The Dooky Chase Cookbook

by Leah Chase

Delectable Creole recipes from both the restaurant menu and personal files. Leah Chase spices her cookbook with stories that reflect her Creole heritage and document the origin of various recipes.

Genres: Cookbooks, Cooking, Food, Nonfiction, Food and Drink

224 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1990

About the author

Leah Chase was an American chef, author and television personality based in New Orleans, Louisiana. She was known as the Queen of Creole Cuisine.

Reviews

[Mark Hartland Blimling · Rating 4 out of 5]

i use her inspiration and wise recipes...

[Redsteve · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fairly slim (224 pages, including the index) book by the legendary Leah Chase, part cookbook and part autobiography. Recipes are a mixture of Creole (city and country) dishes, southern foods, local restaurant favorites, and some original dishes from the family. The section on game meat is based on recipes from Dooky Chase's annual Wild Game Dinner, which started in 1978, when then-mayor "Dutch" Morial was forced by his wife to get rid of all of the ducks filling up their freezer and donated them to the restaurant - this section includes duck, venison, squirrel, quail, rabbit, pheasant. Most of the dishes make extensive use of local ingredients. 3.5 stars. Leah Chase passed away in 2019.

[Valerie Sherman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This cookbook is more like a slice of history, with its elaborate catalogue of Southern Creole dishes and with personal touches from a famed Black chef whose restaurant appeared in the Green Book. I'll keep some tasty-looking recipes for sweet potato biscuits and spicy bean cakes, but a lot of the recipes are a bit gutsy for this mostly-vegan - snapping turtle, tripe with pigs' feet, squirrel pie.

[Sharon Mensing · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting older book, with recipes from a Creole restaurant in New Orleans. We might call the restaurant's origins a pop-up now, but it grew out of the grim necessity of segregation. The narrative is the story of how the restaurant got started and of Leah Chase's (the author's) efforts to fit in with her family. It is by no means fine literature, but it gives a sense of the times and the place. Told in Leah Chase's voice, her personality shines through the words. The narrative explains the genesis of the various recipes. We have cooked the crawfish etouffee, which is outstanding if somewhat less than beautiful on the plate, and the fried squash, which we made with zucchini and yellow squash (also great). We discovered that a mirliton is a chayote, so we bought one and are going to try the mirliton soup. There are many recipes that appeals, and preparation techniques are pretty straightforward. There are no photographs of the food, but there are some nice reproductions of the art from the walls of the restaurant.

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whether the gumbo you order at Dooky Chase's is made with okra or file, it will be some of New Orlean's best - as will the fried chicken, coated with a crisp, flaky breading.
Mimi Sheraton

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Where do personalities the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, Ray Charles, Lou Rawls, Sarah Vaughan, Dizzy Gillespie, the Jackson 5, and Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama choose to eat when they are in New Orleans? Dooky Chase’s Restaurant, a New Orleans landmark and celebrated bastion of fine Creole food, has welcomed these notable individuals as well as thousands of locals through its doors since opening in 1941. The unquestionable authority in the restaurant’s kitchen for many of those years, Leah Chase offers here a collection of recipes from the menu and her personal files that have delighted patrons for decades.

[Janin · Rating 5 out of 5]

The artwork and stories inside are just as good as the recipes.