America’s Unknown Celebrity Chef

Sidedoor

Smithsonian Institution

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4.6 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 10 June 2020

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When Lena Richard cooked her first chicken on television, she beat Julia Child to the screen by over a decade. At a time when most African American women cooks worked behind swinging kitchen doors, Richard claimed her place as a culinary authority, broadcasting in the living rooms of New Orleans’s elite white families. She was an entrepreneur, educator, author, and an icon – and her legacy lives on in her recipes. Today: her improbable rise to prominence, and her famous gumbo.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi Side Door Listeners, a quick message to say that this is a story we've been working on for a few months now,
0:05.6	but it feels especially weighty in light of the events of the past few weeks.
0:09.7	It's a story that takes place in segregated America,
0:13.1	and it resonates today in ways that indicate
0:15.5	we still have a long way to go as a country.
0:18.4	We're going to share it as planned,
0:19.9	but we do want to note that the story makes mention from PRX.
0:38.0	I'm Lizzy cookbooks now as we speak because I'm grabbing the cookbooks now as we speak because I'm long overdue in making my
0:57.2	gumbo.
0:58.6	Paula Rhodes is a lawyer, professor, and human rights advocate. He's also a really good cook.
1:04.8	Okay, on page 135 of her cookbook, there is a brief description of making of the
1:11.8	roof, since that's a base for a lot of the roof,
1:12.7	since that's a base for a lot of the recipes,
1:15.2	not just the dumbbell.
1:17.1	Paula lives in Denver now, but she grew up in New Orleans.
1:20.4	And when I called her up,
1:21.6	she was patient enough to walk me through a New Orleans classic,
1:24.9	her grandmother's gumbo recipe.
1:27.9	Starting with the rue.
1:29.6	Okay, your heat sat.
1:32.4	All right, high heat.
1:34.0	Then you add flour.
	...

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