Sweet Mama Janisse takes the gold once again
By VIVIAN TRACY, The Eureka Reporter, Published: Aug 21 2008
At a time when athletes all over the world are winning gold, silver and
bronze medals at the Olympics, Marie Janisse-Wilkins of Bless My Soul
Cafe in Eureka is no different. For the third year in a row, Sweet Mama
Janisse, as she is affectionately known, took home top honors for her
delectable sauces at this year’s Humboldt County Fair.
With
products
such as Sticky Love Sauce, Soul-Q, Mint to Love Sauce and Spread Me
Please, the names deserve a medal all their own, but Janisse-Wilkins
said she believes it’s the flavor and the love she puts into making
them that earns the true credit.
“I stand behind my sauces,” she said. “They’re clean, no preservatives,
natural, have a great flavor and a good mouth feel,” she said, and she
isn’t the only one who thinks so.
Her Topanga Green Sauce earned the honor of Best of Sauce, and her
Soul-Q, Sticky Love and Chili Pepper Paste sauces were all bestowed
with gold medals. Her Soy Gin Sauce also won top honors, with a silver
medal.
Janisse-Wilkins said she inherited her love of cooking from her
grandmother, Mary Gertrude Janisse, or as she likes to call it,
“Grandma’s Culinary Academy.”
“My grandmother had the taste,” she said, and the natural ability of
knowing how to mix and combine flavors and foods to create a unique and
delicious dish.
In Louisiana, “She raised seven children and then seven grandchildren,”
Janisse-Wilkins said. Cooking by the age of seven, she added “We had so
much love, we never realized that we were really, really poor.”
Later, Grandma Janisse took her brood and moved to Houston, Texas, to
“an old Creole, Cajun neighborhood that was, for six to eight blocks,
all family,” Janisse-Wilkins recalled. “We would get together at each
other’s house and have coffee every day. It was great. Very
close-knit.” That neighborhood was also were she was introduced to the
Southern and Cajun cooking that she is known for today.
She moved to Humboldt County in 1995, and worked for a time in Arcata,
where she says she “learned a lot about packaging products,” and opened
at her current location at 29 5th Street in Eureka in 2002.
Janisse-Wilkins sells her beloved and award-winning sauces not only at
her restaurant, but also at Safeway, Ray’s Food Place, Murphy’s Markets
and at her Web site at www.blessmysoulcafe.com.
Janisse-Wilkins said the secret to her good food is that it is
all-natural. “No one comes to my back door and drops off prepared
food,” she said. “I don’t do that.” Rather, Janisse-Wilkins uses “fresh
collard greens, organic veggies from the Farmers Market” and makes
dishes like “real Mac-n-Cheese.”
“I see ladies buying that packaged stuff in the store and I’ll tell
them, ‘don’t buy that!’ They have all of those dyes and preservatives
in them and they’re not good for children,” she said.
And she practices what she preaches. “Honey, I could tell you about
recycling,” she said. Growing up poor with a house full of hungry
mouths to feed, Janisse-Wilkins said her grandmother always raised her
own food — from vegetables to poultry.
“I never saw a frozen turkey until I grew up,” she laughed. “Nothing
was wasted. We’d use the feathers from the chickens and the turkeys to
make pillows.” She uses that same philosophy now, even making her own
pork sausage from scratch. “I love doing it because it’s all meat,” she
said, with no fillers, no additives, and certainly no preservatives.
She calls her daughter Desiree “one of my best advisors. If I don’t
listen to her, it doesn’t go right,” and said she learned how to master
volume and quantity from her husband and business partner, Chris
Wilkins.
It proved to be a skill that served her well in her earlier catering days when she catered in Southern California for such
celebrities
as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Magic Johnson, Jerry Seinfeld, Bill Cosby,
the Seattle Supersonics, Los Angeles Clippers, Keith Richards and
Little Richard — to name a few; but she adds “not every movie star I
wanted to meet.”
Her sauces are famous and purchased from people all over the world,
and, as was previously reported in this paper, her Sticky Love Sauce
occupies a spot at the National Mustard Museum in Mount Horeb, Wis.
after winning a bronze medal at the Worldwide Mustard Competition in
Napa years ago.
With gold-medal sauces and beloved Southern-inspired entrees like fried
catfish, creole pork, jambalaya and jerk-fried chicken, as well as an
entire vegetarian and catering menu, an inflated ego would be
forgivable in such a successful soul — but that isn’t the case with
Sweet Mama Janisse.
She said she does it all for the smile on her customer’s face who come
to enjoy her good cooking in person- at her Bless My Soul Cafe. “My
pleasure is seeing them enjoy the food,” she said of her customers of
all ages who frequent her cafe. “That’s the beauty. When you’ve made
someone that happy.”
Hours are 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Friday, and 5 p.m. to 10 p.m.
on weekends. Take-out and catering services are available by phoning
707-704-4009 or 707-445-8502. A full menu and a view of Sweet Mama’s
biography is available on the Web site, as well.