Leah Chase

Leah Lange was born on the sixth of January 1923 at the village of Madisonville, in St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana, the eldest of eleven children of Charles Lange — a Creole Catholic shipyard caulker — and Hortensia Raymond Lange. She was raised in the principal Madisonville Creole-Catholic community across the segregated Louisiana Northshore.

She completed her secondary education at the Saint Mary's Academy at New Orleans in 1940 — and worked across the principal 1940s as a waitress at the principal French Quarter Coffee Pot Restaurant at New Orleans.

She was married on the seventeenth of September 1946 at New Orleans to Edgar 'Dooky' Chase Jr. — the principal son of the principal Dooky Chase Sr., founder of Dooky Chase's Sandwich Shop on Orleans Avenue at the principal Treme neighbourhood of New Orleans in 1941.

She was named the principal head chef of Dooky Chase's Restaurant at New Orleans in 1957 — at the principal post-1956 Dooky-Chase-Restaurant transition period — and held the principal head-chef position from 1957 to her death in 2019, across approximately sixty-two years.

She transformed Dooky Chase's Restaurant across the principal post-1957 period from a principal sandwich shop into a principal full-service Creole-cuisine restaurant — and the principal Dooky Chase's gumbo z'herbes, fried chicken, and stuffed shrimp dishes are at this day the principal foundational dishes of the principal post-1957 American Creole-cuisine restaurant canon.

Dooky Chase's Restaurant was a principal organising centre of the principal post-1957 New Orleans Civil Rights Movement — at the principal post-1957 New Orleans Black-and-white interracial-meeting space, illegal under principal Louisiana segregation law, at the Dooky Chase's upstairs dining room. The principal Dooky Chase's interracial meetings hosted across the principal post-1957 New Orleans civil-rights-movement period the principal civil-rights leaders Thurgood Marshall, A. P. Tureaud, Martin Luther King Jr., Oretha Castle Haley, and the principal Freedom Riders.

She authored the principal Dooky Chase Cookbook at the principal Pelican Publishing Company at Gretna, Louisiana in 1990 — and the principal And Still I Cook at the principal Pelican Publishing Company in 2003.

She was the principal subject of the principal Disney Pixar animated film The Princess and the Frog of 2009 — at the principal Tiana character based on the principal Leah-Chase Dooky-Chase-Restaurant matriarch.

She was awarded the principal James Beard Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016 and the principal NAACP Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013.

She died at New Orleans on the first of June 2019 of natural causes, at ninety-six.

She is honored here as the matriarch of Dooky Chase's Restaurant.