Lena Richard was a celebrity chef before she could sit at a lunch counter or ride in the front of a bus.
Born in 1892 in New Roads, La, Richard “built a culinary empire in New Orleans during the Jim Crow era,” a 2020 National Museum of American History article states. “She reshaped public understanding of New Orleans’ cuisine by showcasing and celebrating the Black roots of Creole cooking in a time when pervasive racial stereotypes surrounded the food industry.”
Richard started cooking at 14 while working for a white New Orleans family. Impressed by her skills, the family sent Richard to a Boston cooking school.
“I found out in a hurry; they can’t teach me much more than I know,” Richard wrote in an essay read during the Smithsonian podcast, “Sidedoor.”
“I learned things about new desserts and salads, but when it comes to cooking meats, stews, soups, sauces … we Southern cooks have Northern cooks beat by a mile. That’s not big talk; that’s the honest truth.”
Richard’s culinary career took off in the late 1930s. She opened a cooking school in 1937 and a frozen food company in 1938. A year later, she published “Lena Richard’s Cookbook,” the first Creole cookbook written by a Black person.
In the 1940s, Richard opened two restaurants: Lena’s Eatery and Lena Richard’s Gumbo House. In 1949, she hosted a 30-minute cooking show twice a week on WDSU-TV, the first Black woman in the United States to do so.
“I am beyond impressed with what she’s done in her career,” chef Dee Lavigne, owner of Deelightful Roux School of Cooking, told WDSU in 2022. “She laid the path for me, over 80 years ago, to be standing right here in my own cooking school.”
Richard died from a heart attack in 1950.
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