It starts wet and cold.

Gulf shrimp and oysters when the trucks run north, and whatever's good off the Sound when they don't. In spring the crawfish arrive by the sack, and the boil pot comes out back.

Then it turns brown.

Flour, oil, and thirty patient minutes over cast iron until it's the color of an old penny. Every gumbo, every gravy, every good thing here begins in this pot — and there's no rushing it.

And then it becomes supper.

Pull up a chair and stay a while.

Cast iron on worn wood, a room that fills up loud on the weekends. Dinner here isn't meant to be quick — it's meant to run long, the way it does back home.