The 10 Dishes That Made My Career: Leah Chase

[This dish of ground, stewed greens and seasoned meats served over rice is very different from traditional gumbo. Perhaps it is derived from sauce feuilles, “a sauce of leaves” found in many variations in West Africa. Eating gumbo z’herbes at Dooky Chase on the Thursday before Easter has become a major event on the New Orleanian social calendar. But long before that, gumbo z’herbes was a traditional Lenten dish in many Creole households.—Lolis]

"In those days they fasted for 40 days, and you could not eat—you had to fast—when they told you you couldn’t have this, you couldn’t have that. But Holy Thursday was the day of the last supper. You ground those greens up, and you put all kinds of meat in there—no seafood—and that was your big dinner before Easter Sunday. Because on Friday, they wouldn’t hardly want you to eat a piece of bread.

When I started doing Holy Thursday, there was no big fanfare. I would make these greens and grind 'em, and you would come to lunch, eat your lunch, eat your gumbo z’herbes, and then go about your business. So then, [culinary historian and part time New Orleanian] Dr. Jessica Harris comes in, and she gonna decorate her table with all kind of rabbits and all kind of wine and all kind of things. I say, you made a party out of my gumbo z’herbes. So then everybody else sees that, and they come too. They have a big party. It wasn’t meant to be a big party, it was just meant to be, “This is what Catholics ate on Holy Thursday.”

[Among the things that entertain Leah is the way in which lowly, traditional ingredients and dishes have attained exalted status in recent years. Those things that were once hunted and gathered when there was no money for store-bought provisions are often exalted these days. Such is the case with purslane. Though Americans have eaten it since the time of Martha Washington, it’s gained favor recently. In 2010, the Baltimore Sun dubbed it “a weed worth eating.”—Lolis]

"There was another grass that we ate, Lolis, that was the funniest thing—it’s called purslane. It used to grow all around in Madisonville. When the crops were low and daddy didn’t have greens, my mother would send us to pick this grass. And she said don’t let anybody see us being so poor, we’re eating this grass, you know? She would cook that like spinach. I go to California, [to a restaurant run by these] these two young women chefs out there, I order my liver—$20 for a piece of liver!—and then I look on the plate: purslane! Yeah I paid $20 for this purslane. Now you gotta be rich to eat the grass!" 

"It’s the same with quail. I love to serve quail because I came up eating quail. You know those little bob-white quails? They’re funny. If they up in the trees they whistle like bob-bob-white, but if they down on the ground they gonna whistle a different way. So little quails would be flying down and get into your strawberry patch, so what you do? You shoot ‘em. You bring ;em home after you shoot 'em and you clean 'em. And we had plum trees in our backyard. My mother used to make plum jelly. So she’d take those quails, sauté them in butter, put that plum jelly on 'em. Serve that with grits. I served that to President Bush. He loved it. He said, “I never had grits with quail before Leah, but I like it.”

[Many of the dishes in the Creole lexicon have their origins in France. Daube, for example, is a traditional beef stew from Provence. Adding tomatoes to the dish turns it in to daube a la Creole.—Lolis]

"Daube was a thing that we always made. We took a piece of round meat, and we’d put it in the pot with flour, salt, pepper, and brown it on all sides. Let it steam in that pot with some tomatoes. If you have Creole tomatoes, all the better. Put tomatoes around and serve that on spaghetti—the best thing in the world. So I’m trying to get that on the menu again, because that is what we came up with."

"I started working for this lady; she really taught me. She had a restaurant 'bout as big as this room here. She served breakfast, lunch, and dinner. So the woman was getting old and she wanted to downsize, so that’s when we opened the Coffee Pot. It was across the street from where you see it is now. All she used to serve was breakfast and hamburgers. So you know, Lolis, this is who ran that restaurant: Estelle was 16-years-old; I was 18, Lucy was 19. Three girls. You hear me? We were running that woman’s restaurant. You couldn’t get three 19-year-olds to do that today if you tried. We ran those restaurants, we prepared the food. We served. We cleaned up. We took the money to the bank!

So we told her we wanted to do something different. She said okay, if y’all think y’all can make it work, you can do a hot lunch. Now, we don’t know nothing about nothing. So Lucy say, 'Well what about some Creole wieners?' 'Oh, I say, yeah that’s good.' That’s what we have at our house—Creole wieners and spaghetti. You just make a good tomato gravy and cut the wieners up in it. That’s it. People in those days knew how to work with whatever they had. If you didn’t have anything, you might just have what we call potato stew. Just put the red gravy and the potatoes in the stew—that’s all you had to eat with some rice."

"My daddy raised okra and we had okra coming through the wazoo. Nothing like crowder peas when you put those okra around it. [With] lamb, put the garlic in it, and drop those okra around that lamb—unbelievable. What a flavor it gives—[and] something that gives a thickness. I take that boneless leg of lamb, and I’m gonna put plenty garlic in it. Then I’m gonna rub it and roast it. Then, when it just gets cooked, I put onions and all that around it. In that sauce that’s cooking, you can tighten the gravy up with a little roux flour if you want. But just drop those okra on there. Unbelievable. I do a lot of things with okra. I do the beef brisket, I stuff that with crawfish, then I put the whole okra around it. That okra is what makes it different. That whole okra will do so much for it, it really does."

"I like the turtle soup at Galatoire’s. They do a good job there. Even though I wouldn’t make a turtle soup like that, 'cause I don’t know where they get the turtle meat from. I gotta have that turtle crawling. If I don’t see that turtle crawling, you can’t sell it to me. I don’t want it. I got to see it crawling. I’m gonna take that turtle home, with the head on, live, and then I know how to take that head off. I know how to clean that turtle. That’s what you call cowan. You always feel about the legs of a turtle; you always want to get a female with some eggs in it. But you cannot cook that turtle unless you have fresh thyme. Turtle can’t work without fresh thyme."

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