Documenting, studying, and celebrating the diverse food cultures of the changing American South.
Oral History Project Index
SFA Founders
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INTERVIEWS
Ann Abadie
Kaye Adams
Jim Auchmutey
Marilou Awiakta
Ben Barker
Karen Barker
Ella Brennan
Ann Brewer
Karen Cathey
Leah Chase
Al Clayton
Mary Ann Clayton
Shirley Corriher
Norma Jean Darden
Crescent Dragonwagon
Nathalie Dupree
John T. Edge
John Egerton
Lolis Eric Elie
Donna Florio
John Folse
Terry Ford
Psyche Williams-Forson
Damon Lee Fowler
Vertamae Grosvenor
Jessica B. Harris
Cynthia Hizer
Portia James
Martha Johnston
Sally Belk King
Sarah Labensky
Edna Lewis
Rudy Lombard
Ronni Lundy
Louis Osteen
Marlene Osteen
Timothy W. Patridge
Paul Prudhomme
Joe Randall
Marie Rudisill
Dori Sanders
Richard Schweid
Ned Shank
Kathy Starr
Frank Stitt
Pardis Stitt
Marion Sullivan
Van Sykes
John Martin Taylor
Toni Tipton-Martin
Jeanne Voltz
Charles Reagan Wilson
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Interviews by SFA Members and Friends.
Project sponsored by Jim 'N Nick's Bar-B-Q.
That's the most important thing about food:
It brings you with people...We have to get people back
to food, back to the dinner table.
~Leah Chase
After fighting adversity in the wake of the Hurricane Katrina levee breeches, Leah Chase reopened Dooky Chase, her family restaurant in the Treme neighborhood of New Orleans. That restaurant has been her life’s work.
In 1945, she met musician Edgar "Dooky" Chase II, whose parents owned the restaurant. After the two married, and when their children were old enough to attend school, Leah Chase began working at the restaurant three days a week, first as a hostess, later as a chef.
In the years that followed she has transformed Dooky Chase into a landmark of New Orleans cookery, dishing peerless gumbo and other Creole delicacies. Along the way, she has befriended such luminaries as Justice Thurgood Marshall and musician Ray Charles.
Leah Chase served as the first president of the Southern Foodways Alliance Board of Directors. In 2000, she received the organization’s Craig Claiborne Lifetime Achievement Award.
SUBJECT: Leah Chase, SFA Founder
DATE: October 9, 2004
LOCATION: University of Mississippi – Oxford, MS
INTERVIEWER: April Grayson, Friend of the SFA
*TRANSCRIPT: To download a full transript of this interview in PDF form, please click here.
