Leah Chase

Leah Chase was born Leah Lange on the sixth of January 1923 and raised in Madisonville, Louisiana, coming to New Orleans for high school at St. Mary's Academy. She learned the fine rooms from the floor up, waiting tables in the French Quarter at the Colonial and the Coffee Pot, and in 1946 married the jazz trumpeter Edgar "Dooky" Chase II — whose parents, Dooky Sr. and Emily, had kept a sandwich stand on Orleans Avenue in Tremé since 1941.

From the 1950s she took the kitchen, and with her husband raised the stand into Dooky Chase's Restaurant — white tablecloths and Creole cooking in a fine room for a community every other fine room refused. On its walls she hung one of the city's great collections of Black art, begun with a Jacob Lawrence her husband gave her.

Upstairs, history ate. In defiance of Louisiana's segregation law, the upstairs room fed and sheltered the movement — Thurgood Marshall and A. P. Tureaud, Dr. King, the Freedom Riders, CORE's strategy sessions — over bowls of her gumbo. "We changed the course of America over a bowl of gumbo," she said, and the room is on the Civil Rights Trail to prove it. Her Holy Thursday gumbo z'herbes became a city's rite; when Katrina drowned the restaurant in 2005 she cooked her way back from a FEMA trailer and reopened in 2007; presidents came to her table, and one — newly elected — was reprimanded for putting hot sauce in the gumbo before tasting it.

The press crowned her the Queen of Creole Cuisine; the James Beard Foundation gave her its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016; her portrait hangs in the National Portrait Gallery; and Disney's animators named her an inspiration for Princess Tiana. She died in New Orleans on the first of June 2019, at ninety-six. Honored be Leah Chase, who fed the revolution and called it supper.