Leah Chase has come a long way from her Depression-era childhood in tiny Madisonville, but her memories of the town and that life are close at hand.
Chase, now a world-famous chef and the inspiration for princess Tiana in Disney’s The Princess and the Frog, grew up eating the perch her mother caught from the Tchefuncte River and wearing dresses made from flour sacks.
Her Madisonville exists in a simpler time, before the mansions and yachts and car traffic of today.
“You used to could sit and fish. Our big thing used to be the regattas. They would have a regatta on Fourth of July and Labor Day and would you believe your mother sewed you a new dress to go down to the river and look at the regatta. Can’t do that anymore because boats can’t race on the river, they have so many yachts,” she says. “Now there are big mansions on that river. It’s gorgeous.”
Though she grew up in the small Northshore town, Chase was born in New Orleans.
“You gotta understand. My mother was from New Orleans. And the reason I was born in New Orleans was because her mother—that’s years ago because I’m almost 89—was a registered nurse and a midwife,” Chase recalls as she nurses a glass of iced tea. I catch up with her after the lunch rush at her Tremé restaurant, Dooky Chase, amid the clink of dishes and serving platters.
“And you know how you used to travel most of the time? On a boat,” she says. Her mother boarded a steamer in Madisonville for the two hour trip to the New Basin Canal dock in West End. She would spend about a week in New Orleans before returning to the Northshore.
Chase recalls the impact the Great Depression had on her family and the creative ways her parents kept the children clothed and fed.
“The Great Depression came in 1929. I was six years old. That was horrible. But coming up in a small town, we did not feel it like people in New Orleans felt it. Because at least we could grow some of our food, we could grow greens, we could grow food to keep us eating,” she says. “We would grow our own peas and dry them and that would take you through the winter. We would grow okra and my mother would either can them or dry them.”
In those hard times, nothing went to waste.
“The flour and the rice came in cloth sacks, and you could wash the numbers and the writing out of those sacks and that’s how you would make your clothes. My mother sewed them and made table cloths out of them and pillow cases out of them. Looked like linen when it was ironed,” Chase says.
Though she’s cooked for U.S. Presidents (she’s quick to say that President Barack Obama committed the faux pas of putting hot sauce in her gumbo) and has risen to fame, Chase isn’t the type of person to forget her roots. Her dining room is almost its own small town, and Chase makes her way around the tables to shake hands and take pictures as if everyone there were her oldest and dearest friends. It’s the type of warmth that seems to have its origin in small town Madisonville, where everyone knew everyone else and, rich or poor, black or white, everyone was neighborly.
“It was good coming up in Madisonville. Good people,” she says. “It was segregated times but people were good to one another. They would look out for you. You had no fire engines or whatever they have today. It was the bucket brigade putting out the fires. If somebody’s house was on fire, everyone in the city, in the little town, came to throw the water on. They didn’t care who you were, they came and pitched in to help.”
Though blacks and whites had their own churches and didn’t mix, Chase says everyone was friendly to one another.
“When I was coming up you had the white church on this corner and the black church on that corner. You had to pass in front of the white church and you’d say hello to the white people. You wouldn’t ever dream of mingling with them, but that didn’t bother you,” Chase says. “You never visited their homes but they would say hello to you in the street or say a nice good morning to you. That’s the way people lived in Madisonville.”
Chase’s father worked as a caulker at the Jahncke Shipyard, which stood near where the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Maritime Museum is today. As a caulker, he sealed the joints in the wooden boats built at the shipyard. Chase recalls riding her bike to the shipyard to bring her father his lunch.
Back then, Chase and her ten siblings had to find ways to entertain themselves when they weren’t helping around the house. “We used to make pulling candy with our molasses, and that was our entertainment,” Chase recalls. Her Catholic father also took the children to watch the Baptist baptisms in the river. “I don’t know why he liked it so much but he always went like a religion to see those people being baptized. And we would go with him.”
Chores were a big part of daily life in Madisonville. Chase’s father’s family owned a twenty-acre strawberry farm, and Chase remembers waking up before dawn to pick strawberries, before the day grew too hot. She also helped raise her family’s chickens and grow a vegetable garden. She says these experiences make her more connected with her food, appreciating where it comes from. “I always say it’s good coming up in a small, rural town because you learn about animals. Kids today don’t know the food they eat. If you come up in a country town, where there’s some farming, some cattle raising, some chicken raising, you know about those things,” she says. “When we went to pick strawberries we had to walk maybe four or five miles through the woods and you learned what you could eat. You knew you could eat that mayhaw, you could eat muscadines. You knew that, growing up in the woods. You just knew things. You got to appreciate things.”
She regrets that children today, especially those in big cities, are disconnected from their food. “I wish every child would have that experience. People growing up in a big city know absolutely nothing about the food they eat,” Chase says.
Chase, who grew up Catholic, lived in Madisonville until high school, when she moved in with her aunt in New Orleans to attend St. Mary’s Academy. There were no Catholic high schools for blacks then, and her father felt strongly about having Chase continue her Catholic education.
Though her business and her legacy are firmly planted in New Orleans, Chase speaks highly of Madisonville. “It’s a good little town with good, hard-working people. For me, it’s good to see the town grow the way it did. And it is just so beautiful. When I go over there now and I go to the river, my mother’s tomb is here and not too far from where she’s buried is where she used to fish,” she says. “I will always love Madisonville.”
Details
Dooky Chase's Restaurant is at 2301 Orleans Avenue in the Treme neighborhood, NOLA. They don't have a website. But the number is (504) 821-0535.
