In the kitchen at Two Sisters in Treme, Colette Finister tends a stove crowded with well-seasoned pots, steam rising from under the lids into an unmistakable aroma.
It is soul food, the down-home Southern pot cooking of Black tradition, rendered with a range of rich gravies in a spectrum of brown hues. It’s the cooking Finister and her family have been serving New Orleans for more than 50 years.
Her sister, Shanel Snowton, calls the arsenal of stockpots and tureens and Dutch ovens their “soul pots.” They yield meaty, generous plate lunches built around smothered turkey wings or turkey necks, stewed oxtails, smothered hen, pork neckbones with cabbage and chitterlings, which the sisters clean twice and cook down with onions, low and slow, the way their father taught them long ago…