Princess Pamela Strobel

Pamela Strobel — known to the world as Princess Pamela — was born about 1928 in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Her mother, Rosella, worked as head pastry chef at Spartanburg's Elite Restaurant, and after Rosella died young, Pamela was raised chiefly by her grandmother, Addie. From this Southern upbringing she carried both a love of jazz and a mastery of the home cooking that would one day make her a legend far from home.

Drawn north by music, Strobel settled in New York City, and in 1965 she opened Princess Pamela's Little Kitchen in Manhattan's East Village. Barely more than a hundred square feet, seating a dozen guests, the speakeasy-style room required visitors to knock before she admitted them — and she turned away anyone she disliked. There she served soul food built from humble cuts, and between courses she sang jazz to her guests.

The Little Kitchen became a downtown sensation. Andy Warhol, Diana Ross, Gloria Steinem, Tom Wolfe and many others sought a seat at her table. In 1969 she published Princess Pamela's Soul Food Cookbook, a treasury of Afro-American recipes threaded with her own poems — a book that helped define soul food as an American cuisine and was reissued by Rizzoli decades later.

Around 1989 she moved and renamed the restaurant Southern Touch, near Katz's Delicatessen, before closing it about 1998 and stepping out of public life. Yet her voice endures in every page of her cookbook and every cook she inspired. Honored be Princess Pamela Strobel, who fed a city with dignity and turned a tiny kitchen into a throne.