What’s on the Menu: Chicken and Dumplings

For chef Bryan Caswell, this dish wasn’t just something he learned, it was something he felt compelled to preserve. Both of his grandmothers were from Louisiana. Birdie-Bea from Natchitoches and Ma Daigle from Opelousas, and as a teenager, he realized that no one else in the family was stepping up to carry the chicken and dumplings recipe forward.  

Chicken and dumplings was the first dish he had to learn. Not a want, but a need. It was a recipe only his grandmother knew, and Bryan understood early on that if he didn’t learn it, it would disappear. From ages 14 to 18, he spent weeks at a time immersed in their kitchens. Cooking, handwriting recipes, canning, pickling, farming, building chicken coops, and baking pies with the singular goal of keeping those culinary traditions alive so they could one day be passed down again. 

That lineage still weaves through Latuli’s menu today. Birdie-Bea’s influence shows up in dishes like yeast rolls with jalapeño jelly, cornbread, field peas, collard greens, pickled runner beans, and, most notably, chicken and dumplings. Ma Daigle’s cooking lives on through duck and sausage gumbo, pimento cheese, smoked redfish dip, spiced pecans, duck-fat fingerlings, sorghum butter, and sunchoke purée. 

At Latuli, the chicken and dumplings isn’t a nostalgic throwback or a reinterpretation. It’s a living family recipe, cooked with intention, memory, and respect. It’s Bryan’s way of making sure those grandmothers are still at the table.