This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
In 1949, as the chef Lena Richard stirred steaming pots of okra gumbo and shrimp bisque on live TV in New Orleans, viewers across the city — mostly white housewives and the few Black women who could afford a television set — scribbled down ingredients and instructions, eager to bring her Creole flavors into their own homes.
After the studio lights cooled on the set of her show, “Lena Richard’s New Orleans Cook Book,” on WDSU-TV, cameramen pushed past one another for leftovers. Viewers moved from couch to kitchen, measuring, chopping, boiling and frying, adding a little pinch of this, substituting a little dash of that.
During the Jim Crow era, when domestic work was the primary form of employment for Black women, Richard found a measure of fame as a champion of Southern cuisine, and in particular Creole cooking — a fusion of primarily French, Spanish, West African and Native American ingredients and techniques that originated in New Orleans and often includes a roux (a mixture of flour and fat used as a thickening agent) and a “holy trinity” of onions, bell peppers and celery.
Not only was Richard the first Black person to host a television cooking show and to write a Creole cookbook, but she also owned three popular restaurants, established a line of frozen foods, and founded a catering company and cooking school, according to the historian Ashley Rose Young.
“She was an entrepreneur who built a business despite structural barriers in place,” Young, who once worked for the Smithsonian National Museum of American History’s Food History Project, said in an interview. “How did she secure loans? How did she secure the lease for her restaurant business? We don’t know.”
Young has been searching for clues to Richard’s life — photographs, correspondence, business agreements, diaries — which have been lost to moves, mishaps and misunderstandings. (No recordings are known to exist of her 30-minute cooking show, which was seen twice a week, on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, in 1949 and 1950.) And she has been partnering with Paula Rhodes, Richard’s granddaughter, to compile a biography.
Rhodes, a human rights lawyer who was 1 year old when Richard died, said she was impressed by her grandmother’s ability to carve out a career.
“She was a dark-skinned Black woman,” she said in an interview. “Colorism was front and center in New Orleans, not only from the white community but within the Black community. If you were lighter than a brown grocery store bag, you could have certain privileges. She didn’t meet those standards.”
Lena Richard, who was baptized Marie Aurina Paul, was born on Sept. 11, 1892, in New Roads, La., about 100 miles northwest of New Orleans. Census records show that she was one of 10 children of Jean-Pierre Paul, a farmer, and Françoise Laurent, who cooked for the New Orleans garter manufacturer Nugent Vairin and his wife, Alice, and their five children. The Vairins hired Lena to cook for them when she was a teenager, and she prepared lunch before graduating to more complex dinners and events.
Richard’s sardine and egg sandwich recipe on NYT Cooking.
Lena’s employer, recognizing her early culinary talent, “told me that I could go to the store and pick out any kind of cooking utensils that I wanted,” Richard said in a statement found in the archives of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, “and that she was going to give me cooking lessons and send me to cooking schools and every demonstration. If no other colored woman could get places, I certainly could.”
“She was very fortunate that she was championed by the white person for whom she cooked,” Jessica B. Harris, a historian and the author of “High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey From Africa to America” (2011), said in an interview, adding, “Had that not taken place, her talent may never have had a chance to be developed.”
In 1918, Richard was sent to Fannie Farmer’s School of Cookery in Boston.
“When I got up there, I found out in a hurry they can’t teach me much more than I know,” she told The New York Herald Tribune in 1939. “I learned things about new desserts and salads, but when it comes to cooking meats, stews, soups and sauces, we Southern cooks have Northern cooks beat by a mile.”
When she returned to Louisiana, Richard began working for herself, catering parties, weddings and debutante balls. Her husband, Percival Richard, whom she had married in 1914, managed maintenance duties for her. In 1937 she established a cooking school, where she tested her recipes and provided Black students with the skills to open their own businesses. Among her specialties were crawfish bisque, turtle soup, potato pancakes, stewed eggs and oysters, a 16-pound fruitcake, and lamb chops with pineapple.
She began receiving so many requests for her recipes that she published “Lena Richard’s Cook Book” in 1939. (It was later republished as “New Orleans Cook Book.) The book — dedicated to Alice Vairin, who had died in 1931 — included traditional recipes from other Black cooks who influenced Creole cuisine.
Richard dictated more than 300 recipes, menus and culinary tips to her daughter, Marie, who wrote them down and then passed them on to a typist. To pay the printer, Richard held cooking demonstrations. She toured the country to promote her cookbook, selling 700 copies priced at $2 each in one month. The book went beyond Southern cuisine to include recipes for chocolate waffles, asparagus sandwiches and tea dainties.
“Her recipes are not only Creole but for tea parties and other events,” the chef and TV personality Carla Hall said in an interview, adding, “If she wanted to hit a really wide market with her cookbook, she’d have to include ingredients that people were familiar with.”
Richard quickly catapulted to fame in the culinary world. She was hired as the head chef at the Bird and Bottle Inn in Garrison, N.Y., and at Travis House in Colonial Williamsburg, Va.
In 1945, she set up her frozen food business, shipping stews, okra gumbo and other dishes from New Orleans to New York, California and Panama.
“Black middle class always meant you were one paycheck away from poverty,” Rhodes said, but Richard “was a good businesswoman. She was always looking for ways to make money.”
In 1949 Richard opened Lena Richard’s Gumbo House across the street from a white neighborhood. Known as Mama Lena to her customers, she served 54 gallons of gumbo a week on 12 tables covered with white tablecloths and, defying segregation laws, served Black and white patrons, including the white priest and parishioners from the nearby Holy Ghost Catholic Church.
On Sunday, Nov. 26, 1950, Richard attended mass, then went to her restaurant to meet a devotee who had flown in from Los Angeles and ordered every item on the menu. After a long day, Richard complained of feeling unwell and returned to her home in New Orleans. She died there of a heart attack early the next morning. She was 58.
Richard’s legacy was bequeathed to Dee Lavigne in 2022, when Lavigne became the second Black woman in New Orleans to open a cooking school.
Richard’s legacy lives on: In 1940, Houghton Mifflin republished her cookbook as “New Orleans Cook Book,” and the chef Terri Coleman has been cooking her way through it on YouTube and TikTok.
“She seemed like a woman that just kept going,” Coleman said in a Zoom interview. “She didn’t take no for an answer, and she did what she wanted to do. Lena Richard is very much alive with us because we are using her recipes.”
Arlene Schulman is a freelance journalist who writes from her rent-stabilized apartment in Manhattan.
