ROUSES_JanFeb2019_Magazine_Updated

photos courtesy of NOLA/THE TIMES-PICAYUNE

CHEZ HELENE

A CREOLE CULINARY LEGACY by Lolis Eric Elie

are simply born with good kitchen instincts. It diminishes the knowledge, skills and abilities involved in their work and portrays them as passive and ignorant laborers incapable of creative culi- nary artistry.” Chef Joe Randall, the Savannah-based chef and founder of the African American Chefs Hall of Fame, remembers the impact that cover had on him. “I walked into a bookstore in Sacramento, and I looked up and saw a black chef on the cover and bought the book without even looking inside it,” he says. “I had been cooking since the ’60s and this was in the ’70s. I had never seen a black chef on the cover of the book.” Rudy Lombard,the co-author and driving force behind their book, conceived of Creole Feas t as a way of documenting the dominant

WHEN CREOLE FEAST HIT BOOKSTORES IN 1978, CO-AUTHOR CHEF NATHANIEL BURTON STARED OUT FROM ITS COVER WITH HIS TOQUE, CHEF’S WHITES AND SERIOUS EXPRESSION. This was quite a departure from the portrait Americans were used to seeing of black culinary professionals. When Aunt Jemima, Rastus and Uncle Ben peered out from their pancake, Cream of Wheat and converted rice boxes, respectively, they were all smiles and eager- ness to please.They were more caricatures than chefs. In her James Beard Award winning book, The Jemima Code , Toni Tipton-Martin put it this way: “Historically, the Jemima code was an arrangement of words and images synchronized to classify the character and life’s work of our nation’s black cooks as insig- nificant. The encoded message assumes that black chefs, cooks, and cookbook authors — by virtue of their race and gender —

37 www. rouses .com