Lena Richard was a chef of Creole cuisine from New Orleans, famous for her shrimp bisque and spicy chicken gumbo. She not only had a cooking school, a cookbook, several restaurants and even a frozen food line (unusual for the 1940s), but she was also one of the first American women to have her own cooking show. Richard “is one of the most profound American women in history,” says Zella Parmer of Dillard University in New Orleans, Louisiana. “It’s so much we can learn from Lena Richard.” This podcast episode explores Richard’s early days as a domestic for a wealthy white family, to her turn as a student at the prestigious Fannie Farmer school in Boston, to her eventual reign as New Orleans’ star chef.
Far from resting on her laurels, Richard established a cooking school in New Orleans designed to give Black chefs like herself the training and the credentialing to command higher wages. Just as she was truly achieving superstardom, Richard’s life was tragically cut short. “We don’t really know how far Lena would have gone with everything that she had done, but I imagine had she lived longer, more people would know her story,” says Ashley Rose Young, a historian at the Smithsonian and Library of Congress.
The episode also features Chef Dee Lavigne of the Deelightful Roux School of Cooking, only the second Black woman after Richard to open a cooking school in New Orleans.
Check out the entire Seasoned project, with more episodes rolling out in the weeks and months ahead.
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COLLEEN DEBAISE: Hi, I'm Colleen DeBaise.
VICTORIA FLEXNER: And I'm food historian Victoria Flexner.
COLLEEN: Today we're continuing our series about American women in food…
VICTORIA: …whose names you may never have heard of…
COLLEEN: …but who nevertheless made American food what it is today. If you haven't already, check out our previous episodes on MFK Fisher, the great California food writer, and Cecilia Chiang, the San Francisco restaurateur. Today we head down to New Orleans…
VICTORIA: …to talk about one of the best examples of an iconic American woman in food, who has sort of entirely slipped through the cracks of history.
ZELLA PALMER: Lena Richard, I think she is one of the most profound American women in history. There's so much we can learn from Lena Richard.
VICTORIA: That's Zella Palmer. She's the chair and director…
ZELLA: of the Dillard University Ray Charles program in African American material culture here in New Orleans, Louisiana.
VICTORIA: And we talked to her and a few other food experts about the culinary legacy of Lena Richard.
ZELLA: She knew how to make some of the most classic Creole dishes.
COLLEEN: That's right. Lena Richard was a chef of Creole cuisine from New Orleans, famous for her shrimp bisque and spicy chicken gumbo, who not only had a cooking school--
VICTORIA: --and a cookbook--
COLLEEN: --and a few restaurants--
VICTORIA: --and even a frozen food line--
COLLEEN: --she was also one of the first American women to have her own cooking show on TV, and almost certainly the first Black woman to have her own show.
VICTORIA: It started to air on WDSU in New Orleans all the way back in 1949, more than a decade before Julia Child.
COLLEEN: And you know, I think a lot of people probably assume Julia, whose cooking show “The French Chef” first aired on TV in 1963, was in fact the first American woman to have a cooking show.
JULIA CHILD: This is really the stew of stews! Boeuf bourguignon, today on “The French Chef.”
VICTORIA: Yeah, they probably do, but Lena Richard came well before. Sadly, we can't play a clip from Lena's show, because like a lot of live programs from the early, early days of TV, there's just no archive of it. Though legend has it that when she was done with her twice-a-week broadcast, the cameramen would actually push past each other to get to the leftovers!
COLLEEN: You know, it's kind of shocking that she's not more famous, though her life was tragically cut short. She died from a heart attack at the age of 58 when her TV show was only a year old.
VICTORIA: Yeah, and you have to wonder if perhaps we might be more familiar with her today if she'd lived longer or, to be honest, if we lived in a society that celebrated our Black female chefs. Lena was really at the height of her career, breaking new ground, when she passed in 1950. In many ways, she set the standard of the multi-hyphenate food personality that so many chefs and food stars emulate in this space today.
ZELLA: The one thing that I always think about is just how she perfected these recipes, you know, as she had Black women and white women trying to learn how to cook.
COLLEEN: If you go online today, there's actually an ardent group of fans recreating some of her famous recipes.
FAN #1: Welcome back to Lena's 1939 Creole Recipes, where I'm cooking my way through the original “New Orleans Cook Book.”
FAN #2: Today, we're focused on the queen of Creole cooking, Lena Richard.
FAN #3: Today, we are honoring Lena Richard's legacy with a classic New Orleans dish, shrimp creole.
ZELLA: And it's all in her book, her first book, “Lena Richard’s Cook Book,” which was published in 1939.
VICTORIA: The book, which has been reprinted many, many times, is widely recognized as the first Creole cookbook written by an African American.
COLLEEN: So let's talk about one of the recipes in there, Lena's watermelon ice cream dish.
VICTORIA: Yeah, it's one of her most famous signature dishes. When it was presented at the table-- and Lena catered many meals for wealthy white socialites--it looked like a watermelon. But then as you cut into it, the rind turns out to actually be a green shell of stiff whipped cream. Then there's a very thin layer of white cream followed by a filling of strawberry sherbet that looks like the flesh of the watermelon, complete with little raisins to mimic the seeds.
COLLEEN: Amazing. And, you know, I know there's some speculation today that Lena, in perhaps a subtle way, was taking watermelon, which had anti-Black, racist connotations, and turning it into something beautiful.
VICTORIA: Yeah, I'll read from a piece published just this past spring in Oxford American magazine. Quote, “Such was Richard’s genius. She could take a food so symbolically charged, stained with prejudice, and find authorial agency in it. That dream melon wasn't just a dessert. It was a reclamation.”
COLLEEN: And, you know, it also just sounds really sublime.
VICTORIA: It does. And there's also this trompe l'oeil effect to the watermelon that reminds me of the kind of experimental dishes we've seen in more recent years at Noma, the world-renowned restaurant in Copenhagen, or even El Bulli, which was the legendary eatery in Spain. Once again, she was way ahead of her time.
ASHLEY ROSE YOUNG: This is what I loved about getting into the research with Lena's story.
VICTORIA: That's Ashley Rose Young.
ASHLEY: I am a historian and a Smithsonian research associate.
VICTORIA: She's also a curator in the rare books division at the Library of Congress.
ASHLEY: I love examining U.S. history through the lens of race and gender and ethnicity, and I do so using food as my window into the past.
VICTORIA: Ashley has spent a good chunk of the last 15 years researching Lena Richard’s life.
ASHLEY: So Lena was born in 1892 in rural Louisiana in a francophone, French-speaking area. Her father was actually born into slavery and her mother may have also been born into slavery. She was dealing with the echoes of slavery, and just the economic challenges and the desire to break away from rural life, and life tied to plantation economies.
VICTORIA: Around 1910, Lena's family moved to New Orleans.
ASHLEY: New Orleans is a bustling city, very different. It's in the midst of the Jim Crow South. So, of course, segregation would have followed her from the rural South into New Orleans as well. Like many Black women in the South at that time, Lena started working as a domestic--essentially a cleaner and a cook. She was still attending school at the time that she began working part-time for a wealthy New Orleans family known as the Vairins. And this was a white family that had four daughters. Alice Vairin was their mother and was very involved in Lena's life.
VICTORIA: At first, Lena was just preparing the kids' lunches.
ASHLEY: But there was an opportunity that arose when the Vairins' cook left employment and Alice asked Lena if she could fill in for a dinner and prepare a dinner for the family.
VICTORIA: Immediately, it became clear to Alice Vairin that Lena Richard was not just a cook. She possessed an innate talent. She was a born chef.
ASHLEY: She had this ancestral wisdom that was passed down from one generation to the next; these really important connections to recipes like gumbo and jambalaya and other dishes, again, that were these throughlines for enslaved African American women and their descendants. There was something that she understood about cooking that wasn't just your average way of knowing flavor and knowing how to create something that was special.
VICTORIA: Alice and Lena became close.
ASHLEY: Alice actually spent a lot of time with Lena in the kitchen, which is kind of an odd arrangement in the Jim Crow South, for a white employer to spend so much time with a hired chef.
VICTORIA: Eventually, Alice offered to send Lena to a cooking school, the Fannie Farmer School in Boston.
ASHLEY: That was one of the most prestigious cooking schools in the nation at the time, specifically for women and mainly for white women. But there were opportunities to petition the school to ask for special permission for an African American student to attend. Alice and Lena were determined and worked their magic, so to speak.
COLLEEN: Wow. So they had to make sure this was OK with the white students?
VICTORIA: Yes. Boston might not have been the Jim Crow South, but every white student at the school still had to give written permission for Lena Richard to attend. She was accepted to study in Boston in the summer of 1918.
ASHLEY: This is in the midst of World War I, and Lena, a young Black woman, is going to head north by herself, without many networks in the north. But she heads north to do so. And she attends the school.
VICTORIA: Later in life, when Lena reflected back on her time in Boston, she famously said…
ASHLEY: “I learned really quickly that they weren't going to teach me anything that I didn't already know.” Her classmates really were interested in Creole cuisine. It was revered at that time. Regional cuisines are of great interest to Americans in the early 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, and Creole cuisine, it was on a pedestal. I mean, this was a cousin or a sister to French cuisine.
VICTORIA: And so Lena, a student at the Fannie Farmer School, found herself doing informal classes for her fellow students and teaching them about Creole cuisine.
ASHLEY: She liked being a teacher. She liked sharing Creole cuisine and her knowledge and her family's knowledge with people.
VICTORIA: I think what is quite interesting about this chapter of Lena's life is that this is the moment where she goes out into the wider world, and is able to sort of measure her own skills as a chef against the larger backdrop of American cuisine at the time.
COLLEEN: Yeah. And perhaps she also gets the bug for teaching.
VICTORIA: Yes. As she starts to share her knowledge of Creole cuisine with the other students, she's not only honing her teaching skills, she's learning the value of the knowledge that she has to share.
COLLEEN: When we come back, Lena heads to New Orleans…
VICTORIA: …where she'll open up her own cooking school.
COMMERCIAL: The Story Exchange is an award winning nonprofit media platform that elevates women's voices and achievements. If you like what you're listening to in our series on culinary pioneers, check out our episode on trailblazing San Francisco restaurateur Cecilia Chiang.
SIENA CHIANG: They called her Madame Chiang and she reveled in having the perfect outfit and creating a warm environment and welcoming people of all stripes.
COMMERCIAL: And stay tuned for more, including an upcoming episode on Southern legend Edna Lewis.
COLLEEN: Welcome back. We're sharing the story of Lena Richard of New Orleans, a prominent chef of Creole cuisine…
VICTORIA: …who had her own cookbook, TV show, restaurants and even her own line of frozen food products way back in the 1930s and 40s, but whom history has nearly forgotten.
CHEF DEE LAVIGNE: To know that I was born and raised in New Orleans and I never knew how phenomenal this lady was… It almost hurts my soul.
VICTORIA: That's Chef Dee Lavigne.
DEE: I'm the owner of the Deelightful School of Cooking in New Orleans, Louisiana.
COLLEEN: We reached out to Dee because she is only the second Black woman in New Orleans to open up a cooking school some 80 years after Lena Richard did.
VICTORIA: Dee, who trained at the Culinary Institute of America, first learned about Lena thanks to an exhibit less than 10 years ago at the Southern Food and Beverage Museum. Now she's following in her footsteps.
COLLEEN: Dee's cooking school is located inside the museum. Here she is making a pecan pie, a Southern classic.
DEE: So the first thing we're going to do, is we have three large eggs we're going to add to the bowl. Next, we're going to add in some delicious dark Karo syrup.
COLLEEN: OK, I have to ask, we always hear the terms Creole and Cajun thrown around as two distinct styles. Are they?
VICTORIA: Yeah, Dee actually broke it down for us.
DEE: Cajun cuisine is going to be more smoky. They are woodsmen. They're more sports hunters, so they eat more game and tight proteins. Creoles are more city people, right? So we eat a lot more seafood, lighter fare, but more spicy, and definitely has tomatoes. Tomatoes is a bigger separation between Cajun and Creole. Creole, tomato-laden; Cajun, no tomatoes at all.
COLLEEN: Got it.
VICTORIA: So one of Dee's favorite Creole recipes to teach is shrimp bisque.
DEE: And that was done with this stuffed shrimp head. That is definitely an old school, like, New Orleans type of style. And so, yeah, there are a lot of young people that are doing it today--not knocking any credit--but every time I see it, I know it goes back to her.
VICTORIA: The her, of course, is Lena Richard, who arrived back home to New Orleans in the fall of 1918 after studying in Boston. She went on to open up her own cooking school.
DEE: Her reasoning for owning a cooking school was impact; to teach people how to get that step up, right? How to kind of get that leg up. I think just giving people the opportunity to present themselves [as] more seasoned, more educated, more well-rounded, more polished. That's incredible to know that it was not just about her. It was really about a community as a whole and a people as a whole.
VICTORIA: Unlike Fannie Farmer's school in Boston, which was really aimed at educating a white female student body, Lena's cooking school was aimed at educating Black women.
DEE: People were working jobs that was barely paying anything, and she wanted to allow them to thrive. And the best way she could do that was through education.
VICTORIA: It was about the power of credentialing.
ASHLEY: The cooking school--
VICTORIA: That's Ashley Rose Young again.
ASHLEY: --I think stems from Lena's own experiences with culinary education. So Lena left that program with a diploma in hand and that wielded cachet in the United States at that time. And so she understood that credentialing, which was denied so many African Americans in New Orleans at that time, could really make a difference. So she opens the Lena M. Richard Catering School so that they could leave with a paper diploma signed by Lena Richard with her stamp of approval. And it gave them an opportunity to ask for higher wages.
DEE: To know that I am the only second Black woman to own a cooking school in New Orleans outside of Mama Lena is pretty incredible.
VICTORIA: Both Dee and Ashley often affectionately refer to Lena as “Mama Lena.” That's also how she was known to customers.
ASHLEY: So there's all these beautiful parallels between Dee's life and Mama Lena's life.
COLLEEN: Like Lena, Dee also cooks on TV. Here she is on local New Orleans station, WWL.
DEE: I am Chef Dee Lavigne, and today we will be making a honey apple citrus coleslaw. So you want to shake it just well enough until the dressing itself is emulsified, which means that…
COLLEEN: Numerous publications--Forbes, New York Times, Eater--have connected Dee and Lena.
VICTORIA (FROM TAPE): How does it feel when people say that you are kind of carrying on her legacy? And do you feel like you are?
DEE: So I went and I Googled myself and I just saw all of these articles. And…and I was like, OK. So that made me feel good, because I felt like my message was getting heard and that she was getting more visibility of, you know, about her legacy. I felt like it was never about me. I was just a messenger.
VICTORIA: By the 1930s, Lena's career was flourishing. She had now opened a few restaurants. She had the cooking school, which she was running alongside her daughter, Marie. In many ways, the cooking school really functioned as sort of a culinary laboratory for the recipes that would eventually make their way into her cookbook, the “Lena Richard Cook Book,” which she self-published in 1939. It contains over 300 recipes created by Lena, all transcribed by Marie.
COLLEEN: And I love the preface of her cookbook, which is very straightforward and to the point. Here's Dee reading from it from the Smithsonian's podcast.
DEE: “The secrets of Creole cooking, which have been kept for years by the old French chefs, are herein revealed. There is no need to experiment, for I have done the experimenting in my own laboratory kitchen as well as in my cooking school.”
VICTORIA: After her cookbook came out, Lena went up north again, this time to New York City. She began promoting her book, which gained attention from big publishers in the city, and eventually Houghton Mifflin republished it a year later as the “New Orleans Cook Book.”
COLLEEN: OK, so Lena has become at this point this nationally recognized figure.
VICTORIA: Yeah, it's at this moment that she gets the break so many cookbook authors dream of having: her own TV show.
TV CLIP: From WDSU…
VICTORIA: In 1948, WDSU, the first television station in New Orleans, hits the air. This is, of course, very early television days in America. This is a brand-new technology.
TV CLIP: We've come a long, long way in TV, but the future looks even brighter…
ASHLEY: And then come October 1949--so less than a year after WDSU kicks off for the first time--Lena's program premieres. Given her reputation in New Orleans, right, as their top star chef, it's natural to me that they would tap her to start a cooking program. And women who watched her early program would say, “It was like she was in my living room with me. It was like she was talking directly to me.”
VICTORIA: That's all we have to go by, sadly. Ashley has searched every archive imaginable and can't even find a script from the show.
ASHLEY: What I would do to be able to watch a recording of Lena on TV, to hear her voice, to see her facial expressions, to understand why she was so captivating and what made her such a great educator… You know, it's like breadcrumbs that we are trying to piece back together to understand who she was.
VICTORIA: I asked Dee, who's done a lot of TV herself, what Lena may have been like on camera.
DEE: I often think that she was quite serious when it came to food, but I still think she had an excellent sense of humor--at least in my head she did! You have to kind of be a big personality to hold and captivate. You have to be dedicated. And the word I use all the time to talk about her is just “fortitude.”
VICTORIA: I feel like we need to pause here and just take a second to think again about how incredibly ahead of her time she was. Today, food personalities are often multi-hyphenates. They've got cookbooks and restaurants, podcasts, TV shows.
COLLEEN: Mm-hm, right. And here's Lena in the 1940s, a Black woman in the Jim Crow South, doing it all. She even had a frozen food line! I don't even know how one would even do that back then, but we know from news reports [she] shipped some of her signature dishes like okra gumbo as far as New York, California, even Panama.
VICTORIA: A true multi-medium food entrepreneur. And then just like that, Lena is gone. What we know, again from news reports, is that on Sunday, November 26, 1950, Lena met with a fan who had flown in all the way from Los Angeles to try her food. It was a long day. And by the end of it, Lena complained of feeling unwell. She went home and died there early the next morning of a heart attack. She was just 58.
ASHLEY: We don't really know how far Lena would have gone with everything that she had done. But, you know, I imagine had she lived longer, more people would know her story. I think her story would have been out there along with Julia’s, all of these people who have come to define cuisines in the United States.
VICTORIA (FROM TAPE): Do you feel like she is well-known, or is she only well-known in kind of, like, the culinary history community? Does the average chef working in New Orleans today know who she is?
ZELLA: For those who do their research, I mean, here's the challenge.
COLLEEN: This is Zella Palmer again from Dillard University, Louisiana's oldest HBCU.
ZELLA: When I think about how other chefs are celebrated from other parts of the U.S., compared to how Black New Orleans chefs are celebrated, it's very troubling. And it goes back to New Orleans always being seen, exotified, you know, or just like, being seen as an outsider. And I wonder why. Is it because the food is quite different from the rest of the U.S., or because of the kind of intimidation of these chefs who have so much talent--not being able to share the spotlight with other chefs? And it's the proximity also to New York, right? New York is the media capital of the world. So if you have more proximity to New York's media machine, then, of course, you're going to get more attention. But we're at the end of--we're at the bottom, at the boot.
COLLEEN: So do we think Lena has been forgotten because she's not just from New Orleans, but also Black and female?
VICTORIA: I mean, would it really be that shocking to say that a Black woman in America has not been properly recognized or remembered for her work? I asked Zella about it, and I feel like her answer speaks volumes.
ZELLA: Black culture is used as a vehicle to bring the cool, but erase the people.
VICTORIA: As we end this episode, I wanted to circle back to this broader idea that we've been exploring throughout our series: that there are many overlooked or little-known American women who contributed so much to what we think of today as American food.
COLLEEN: Right. Which is so much more than the stereotypical hamburgers and hot dogs.
VICTORIA (FROM TAPE): Where do you see the food and the cuisine of New Orleans sort of fitting into this bigger story?
DEE: I like to look at it as world cuisine.
VICTORIA: That's Dee Lavigne again.
DEE: There's French, heavy African, heavy Spanish, heavy Indigenous American. Like, it's all tied in together. And I look at it as, this is what America was supposed to be. When I look at New Orleans food, this is what the idea, the original idea of America, this is what it was supposed to be. You were supposed to be able to put all of these things together and make something incredible.
ASHLEY: We are all connected.
VICTORIA: And here's Ashley Rose Young again.
ASHLEY: That is the tapestry that weaves together food in America. I wouldn't call it a cuisine necessarily. I think we have cuisines, plural, in America. It's mingling. It's mixing. It's fusion. It's rife with political struggles. It's full of love. It's pain and sorrow. It's joy and generosity all blended into one gorgeous and complicated and horrible and lovely, soupy stew. The gumbo of America.
COLLEEN: The gumbo of America. I like that.
VICTORIA: I do, too. And we have Lena Richard, author of the first Creole cookbook, chef, restaurant owner, frozen food entrepreneur and TV host, to thank for that.
COLLEEN: And we thank you for listening.
VICTORIA: This has been The Story Exchange. Join us next time to hear more stories about innovative and inspirational women doing the things you'd never dream of. Or maybe you would. If you liked this podcast, tell your friends about us and share it on social media. It helps other people find the show. And visit our website at thestoryexchange.org, where you'll find news, videos and tips for entrepreneurial women.
COLLEEN: And we'd love to hear from you. Drop us a line at info at thestoryexchange.org or find us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Bluesky. I'm Colleen DeBaise, reporting by Victoria Flexner. Sound editing provided by Nusha Balyan. Production coordinator is Noel Flego. Executive producers are Sue Williams and Victoria Wong. Our mixer is Pat Donahue, recorded at Cutting Room Studios in New York City.