By Jim Beaugez
Catfish Row Museum’s Summer Chef Series continues Sat., July 12, with a cooking demonstration and conversation featuring LeAnne Gault and Malcolm White, two Mississippians whose personal and professional lives have been shaped by food, family and the communities they’ve built along the way.
Gault’s menu for the event centers on Catfish Piccata and Elfo’s Special, a pair of recipes she describes as chapters in her life. “This demo isn’t just about cooking,” she says. “It’s about storytelling through food.”
Born and raised in the Mississippi Delta, Gault grew up in a household where meals were structured and deeply Southern. As her family moved around the region, from Yazoo City to Indianola to Greenville, each town left its own impression on her palate. In Yazoo City, Lebanese and Italian families sold kibbeh and meatballs at the corner store. Indianola had The Crown in the Antique Mall, where chicken à la king reigned supreme. But the center of gravity for Gault was always home.
“Fridays meant steak, Saturdays were for catfish fries with hush puppies and vinegar slaw,” she says. “That’s where my love for catfish was born — at neighborhood gatherings, with the smell of fried potatoes in the air and laughter echoing off the porch.”
Her Catfish Piccata is a tribute to those nights, but with a twist. “I come from a long line of dredge-and-fry women,” she says, “but we were frying pork chops and country fried steak with gravy. Piccata was something different — delicately floured, sautéed, elevated with wine and butter instead of heavy gravy. It was a revelation for me.”
That shift began in the 1980s, when her family landed in Greenville and her parents started taking cooking classes from chefs out of Memphis and New Orleans. One of them was John Grisanti, a larger-than-life restaurateur who ran one of the South’s most storied Italian restaurants in Memphis.
One of Grisanti’s signature dishes, Elfo’s Special, stuck with her. The dish was simple, consisting of pasta tossed with shrimp, mushrooms and garlic butter, and topped with a lemon-forward piccata sauce, but the flavors were bold. “Until my parents took that class, I’d never had anything so simple and so elevated,” Gault says. “Just butter, garlic, mushrooms, and really fresh Gulf shrimp. It changed the way I thought about food.”
At home, Gault began experimenting in the kitchen, watching Julia Child and Justin Wilson on PBS, cooking for her sisters when her parents went out. For Catfish Row Museum, she’s reimagining Elfo’s Special as a risotto cake, using Mississippi-grown arborio rice tended and harvested by a Delta farmer friend, with local catfish subbing for shrimp. “I’m taking all the ingredients of Elfo’s Special and turning it into something new,” she says. “I’m even replacing the capers with pickled field peas for a real Delta immersion.”
Joining Gault on stage is longtime friend and fellow food advocate Malcolm White. Known to many as the “Mal” in Hal and Mal’s, the Jackson institution he co-founded with his late brother Hal, White’s culinary resume also includes running Tuminello’s Kitchen in Vicksburg and co-hosting Deep South Dining on Mississippi Public Broadcasting.
White and Gault are also central members of Cooking and Coping, an online community that grew out of the pandemic and now includes more than 8,000 people around the world who share photos, recipes and reflections on the meals that shape their lives.
“What started with Saturday night catfish fries became this community my parents built,” Gault says. “Now, it’s grown into something bigger — this family of people around the world who just want to talk about food. That’s my inspiration now.”
The Summer Chef Series will continue on July 26 as Chef Enrika Williams brings her signature style for “Bohemian Bites and Southern Roots.” Chef Taylor Bowen-Ricketts will close the season with “Southern Fresh: Tradition with a Twist” on Aug. 9.
