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cooking school and then at the Fannie Farmer Cooking School in Boston. She graduated in 1918, but discovered that her culinary gifts were unique. She recalled “I found out in a hurry they can’t teach me more than I know… When it comes to cooking meats, stews, soups, sauces, and such dishes we Southern cooks have Northern cooks beat by a mile.” Richard gradually used her expertise and by 1920 was catering from her home. By 1937, she had opened a cooking school, small gumbo shops, and a catering business. She privately published a cookbook in 1938 and promoted it around the city. In 1939, she was enough of a celebrity to publish Lena Richard’s Cook Book locally in New Orleans. Mentions in the press by such notables as Clementine Paddleford of the New York Herald Tribune and James Beard created a large audience for the work and it was published internationally in 1940 as The New Orleans Cook Book, the first work on the cuisine of the Crescent City to be published by an African American. Richard was also an innovative marketer and sold her book wherever she cooked as well as at New Orleans department stores. She also sold her book through an agreement with Father Divine who, after meeting Mrs. Richard, promoted it to his followers, making it available to them for two dollars, or one third of the list price.

As a caterer, Richard cooked mainly for whites; indeed, the first edition of her work is dedicated to Alice Baldwin Vairin, the woman for whom she initially worked as a domestic. However, along with dishes like ground artichoke mousse and lobster salad, Richard also included dishes from a more traditional African American culinary lexicon: banana fritters, fried chicken (albeit creole style), and corn-bread, as well as a significant number of dishes that are uniquely Louisiana creole such as daube glacé, pralines, and baked mirlitons. Mrs. Richard’s culinary renown grew and she was invited to cook outside of New Orleans, at the Bird and Bottle Inn in Garrison, New York, and in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia. The expeditions proved successful, but she always returned to her home city.

There, in 1947, she became the first African American woman to have her own television show. She did this in the segregated South at a time when a television set was still not common currency in the homes of most whites. Almost twenty years before Julia Child used television to transform the way Americans thought about food, Richard in New Orleans was using the new medium of television to get the word out about herself and about African American food.

If Richard was an African American culinary entrepreneur with a growing national presence, Freda DeKnight became the national, if not international, face of African American food when John Johnson appointed her as the first food editor of Ebony magazine in 1946, shortly after the magazine’s establishment. Johnson recognized that knowledge of proper nutrition was a necessary part of the growing world of possibility for African Americans, and DeKnight fit the bill.

Unlike many in the first half of the twentieth century, DeKnight did not come to matters culinary from domestic work. She was born in Topeka, Kansas, and had a peripatetic childhood, attending convent school in South Dakota and high school in St. Paul, Minnesota. She was trained in home economics, had a twenty-year career as a caterer in New York City, and for a time jointly operated a Harlem restaurant known as the Chicken Coop with African American actor Canada Lee.

As Ebony ’s first food editor, the Kansas native became the magazine’s culinary ambassador, speaking to the public both black and white and doing cooking demonstrations around the country. At Ebony, DeKnight was also instrumental in setting up what was the first Home Services Department at any African American publication. She described this in an early memo:

We have an efficient Test Kitchen in our Home Office where recipes and products are tested and new ideas are originated for advertisers, a service we are very proud of …

We also publish “Food Hints,” which is