In the early nineteen-eighties, I attended a gala in San Francisco that included appearances by the chefs Julia Child, Alice Waters, Jeremiah Tower, and Paul Prudhomme. Child, of course, needed no introduction, and as a Bay Area resident I was familiar with Waters, the godmother of California cuisine, and Tower, who had helped her launch Chez Panisse before moving on to solo glory at Stars. But it was Prudhomme, an extravagantly overweight Louisiana chef I’d never heard of, who made the strongest impression on me. The youngest of thirteen children reared by sharecroppers, he had learned to cook from his mother, and from the event stage he delivered serious, soulful thoughts about the emotional experience of eating. Not long afterward, he brought his popular New Orleans restaurant, K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen, to San Francisco for a five-week visit, inspiring six-hour-long queues around the block and introducing hard-core Cajun cooking to Northern California.
Intrigued by these snapshots of an incipient food phenomenon, I proposed a profile of Prudhomme to Life,_ _and in November of 1983 arrived on my first visit to New Orleans. I made straight for Felix’s Restaurant and Oyster Bar (“Step right up, sir! What’ll it be—six or twelve?”) and then to K-Paul’s, where I waited on the sidewalk along with everyone else. I had arranged to meet Prudhomme the next day, but first I wanted to experience the restaurant incognito. Once inside, I ordered the rabbit jambalaya, which—coming as it did on the heels of a Cajun martini, served in a Ball jar—inflamed the inside of my mouth so badly that I couldn’t finish it. I considered myself a fan of spicy food, but this required a different level of commitment, confirming the hand-drawn sign in the restaurant’s window: a picture of a pepper cackling, “Totally hot!”
“Welcome to New Orleans!” Prudhomme said when I called the next day. Returning to the restaurant that evening, I found him at a table by the wall, between the bar and the kitchen. His appearance was, of course, prepossessing—his huge body clothed entirely in white, his signature snap-brim cap above a dark black beard. Hands cupped atop an ornate walking cane, he greeted visitors (including a much slimmer brother), kept tabs on the dishes that passed by, and even answered the K-Paul’s phone. When a tourist called to ask if the food was “kind of Creole,” Prudhomme told her, “No, ma’am, it’s full blooded.”
He smoked cigarettes but didn’t consume alcohol. “I only eat and drink things that taste good,” he said. At his urging, I had a mirliton pirogue (translation: squash canoe) stuffed with shrimp and smoked andouille sausage and covered in oyster hollandaise, which contained enough calories to last me the rest of the year. When I vacillated over dessert, he turned to the waitress and said, “He wants pie.” (Sweet-potato pecan, to be exact.)
The next morning, I got up early to accompany Prudhomme to the set of a local TV show, where, in advance of Thanksgiving, he demonstrated the preparation of Turducken, a chicken stuffed inside a duck stuffed inside a turkey—a southern-Louisiana specialty that Prudhomme would trademark a few years later. When it was time for a commercial break, he urged viewers, “Go get your second cup of coffee!” He told me that he preferred live TV for the same reason that he didn’t like freezers. One of the program’s hosts declared him a natural.
The next day was devoted to a drive through the countryside, north and west between New Orleans and Prudhomme’s hometown of Opelousas. Wearing a plaid shirt and overalls, he picked me up in a muddy truck, which was outfitted with a miniature steering wheel to accommodate his girth. Our first stop was for fried chicken with red beans and rice at Popeyes, the Cajun fast-food chain, which Prudhomme admired for its high-quality mass production. I noticed that he kept a cache of raw jalapeños in his pocket, using them to embellish meals that lacked the requisite flair. (“Pepper makes your taste buds rain,” he told me.) Recounting his early history, which included starting a hamburger stand as a five-hundred-pound teen-ager, he said, “Listen, I know what I look like. Food is sensual–it was a way that I could get girls.” I could relate; he had seduced me the same way with his ardent talk in San Francisco.
The better to gauge my Popeyes intake, I asked if he had any more food stops planned. He did—at an upscale New Iberia restaurant run by the rising young chef Alex Patout, where, although we arrived unannounced, Prudhomme consumed a New York steak and I was proffered a parade of dishes including gumbo, bacon-wrapped trout in cream sauce, and cheesecake. (For a non-New Orleanian, much of the “emotional experience” of this kind of eating was guilt.)
En route to Patout’s, Prudhomme drove me to a hundred-year-old plantation site where he hoped to start a cooking school, teaching students how to use authentic, unspoiled ingredients. The problem with many young chefs, he said, was that they’d “never tasted a fresh vegetable or a chicken that was raised outside.”
As far as I know, the school never happened. Instead, Prudhomme went on to create a series of commercial slam-dunks, from popular cookbooks to a nationwide line of “Cajun Magic” spice mixes, which I continue to use today. In this sense, and in his outsized persona, he was a quintessential celebrity chef, but his passion, and his connection to the place he was from, were genuine.
As we sat talking in his truck at the plantation, a solitary passerby tentatively approached the driver’s side window.
“Aren’t you that guy?” he asked. “That guy who cooks?”
“Yeah.” Prudhomme laughed, extending his hand. “I’m that guy.”
