Leah Chase

From Southern Food Wiki

History

Leah Chase is the remarkable owner of Dooky Chase Restaurant in New Orleans, a restaurant she inherited from her husbands family. Leah Chase grew up the first of a large family in small town Madisonville, Louisiana. Born in 1923 to a segregated South, Leah struggled with the limits imposed by her gender and dark complexion to fulfill her ambitions. Always desiring to be greater, to do more, Leah found herself in New Orleans, married to musician Dooky Chase Jr., and after raising her children, she started working in his family’s restaurant. She moved quickly into the restaurant, redecorating and making it expanding the menu to include hot lunches for working men. She and Dooky took over the business and began a fine dining restaurant for African Americans, the first in the city. She hosted civil rights activists such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Thurgood Marshall and welcomed them through her restaurant doors to plan marches and movements in the upstairs dining room. Through the years, she and her husband have remained respected members of the community, and have continued to fight whatever nature and man throw at them, including Hurricane Katrina’s destruction of their restaurant. Leah has come back and reopened Dooky Chase, and it continues to be a New Orleans landmark with its African Creole fare.

Leah Chase’s Creole Cooking

As the first dining establishment catering to African Americans, Dooky Chase and its chef helped preserve a style of cooking that was found mainly in private kitchens. Widely recognized as the “Creole Queen,” Leah’s food embodies the fusion of the many different cultures and cuisines that make up New Orleans: one can find culinary traditions from Africa, Spain, and France mixed in almost every dish. She creates classic Creole dishes like Stewed Snapper Turtle, Creole Gumbo, and Crawfish Etouffee, but she invents new dishes, using whatever ingredients she’s given; hence her cookbook contains a recipe for Roast Venison with Juniper Berries. Although she was never classically trained, Leah Chase represents the multitude of home chefs that continue their family and culture’s traditions; we are lucky enough that she happens to open her kitchen to the world. Her cookbooks and restaurant and constant presence all ensure that African Creole food gets its fair recognition in the culinary world.