Paul Prudhomme- Mentor, friend celebrated

I just returned from New Orleans where I’d flown  to attend Chef Paul Prudhomme’s 70th birthday party  as a surprise guest.     I hardly got to talk to or  see him because in true- Paul fashion, the party included all his employees who came to honor this generous man who paid their salaries for months during the Katrina tragedy and the periods of near non-business that followed.  They hovered around him and took photographs and thew arm smile never left his face.

The party was held at the impressive Magic Seasonings plant where his spice mixtures are made an shipped to over 60 countries. Shawn McBride, his partner, was the perfect  hostess and I got my fill of their famous  andouille sausage and tasso and I was happy to just sit and enjoy the warmth.

Late in the afternoon he realized that he had not spoken to me and called to apologize but no apology was needed.  I was there to show him my appreciation for everything he’s done for me throughout the years.  I probably would have never made it if it weren’t for that first break he gave me and his wise counsel.  He also probably saved my son Aaron when he took him in two summers during the difficult teenage years that I couldn’t handle him and look at him now!

But I’m getting ahead of my story. This is an except from my book Food from My Heart.

Mom and me on that fateful trip to New Orleans in 1981

It was in February, 1981 when I first met Chef Paul Prudhomme and my life took an abrupt Cinderella turn.  After working for nine years at  the Department of Human Resources as a social worker in El Paso, I had quit my job  and opened a small catering business. For years, I had been supplementing our income by baking cookies and cateriNg  parties for my sister and close friends and had discovered that this was what I most enjoyed and couldn’t live with out.  I had found my passion,

My mother offered to pay for basic catering and  specialized cooking classes  and we  threw ourselves into making this dream  a reality.

My good angel was Chef Paul Prudhomme of K-Paul’s in New Orleans. Late in February, l98l, I found myself there because my mother and I had had a couple of planned visits to U.S. cooking schools fall through. We decided to salvage something from the trip by visiting all the restaurants we could, looking for potential additions to my repertoire. (We both had an ability to duplicate most things we have tasted from memory.) We had already eaten four meals on the day we passed K-Paul’s,b  but we went in anyhow and they sat us in front of Paul. We had the most marvellous meal. My mother had the Sticky Chicken and I ate a dish of three small filets (veal, pork and beef). I was painfully shy in those days, and when my mother urged me to go up and talk to Paul Prudhomme,  I was terrified. But with my mother’s coaxing I got up my courage and introduced myself.

Paul was wonderful. He asked me about myself and listened with sympathy when I told him how the restaurant-school I’d started out to visit in New Orleans, hoping to acquire new dishes, had turned out to be a waste of time and money. Before I knew it, he had offered to teach me something about Cajun food from his own vast knowledge. In return he asked me to teach him some Mexican dishes. For the next three days I cooked at K-Paul’s. We had a great hit with one of the recipes Lillian Haines, my first catering teacher,  had taught me, Enchiladas de Cangrejo . Everything else we tried was well received, too. By the time I went back to El Paso Paul and I were fast friends.

We chatted a few times by phone to stay in touch, and during one call Paul told me that he had been invited to cook at a dinner for the Maitres Cuisiniers de France at Tavern on the Green in New York. Mother half-kiddingly suggested that I offer my services as a dishwasher, to get to go along with him. I said, “Mother!” and declined the suggestion. But two weeks later I had a phone call that floored me. Paul told me that the party had got so big that he would not be able to do his food as it should be done. So they were changing the concept to a buffet showcasing American regional cooking (one of the first presentations of this kind — the idea would be almost commonplace a few years later). Would I do the Mexican-inspired food?

I was not a confident person at that stage. I told Paul I couldn’t possibly do it — I didn’t even know how to chop an onion the way chefs do.

“You don’t have to,” said Paul. “You are the chef! You can ask a prep cook to bring you a chopped onion.”

So I agreed. I asked that Mother be allowed to accompany me, as I had about one third of her repertoire. On March 21, one month to the day after we had wandered into K-Paul’s, we were at work in the kitchen at Tavern on the Green. Neither of us had ever been inside a restaurant kitchen, and there we were not ten blocks from a fantastic suite that had been rented for us at the Essex House, learning from Pierre Franey how to chop a scallion double-quick. We made  crab enchiladas , salpicon de carne, enchiladas with red chile sauce. Every one was a hit. They were served in an incredibly beautiful buffet presentation, with silver chafing dishes, candles, and flowers galore amid a fairyland of chandeliers, Tiffany glass, and red carpets.

We had never been to such an event, let alone participated in one. I was so inexperienced that when we were called to the Crystal Room after the meal and everyone stood up and clapped amid exploding flashbulbs, I never imagined it was for me. I innocently sat down at a table and Suzanne Hamlin, food correspondent for The New York Daily News, had to tell me to stand up and acknowledge the applause. I burst into tears.

Needless to say, this was a watershed. One month before I had been a small-time caterer looking for new recipes to serve the El Paso Medical Society. Suddenly I was a star at a national media event, with heady compliments and talk of major-league career opportunities flowing all around me. Paul was my anchor to reality. He took time to talk over the whole experience with me. He helped me learn what to say to the reporters and interviewers. Above all he warned me not to let the moment’s triumph go to my head — that this was never-never land and I would have to go back to bridge luncheons and bar mitzvahs in El Paso, paying bills and working hard. Then and at every stage Paul would be there with the advice I needed and the sane, steady perspective I couldn’t have provided for myself.

So Chef, Happy birthday with all my love.

Stay tuned because I’ll be posting how the rest of my trip went –where I shopped, ate, who I saw in the Travel section in the next three days.