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you wanted cooking for you, beside you or simply having a seat at your table. If the old political test for likability, “Which candidate would you want to drink a beer with?” was applied to celebrity chefs over the genera- tions, I still believe Prudhomme would be a top choice. “It’s alive; it’s wonderful gumbo!” Prud- homme marvels at a boiling pot of gumbo in an episode of Always Cooking! “I can just see all the taste in it. Take a bowl of potato salad, pour some rice on it, and take the gumbo to it!”

When the tastes change with every bite and every

bite tastes as good as the first, that’s Cajun. — Paul Prudhomme

Prudhomme’s sensibility not only as a chef, but as a live performer, also made him a favorite guest on talk shows. Perhaps most notably, he was well-liked by Regis Philbin, who hosted him on his daytime program countless times and gave Prudhomme’s reci- pes a key role in his 1993 book, Cooking with Regis & Kathie Lee: Quick & Easy Reci- pes from America’s Favorite TV Personalities. This charm — combined with top-notch cuisine, of course — came to manifest what could be described as the first-ever celebrity chef “brand.” Whether consciously or not, Prudhomme was a master of self-promotion and branding before the term existed as something an individual could (or would even want to) do. There was his signature look, his Cajun identity (“Cajun makes you happy,” he told People magazine in the mid-1980s. “It’s emotional. You can’t eat a plate of Cajun food and not have good thoughts.”) And then, in the early 1990s, the catchphrase “Good cooking, good eating, good loving!” — which became his official television sign-off. Prudhomme’s status as a deeply recog- nizable culinary force unto himself also ex- tended to grocery store aisles, with a line drawing of his likeness donning each jar of Magic Seasoning Blends — his line of sig- nature spices, rubs and, eventually, smoked meat — that debuted in 1982. And while restaurant chefs until this point had, by and large, attempted to keep their recipes and processes close to the vest, Prudhomme took a very different approach, bottling and sell-

instruction, Prudhomme gave it flair. Where Julia made cooking that might’ve seemed intimidating — from cheese soufflé to boeuf bourguignon — accessible, everything about Prudhomme was downright affable. Each facet of his television persona sought to reveal something about his Louisiana heritage, diving into both his personal story and the history of the region with a sense of warmth and tradition that, until then, had rarely been seen in a chef on television. It’s difficult to imagine tracing the legacy of any broadcast chef promoting the cuisine of their region, whether Southeastern or Southern Californian, and not see Prudhomme as the originator of this style of culinary TV. But Prudhomme was not only a represen- tative of regional cooking at its finest and a storyteller extraordinaire: He was a man

Over the course of his lifetime, Prud- homme starred in five separate cooking shows on PBS, beginning with Fork in the Road in 1995 and ending with Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Always Cooking! in 2007, which can still occasionally be found airing on public television stations across the coun- try. And with over 125 episodes of television under his belt — in addition to direct-to-vid- eo instructional tapes like Louisiana Kitchen Vol. 1: Complete Cajun Meal Featuring Blackened Redfish and a recurring syndicat- ed news segment called The Magic of Chef Paul — it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that Chef Paul was a bona fide television star, and one who scratched out the blueprint for all celebrity chefs to follow. While Julia Child (and, before her, James Beard) also pioneered televised cooking

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