Lena Richard

Lena Paul Richard was born on the ninth of September 1892 in New Roads, in Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana, into a Black Creole family of the Reconstruction-era South. She came of age in New Orleans, where as a young woman she entered domestic service in the household of Alice Nugent Vairin, whose family recognized her gift and helped send her north to Boston to train at the school founded in the tradition of Fannie Farmer. She returned to Louisiana with formal culinary schooling layered atop the deep Creole knowledge of her own community.

Richard built a life of enterprise rare for a Black woman in the Jim Crow South. She opened a cooking school to pass her craft to others, ran catering operations and restaurants, and in 1939 self-published "Lena Richard's Cook Book," a work reissued in 1940 by Houghton Mifflin as "New Orleans Cook Book." The book preserved the Creole culinary heritage — a confluence of French, Spanish, West African, and Native American technique — in her own authoritative voice, at a time when such recipes were too often taken from Black cooks without credit.

She later launched a frozen-food business to carry her Creole dishes far beyond New Orleans. Then, in October 1949, she made history: her half-hour program "Lena Richard's New Orleans Cook Book" began airing on WDSU-TV, New Orleans' first television station, broadcasting twice weekly. She became the first Black American to host a televised cooking show, appearing on air with her assistant, years before the medium's better-remembered culinary figures.

Lena Richard died on the twenty-seventh of November 1950, at the age of fifty-eight, with her show still on the air. May her name be honored — a pioneer who set a table wide enough for those who came after.