The Dooky Chase Cookbook

Dooky Chase's Restaurant, a New Orleans landmark and celebrated bastion of fine Creole food, has welcomed notable individuals as well as thousands of locals through its doors since opening in 1941. The unquestionable authority in the restaurant's kitchen for many of those years, Leah Chase offers here a collection of recipes from the menu and her personal files that have delighted patrons for decades.

Spiced with exquisite works from the African American art collection that hangs in the restaurant's dining room, this cookbook pairs the flavors of Leah Chase's dishes with anecdotes recounting the restaurant's traditions, origins of the recipes, and memories. This revised and expanded edition presents even more of the restaurant's favorite offerings and features a new chapter on drinks. Dooky Chase's longtime chef and proprietor passed away in 2019, but these pages honor Leah's legacy through recipes and sentiments that will be forever intertwined with the history of New Orleans.

Loyal to the tenets of Creole cuisine and mindful of her country roots, Leah Chase has been featured in hundreds of publications, including Food & Wine and Saveur. In addition to having hosted her own television program, she appeared numerous times on NPR, CNN, CBS, the Food Network, and many other programs. She was a driving force in the culinary and cultural revival of New Orleans and in the international popularity of Creole cuisine.

Leah Chase's accolades include honorary degrees from schools across the country. She received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Southern Foodways Alliance, the Ella Brennan Savoir Faire Award for Excellence from the American Culinary Federation, and the Outstanding Woman Award from the National Council of Negro Women. For her contributions to the culinary world, she was inducted into the James Beard Foundation's Who's Who of Food and Beverages in America in 2010. In 2016, just after her ninety-third birthday, she received the Foundation's Lifetime Achievement Award. As a cultural icon, her portrait hangs in the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC.

Her beloved husband died in 2016 and Leah Chase reigned over her kitchen every day until her death in 2019 at the age of ninety-six, still surrounded by family and friends. Her joie de vivre remains as an inspiration to all in her cookbooks, a biography, Leah Chase: Listen, I Say Like This, and an inspirational children's book, A Long Way from the Strawberry Patch: The Life of Leah Chase, both written through interviews with the author, Carol Allen.