02/29/2024
Chef LENA RICHARD …for Black History Month and Everyday!
A Chef who looks like me and I move like her🙏🏾! 👩🏾🍳
Born in New Roads, LA in 1892, Chef Lena started cooking young by helping her mother at her job cooking for a rich white family in New Orleans. The lady of the house saw Lena’s efforts and began to pay her for her work.
Later, Chef Lena went on to College/Culinary Schools in New Orleans and Boston.
Starting off with small catering businesses from her home, Chef Lena went on to open restaurants, write cookbooks , open a culinary school, sell frozen meals nationally and was the first black women in New Orleans (maybe the U.S. ) to have a cooking show on television, weekly on WDSU (New Orleans).
Chef Lena was additionally invited to be the head Chef in a few New York State restaurants and also Colonial Williamsburg during World War II. She was also friends with James Beard.
The most astounding part of all of this was Chef Lena Richard accomplished these GREAT achievements during the early 1900’s during the Jim Crow era.
Something important to note: Chef Lena took something that was considered completely subservient by blacks at that time (Cooking for whites) and made herself a Mastermind in the field. She transformed her own narrative from “house servant” to “invited expert”. She also brought black and white people together to eat her cuisine (TOGETHER) in a very segregated South.
Chef Lena Richard was, in my eyes, the pioneer of the “Cool Kids” in Culinary Arts. I see myself in her in many ways and I’ve been deeply encouraged by her accomplishments.
I plan to continue her legacy of culinary and entrepreneurial excellence. 🙏🏾👩🏾🍳
Chef Lena Richard
September 11, 1892- November 27, 1950
Salute Queen! Wow! 🙏🏾 ✊🏾
