Paul Prudhomme, the chef who put the cooking of Louisiana — especially the Cajun gumbos, jambalayas and dirty rice he grew up with — on the American culinary map, died Thursday in New Orleans. He was 75.
Tiffanie Roppolo, the chief financial officer for his various businesses, said he died after a brief illness, which she did not specify.
In 1979, Prudhomme and his wife, the former K Hinrichs, opened K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen on Chartres Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans, and it became a sensation almost immediately, capturing the attention of food writers across the country with its inventive take on traditional Cajun specialties and exposing Americans to ingredients like tasso and boudin.
It was an approach that dovetailed with the larger movement known as New American cooking, which placed a new premium on the richness of regional cuisine in the United States.
One dish, blackened redfish, became a national craze. Prudhomme dipped redfish fillets in butter, dusted them with cayenne pepper and a mix of dried herbs, and seared them in a red-hot iron skillet until a black crust formed. The dish became so popular that the redfish population in the Gulf of Mexico came under threat.
For those familiar with the Creole cooking of New Orleans, enshrined in classic restaurants like Galatoire’s and Antoine’s, Cajun cuisine came as a revelation. Prudhomme, as its ambassador, and the author of the best-selling 1984 cookbook “Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Louisiana Kitchen,” rode the wave to become one of the first bona fide American superstar chefs.
A bear of a man — at one point he weighed more than 500 pounds — with an outsize smile, a wraparound beard and a hearty manner, Prudhomme was often mistaken for the actor Dom DeLuise. His natural exuberance and Falstaffian presence made him a walking advertisement for the joys of Cajun cuisine.
“Cajun makes you happy,” he told People in 1985. “It’s emotional. You can’t eat a plate of Cajun food and not have good thoughts.”
Paul Prudhomme was born on July 13, 1940, on his family’s farm near Opelousas, Louisiana, the youngest of 13 children. His parents were sharecroppers, and the family was poor.
By the time he was 7, when his sisters had left home, he began helping his mother in the kitchen
“I remember when I was about 9 years old, I heard of a cousin that worked in a New Orleans hotel,” he told The Chicago Tribune in 1986. “This is 1949, and he made $150 a week; it seemed like an awesome amount of money to cook. I mean, to be a cook, which was fun, and to get paid that much money and be all dressed in white just seemed like a wonderful thing.”
In 1957, after graduating from high school, he married and opened Big Daddy O’s Patio, a drive-in hamburger stand, in Opelousas.
“It really taught me I wanted to be in the restaurant business, and it taught me it’s really hard to be in the restaurant business,” he told Nation’s Restaurant News in 2000. Ten months later, the restaurant went under and his marriage was over.
After selling magazines in New Orleans, Prudhomme began taking cooking jobs in restaurants across the country. He opened a few more restaurants along the way, without much success.
Gradually, he developed a cooking philosophy that turned him back to his roots. Working at the Elkhorn Lodge in Estes, Colorado, he experienced an epiphany while cooking a batch of small, store-bought red potatoes.
Nothing seemed right. When he made the same potatoes with his mother, “they were wonderful,” he told Nation’s Restaurant News. Then, he said, “I remembered that the first thing we did was we went out in the field, and we dug them up. I recognized at that point how important it is to have fresh ingredients, and I’ve been battling that battle ever since.”
Prudhomme moved back to New Orleans in 1970 and began working as a sous chef at the hotel Le Pavillon. At another hotel, the Maison Dupuy, he began cooking his version of Louisiana food.
In 1975 he was hired as the executive chef at Commander’s Palace, one of the city’s premier Creole restaurants, where he began introducing Cajun dishes like chicken and andouille gumbo made with an authentic roux. Eventually he transformed the menu.
“It was down-and-dirty Cajun,” Prudhomme told The Times-Picayune in 2005. “It was what Mama used to do. I’d go into the country and buy the andouille from the guy I’d known since I was a kid.”
Gene Bourg, a former restaurant critic for The Times-Picayune, recalled in 2011: “This is when Paul began using all of these little puns and wordplays in his menu items. He started using words like debris, Cajun popcorn.”
The restaurant began billing the cuisine as “nouvelle Creole.”
“Cajun cooking is old French cooking that was transformed into a Southern style when my ancestors migrated to Louisiana,” Prudhomme explained to Craig Claiborne, the food editor of The New York Times, in 1981. “It is spicier with pepper than authentic French. But when I have chefs in this country, those who come from Grenoble, for example, they say, ‘That’s how my grandmother used to cook.’”
Creole, by contrast, blended Spanish, French and Italian cooking in a citified, sophisticated style that reflected the ethnic mix of New Orleans. This melting-pot cuisine came courtesy of the city’s black cooks, who grafted African-derived ingredients and techniques onto the dishes.
He got a taste of nationwide exposure in 1979 when Food and Wine magazine invited him to Tavern on the Green in New York to give a cooking demonstration for the food press with chefs from France and Italy and a California contingent that included Alice Waters of Chez Panisse. Prudhomme charmed the press and reveled in the attention.
“I will never forget the dessert,” Waters told The Times-Picayune in 2011. “He constructed out of chocolate little Cajun cabins with little front porches. Each person had one, and under the roofs were little Louisiana strawberries. The waiters came around with a big bowl of warm crème anglaise. They poured it over the little Cajun cottages, and they all melted. I just thought, ‘Who dreamed this up?’”
Prudhomme and his wife, whom he had met when she a waitress at the Maison Dupuy, opened K-Paul’s on Chartres Street in 1979. (Emeril Lagasse replaced him at Commander’s Palace.) In keeping with Prudhomme’s gospel of fresh ingredients, the restaurant had no freezers. It did not accept credit cards or reservations. The rent was $50 a month. It was an instant hit, and with just 64 seats it filled up every night for four or five seatings; dinners were priced at about $5.
Prudhomme tried to keep the press at bay, but in no time K-Paul’s became one of the most influential restaurants in the United States, and the gregarious, beaming Prudhomme its highly visible face, a constant guest on countless television shows that invited him to share the pleasures of Cajun cooking. He also made room for Creole dishes like mirliton, known outside Louisiana as chayote, stuffed with fried oysters and topped with hollandaise sauce.
Prudhomme — whom Claiborne once referred to as “the undisputed pontiff and grand panjandrum of the Cajun and Creole cookstove, that genial genius of massive girth” — published many cookbooks over the years, notably “Louisiana Cajun Magic Cookbook,” “Fiery Foods That I Love” and “The Prudhomme Family Cookbook: Old-Time Louisiana Recipes.” In 1983 he created a food company, Magic Seasoning Blends, to sell his dry spices, rubs, sauces and marinades.
Prudhomme, whose second wife, K, died of cancer in 1993, is survived by his wife, Lori, and a brother, Eli.
Throughout the years of celebrity and acclaim, Prudhomme clung to the identity of a simple country boy from Cajun country who liked to cook and loved the foods of Acadiana.
Asked by The Toronto Star in 2000 to name his favorite dish, he did not hesitate. “From the time I was a child, it’s fresh pork roast with holes punched into it and filled with herbs, spices, pork lard, onions, peppers and celery and cooked in a cast-iron roasting pan in a wood-burning oven all night," he said. “I’d serve that dish with candied yams, dirty rice and warm potato salad."
-- Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.
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