, bringing Fish-Fri into the Zatarain’s family.) In the 1980s, everyone wanted a piece of the action, and the company changed hands a half-dozen times. It was about as distinct as a New Orleans company can get, and by 2000, it was a nationally recognized brand, available on store shelves from coast to coast.
Though Maryland-based McCormick & Company paid $180 million in cash for Zatarain’s in 2003, its massive plant, 500 feet from the Mississippi River, remained on the West Bank. In fact, its presence in Gretna is larger than ever. In 2015, Zatarain’s tripled its footprint, expanding its facility with a gleaming, 80,000-square-foot shop floor, able to produce hundreds of products and ship tens of millions of pounds of food annually across the planet. Today, Zatarain’s is one of the largest spice companies in the world — which, given the tumultuous history of spice as a driver of world affairs, is an epic achievement.
Zatarain’s is more than simply a company that makes food products in New Orleans. It is a worldwide ambassador for the city. It is, as its label promises, a New Orleans tradition since 1889. For me, though, it’ll always be Sunday afternoons and summer vacations at Bootsie Letulle’s house, a little brown bottle with a yellow label, and a cool pitcher waiting to be poured.
