Blake Pontchartrain: The Lee Barnes Cooking School | Blake Pontchartrain | Gambit Weekly

Hey Blake,

I came throughout a poster advertising a thing known as the Lee Barnes Cooking University. What can you explain to me about it?

Expensive reader,

Lee Barnes was a indigenous of Natchez, Mississippi, who graduated from Newcomb College right here in New Orleans and Le Cordon Bleu, the famous cooking university in Paris.

She opened her to start with cooking faculty in New Orleans in 1974, training not just classic local dishes but also new approaches and cuisines. “We modify the calendar each month,” Barnes claimed in a 1976 posting in The Times-Picayune. The newspaper spelled out that programs ranged from “Japanese, Chinese, Creole or French cooking to crepes, soups, hors d’oeuvres and setting up informal buffets. She has been acknowledged to present a study course in how to boil drinking water, for intense circumstances.” Classes ended up taught by Barnes and other guest instructors, together with Leah Chase, Paul Prudhomme, Jacques Pepin and Poppy Tooker.

As Susan Tucker factors out in her book “New Orleans Cuisine: Fourteen Signature Dishes and Their Histories,” Barnes is credited with opening the 1st cooking school which did not segregate pupils by race, class or gender.

The cooking school started at 1339 Coliseum St. in advance of going to 7808 Maple St. and at last to 8400 Oak St. In addition to classroom house, there was also a store showcasing connoisseur food items merchandise, cookware and cookbooks for sale.

Barnes also produced radio shows for Prudhomme, taught at Delgado Neighborhood College and wrote two cookbooks.

In 1986, she and her relatives left New Orleans for Germany, where her spouse accepted a placement with the U.S. Section of Protection.

She returned listed here from time to time to educate cooking lessons, which include for kids at the freshly recognized Louisiana Children’s Museum. In 1988, she was back again teaching at a cooking school in the Riverwalk.

By 1989, she had remaining New Orleans for Alexandria, Virginia. She died in 1992 of difficulties from a brain tumor. She was 41.