Arlene's Scratch Paper

Chef Lena Richard has been compared to Martha Stewart. Almost everything is wrong with this comparison.  Richard was first.  She was a Black woman born in Louisiana during the Jim Crow era. She had almost everything against her. Stewart was born in 1941 up north in New Jersey, two years after Richard self-published her cookbook of Creole recipes. When Stewart was a teenager, she was modeling. Richard was cooking in someone else’s kitchen. Richard cooked on live television long before Julia Child  was on the air. Because we don’t have recordings of her cooking show on WDSU-TV in New Orleans and almost all of her papers are gone or have not been found, there’s isn’t much available to determine who Richard - Mama Lena to her customers - was, how she overcame so many obstacles, what drove her. Read more about Richard in my story in the Overlooked section of the New York Times . The Cooking Section includes a popular recipe of hers.