Lena Richard (1892–1950) was the first Black American to have a cookbook published nationally in the 20th century — *New Orleans Cook Book* (1940, Houghton Mifflin) — and the first Black woman to host a television cooking show, airing on WDSU-TV in New Orleans in 1947, two years before any national cooking show existed. She ran a catering business, a cooking school, a frozen food company, and a restaurant (Lena's Eatery on Chartres Street), building a culinary business empire in Jim Crow New Orleans that would have been remarkable for any entrepreneur and was extraordinary for a Black woman in the 1940s South. Her cookbook codified Creole recipes that had existed only in the oral tradition of Black Creole kitchens — gumbo, courtbouillon, pralines, beignets, Creole sauce, red beans — giving them written form and national distribution for the first time. · Presentation And Philosophy
Lena Richard connects to similar techniques: Fannie Farmer (the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, 1896 — the first standardise, Auguste Escoffier (Le Guide Culinaire, 1903 — same systematic documentation of a, Elizabeth David (same authority, same bringing-a-regional-tradition-to-a-nationa.
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