Paul Prudhomme, the influential Louisiana chef who made Cajun and Creole cooking popular across the country, died Thursday. He was 75.
Born in 1940 near Opelousas, Louisiana, Prudhomme was the 13th child in his family, and started cooking at the age of seven in a kitchen without electricity. Prudhomme opened his first restaurant at the age of 17, Big Daddy O's Patio, outside of Opelousas, Louisiana, and in 1975 became the first non-European chef at Commander's Palace in New Orleans. He introduced Cajun food there, which, NOLA.com says, was "almost unheard of in New Orleans at the time." In 1979, he opened K-Paul's Louisiana Kitchen along with his future wife, K Hinrichs, and patrons would wait hours for his blackened redfish and sweet potato pecan pie.
Prudhomme's popularity spread across the country as food writers began to come to New Orleans to pay him a visit. He wrote numerous cookbooks, including Chef Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen, opened pop-up restaurants in New York City and San Francisco, gave a demonstration at the Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris, and started Magic Seasonings Blends, sold in all 50 states and 30 countries. Food writer Craig Claiborne said in 1988 that Prudhomme "has had the greatest influence on American cooking, in cultivating the public interest in American food, of anybody I know. ... People said, 'There must be more to Southern cooking,' and he opened up the floodgates to the whole field of Southern cooking." He is survived by wife Lori Prudhomme. His first wife, K Hinrichs, died in 1992.
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