Lena Richard was born and raised in Louisiana. Growing up, her mother and aunt worked as domestic servants for the Vairins, a prominent family in New Orleans, and she used to help them in the kitchen after school. Alice Vairin, the family matron, noticed Richard’s talent in the kitchen, and once a week, she let her prepare unique dishes. After Richard graduated high school, the Vairins hired her as a full-time cook and sent her to the prestigious Fannie Farmer cooking school in Boston, where Richard was the only woman of color. On her return to New Orleans in 1918, at the age of 26, she started a catering business and married Percival Richard.
In 1937, at 45, Richard and her daughter Marie opened a cooking school. She specifically invited black students, wanting to teach them the art of food preparation and service, giving them the chance to have a career and earn a good living in a city that was, at the time, discriminatory against its black population.
Richard began to collect and record the cooking traditions of the local Creole cuisine. In 1939, she independently published a collection of more than 350 recipes titled Lena Richard’s Cook Book, becoming the first African American to publish a cookbook of the New Orleans Creole cuisine. Her book came to the hands of the Houghton-Mifflin publications, which reissued it under the name New Orleans Cook Book. The book was a best-seller, and Richard went on a nationwide publicity tour, in which she was often invited to give private cooking lessons.
In 1941, at the age of 49, Richard returned to New Orleans and opened her restaurant, named Lena’s Eatery. Four years later, she opened a frozen food business that offered packaged cooked meals delivering nationwide. In 1949, 57 years old Richard opened her last business, a restaurant named Lena Richard’s Gumbo House, which was among the few fine-dining establishments in the city owned by a black person. The restaurant became a gathering place for the black community and welcomed the white people who defy the segregation laws of the Jim Crow era.
In that same year, Richard began to host a cooking show at the new New Orleans television station, WDSU, becoming the first African-Americans to host a cooking show. The Lena Richard’s New Orleans Cook Book, aired for 30 minutes twice a week, in which Richard and her assistant, Marie Matthews, instructed the audience how to cook Creole dishes based on the recopies from her book. Her show celebrated the black roots of Creole cuisine and reshaped the public understanding and opinions about its origins. In the following year, Richard passed away unexpectedly, when she is only 58 years old.
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