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Left: Clementine Paddleford article on Lena Richard from the New York Herald Tribune, 1939.
Background: The Gumbo House
Right: New Orleans Cook Book, Wikipedia Commons
About a half-century before Emeril Lagasse exclaimed his first televised “Bam!”, a now largely forgotten New Orleans chef and restaurateur named Lena Richard was showing those fortunate enough to own a tv in 1949 how to prepare the Creole dishes she’d featured in her restaurants.
By that time, Richard had owned and operated three dining establishments. She’d also written a popular cookbook, launched a social catering outfit, opened a cooking school in the Big Easy, created a frozen food company with national distribution, and cooked for wartime miliary dignitaries. And she was all of 57 years of age.
But perhaps her greatest achievement was breaking the color line at a time racial barriers were as dangerous to cross as a raging Mississippi River. Indeed, her last restaurant, The Gumbo House, challenged the Jim Crow rules of the Deep South by refusing to segregate its 12-table dining room.
Her cooking school was marketed to Black men and women who wanted to open their own restaurants, a bold ambition at the time.
Historians say it’s a near certainty that her twice-weekly cooking show, “Lena Richard’s New Orleans Cookbook,” was the first program during the early years of tv to feature a Black host. Many go so far as to contend Richard was the food-away-from-home industry’s first celebrity chef.
Richard was one of six children born to a Louisiana couple who both worked as servants for the Vairin family, a pillar of New Orleans’ White high society. The matriarch, Alice Vairin, hired Lena at age 14 to make lunches for the Vairin children.
Fortunately for Richard, Alice Vairin was more attuned to talent than skin color. Realizing her young hire was an outstanding talent, Vairin insisted that Lena pursue a culinary education, first locally, then at the famed Fannie Farmer’s School of Cookery in Boston, Mass. (Richard would pay her benefactor back by dedicating her cookbook to Vairin.)
After Richard started classes at Fannie Farmer’s, she remarked to family and friends that she’d already knew much of what was imparted in the school’s instructional kitchens. But she persevered.
Upon completing the curriculum, she started a catering concern that specialized in weddings and debutante balls. Her school for aspiring Black culinarians would soon follow.
Richard’s cookbook was published in 1939. Its 330 recipes included the how-to instructions for New Orleans staples and such tea party fare as finger sandwiches (an asparagus sandwich was one of the specialties.)
The book drew the attention of major newspapers and White society at large, and sales were significant. Each sold for the then-princely sum of $2.
Her fame and talent propelled her into jobs as far from New Orleans as Garrison, N.Y., and Williamsburg, Va. But she returned home to open The Gumbo House.
In late 1950, an out-of-town fan of Richard’s cooking met with the chef at the restaurant and ordered everything on the menu. Richard obliged him.
The exertion is believed to be what triggered a fatal heart attack the next morning. She was 58.
There is no consensus as to why Richard is not more widely remembered today for her culinary talents and what she did to counter the racism of the 1930s and ‘40s. But her cookbook is still available today on Amazon.