New Orleans’s Queen of Creole Cooking, at Ninety-Three
BY BRETT ANDERSON
 | ||
| The New Orleans chef Leah Chase will in May become the first African-American to receive the James Beard Foundation’s lifetime achievement award. |
The ninety-three-year-old New Orleans chef Leah Chase arrived at Dooky Chase, her historic Creole restaurant, at 7:30 A.M. on Holy Thursday. Lent was over for the city’s Catholics, but the day is nonetheless a solemn occasion, marked by foot-washing ceremonies and the Mass of the Lord’s Supper. In New Orleans, Holy Thursday is also synonymous with going to Dooky’s for gumbo z’herbes, a rare form of New Orleans’s ubiquitous dish.
An hour before the 11 A.M. service, the first of three sold-out turns on the restaurant’s busiest day of the year, Chase was holding a knife over a steaming pile of smoked ham hocks. In her tenth decade, she requires the aid of a walker or a cane. Her fingers no longer travel in a straight line from knuckle-to-nail, but her hands remain nimble, and she can still be found in Dooky’s kitchen most days. Next month, she’ll become the first African-American to receive the James Beard Foundation’s lifetime-achievement award. (The Times was marvelling at her fortitude back in 1990, when she was just sixty-seven.) She pulled meat from the bones and chopped. “See how tender they are?” she said, extending a morsel of rosy pork. A local television cameraman, who was capturing the kitchen’s progress, asked Chase’s grandson, Edgar “Dooky” Chase IV, to name his favorite dish. His grandmother answered for him: “Gumbo.”
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/new-orleanss-queen-of-creole-cooking-at-ninety-three?mbid=nl_TNY%20Template%20-%20With%20Photo%20(29)&CNDID=27124505&spMailingID=8790175&spUserID=MTE0MzE0NDEyNDUyS0&spJobID=901616882&spReportId=OTAxNjE2ODgyS0
No comments:
Post a Comment