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by Sarah Baird When a group of hungry guests of the Southern Foodways Alliance gathered for a 2011 dinner honoring Paul Prudhomme at Cochon in New Orleans, the larger-than-life chef and culinary personality began the evening on a humble note: Hello, everybody. My name is Paul Prudhomme and I’m a cook. And I mean that very, very strongly. And while this genuflection of modesty certainly speaks to Prud- homme’s affable nature and love of the kitchen, what everyone in the room knew well is that the Opelousas-area native was so much more than a cook: He was a man who fundamentally changed the face of what it meant to be a chef in the United States — all while creating a madcap frenzy around Louisiana cuisine. As an (ahem) younger person, when I first learned about K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen — Prudhomme’s iconic ode to forward-thinking, his- tory-respecting Cajun cuisine in the French Quarter — I automatically assumed the “K” stood for “king” because, well, why not? It made perfect sense given Prudhomme’s oversized stature in both regional lore and national edible history. Soon, though, I learned that the “K” actually represented a queen: K Hinrichs, his late wife and business partner, who was responsible for making the atmosphere and experi- ence at K-Paul’s one that magnetized out-of-town guests and, ulti- mately, charmed the nation. This doesn’t mean, though, that Paul himself wasn’t royalty. A proud product of the Cajun prairie who carried the area’s signature lilting accent until his death in 2015, there’s little about his path to acclaim that followed the traditional route at a time when becoming a lauded chef meant climbing the lockstep rungs of a culinary ladder and stay- ing, mostly, out of the public eye. Instead, Prudhomme carved out a very public-facing path with sheer Cajun tenacity — and therein lay his strength. One of 13 chil- dren and the son of a sharecropper, Prudhomme did things his way, meandering through stints in magazine sales, failed hamburger joints and failed marriages to finally bring a style of cooking — first to New Orleans diners, and then, the world — that was completely, deeply, in his blood. “If that culture wasn’t there, if Mother hadn’t handed me this stuff, and my sisters and my cousins and my uncles and my aunts, if they hadn’t shown me all this by putting it in my mouth and talking about it all the time, I wouldn’t have done any of this. I don’t kid myself. I wasn’t born with it. I may have been born with the drive. But the food was taught to me by the family and the people around. It’s their food as much as it is mine,” Prudhomme recalled as part of an exhaus- tive oral history conducted by The Times-Picayune ’s Brett Anderson in 2005. And while Prudhomme is, undoubtedly, celebrated as a chef and restaurateur (where would contemporary Louisiana cooking be today, after all, without his blackened redfish?), he also played a critical role in shaping how the public perceives food as not only diners, but as an audience. Prudhomme and K both knew that eating and entertaining are inextricably linked, and through avenues that were novel at the time, heightened Prudhomme’s profile by making the excitement of the dining room at K-Paul’s accessible to the masses. If anyone was an influencer, brand builder and pop culture force of nature long be- fore we had names for these things, it was Chef Paul. Blackened Everything

But his massive role as a sculptor of our current food media land- scape seems to be glossed over far too often in national discussions. Julia Child gets almost all the credit for bringing televised cooking into living rooms across the country, but it was Prudhomme who showed that regional cuisines are just as likely to get viewers to tune in. Prud- homme protégé Emeril Lagasse has made a career out of Bam!-ing his way into pop culture consciousness as the quintessential Louisiana chef, but it was Paul who did it first — in an era largely unaided by syn- dication and social media. And while Prudhomme’s longtime friend Alice Waters is best known for sparking the farm-to-table movement at her California restaurant, Chez Panisse, it would be hard to surpass Chef Paul’s passion for encouraging chefs and home cooks alike to seek out and use the freshest possible ingredients. (After recalling how, as a child, he and his mother would dig up new potatoes fresh from the field to use while cooking, Prudhomme told Nation’s Restaurant News that he “recognized at that point how important it is to have fresh ingredients, and I’ve been battling that battle ever since.”) A role model for authenticity and staying true to your roots — all while innovating, achieving and, of course, altering dining history — it’s easy to look at the ways Prudhomme succeeded in the kitchen and call him a legend. He was, after all, the first American-born executive chef of Commander’s Palace. But in our ever media-hungry world, it’s more important than ever to begin talk- ing about how Prudhomme was, in part, an architect of something larger, a foundational example of how a chef goes from celebrated to full-blown celebrity . Love it or hate it, it’s nigh on impossible to flip through television chan- nels, stroll down the grocery store aisle or pick up a local event listing without seeing celebrity chefs everywhere . If you were so inclined, it would be all too easy to be eating a dish cooked with Bobby Flay- branded sauce, using an Alton Brown-branded spatula, in a Ree Drummond (aka The Pioneer Woman) branded crockpot. You could do this while flipping through 24-hour-a-day celebrity food program- ming on both the Food Network and Cooking Channel, or while get- ting dressed to head out to a “secret” pop-up dinner from the latest beloved chef du jour. And while it’s difficult now to imagine a time when food program- ming didn’t dominate the television landscape and cooks didn’t launch their own lines of ready-to-eat frozen meals on a regular basis, before chefs like Prudhomme, the thought of a “celebrity chef” seemed almost ridiculous.

Paul Prudhomme was a man who fundamentally changed the face of what it meant to be a chef in the United States — all while creating a madcap frenzy around Louisiana cuisine.

Following the runaway success of his first cookbook, Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Louisiana Kitchen , in 1984 (which, by the time his first television show aired in the mid-’90s, had sold over half a million copies), Prudhomme found himself the origin point for, and nexus of, a Cajun food mania across the country. And while most restaurant chefs of the era would’ve simply returned to the kitchen and reveled in the throngs of customers drawn in by such a popular work, Chef Paul took a different tact: He found a way to reach even more people by going on television.

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