LOS ANGELES, CA - OCTOBER 15: Chefs Paul Prudhomme (L) and Wolfgang Puck attend The First Annual Los Angeles Food & Wine Hosts "Lexus LIVE On The Plaza" with Train at LA Live on October 15, 2011 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by John Sciulli/Getty Images for DCP)
Chef Paul Prudhomme, the man who can be given credit for bringing Cajun and Creole food to a wider American audience, died today at the age of 75. Prudhomme was an innovator who spent his career elevating his childhood favorites to the level of haute cuisine — impressing both diners and critics alike.
Here’s what Craig Claiborne of The New York Times wrote about Prudhomme after he’d lined up to try the chef’s food:
“I think that Paul Prudhomme has had the greatest influence on American cooking, in cultivating the public interest in American food, of anybody I know,” Claiborne, who was born in Mississippi, said in a 1988 interview. ”He created this great interest in Cajun and Creole cooking. People said, ‘There must be more to Southern cooking,’ and he opened up the floodgates to the whole field of Southern cooking.”
Prudhomme cooked for your everyday average folks around the country during his career, as well as for many major world leaders at the world economic summit in 1983.
”He had the guts to take the food he knew and grew up with as a poor Cajun boy and make it presentable in a white-tablecloth restaurant,” said Frank Brigtsen, a Prudhomme protege who is the chef and a co-owner of Brigtsen’s Restaurant. ”When he started, the food was unique. Also, there seemed to be a groundswell of interest in regional American food, and, obviously, Louisiana food is one of the strongest.”
The chef’s secret? Prudhomme loved to cook more than most people say they love anything, especially their job:
The secret, he wrote in his first cookbook, lay in the food itself and the pleasure it can bring: ”Watching people eat something that they’ve never tasted quite so good, or eat something that they didn’t believe could be that good, watching their eyes and their whole expressions change, and even their attitudes toward the cook change — that’s what keeps me cooking!”
Prudhomme is survived by his wife. His funeral will be private.
(Via NOLA.com)
