Cleora Butler

Cleora Butler was born on the twenty-seventh of August 1901 in Waco, Texas, into an African American family for whom, in her own words, careful attention to the preparation of food had been a tradition since before the Civil War. As a child she moved north with her family, coming of age in Oklahoma, where she learned to cook at the side of her mother — herself a gifted cook whose home became a welcome table for Black musicians traveling through the segregated Southwest.

Already cooking professionally by her middle teens, Cleora took her first position as a household cook in Tulsa in 1923. There she built a long and distinguished career in the private kitchens of the city's early oil families, mastering an American table that wove together Southern tradition, refined technique, and the abundance of a self-provisioning household. Her father followed her to Tulsa, and the rest of the family joined them by 1925.

Butler practiced her craft in a city still bearing the wound of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, becoming a mainstay of its Black community's culinary life. In 1961 she and her husband opened Cleora's Pastry Shop and Catering, and she continued to cater into the 1980s. Late in life she gathered the recipes and remembrances of eight decades into a memoir, Cleora's Kitchens: The Memoir of a Cook and Eight Decades of Great American Food (1985), which Gourmet magazine named the best cookbook of its year.

Cleora Butler died in 1985, only days after her life's book was completed. She had cooked for more than seventy years, and she left a table set for all who came after her.