Mandy Lee's Recipes for Good New Orleans Dishes [Cover title]

[New Orleans, Louisiana]: N.P., 1954. Very good. 7¼" x 3¾". Plastic spiral-bound at top edge, thin card covers. Pp. 68 + two blank pages for notes at rear. Very good: covers lightly spotted with a few small stains to rear; a few pages lightly soiled at top edge; a bit of light scattered spotting.

This is a rare and fantastic book of recipes written by an early African American female celebrity chef and television host, Mandy Lee.

Amanda "Mandy" Lee was the on-air pseudonym for Ruth Porter Prevost. She was born in Slidell, Louisiana in 1917, and a 1950 New Orleans census listed her occupation as "lunch room supervisor" for a parish school. Later that year, Lee took over as host of a cooking show on New Orleans' WDSU-TV when Lena Richards died. Richards had been the first African American woman to host her own television cooking show, making Mandy the second. Contemporary news accounts called Mandy "a jovial person with a delightful smile and a rich laughing voice" and spoke of the "warm regard that New Orleans housewives have for her . . . On the streets she is immediately recognized and spoken to and in the fan mail you really learn of her popularity." Lee died suddenly of a brain hemorrhage in 1954; she was 37.

This cookbook featured an introduction by Harnett T. Kane on what could be misconstrued as a title page. Kane, who authored over 30 books on Louisiana history and culture, wrote that "New Orleans food is, of course, the best that America can offer" and called Mandy one of the city's "most resourceful artists of skillet and baking oven, a mistress of high cuisine." The book contained 80 recipes in nine categories. Sweets were the star - there were sections for Cookies, Cakes and Pastries, all separate from a fourth category of Desserts - but there were also recipes for a "Creole Grillade," "Upside Down Burger Pie" and a few surprises like a "Sophisticate Salad" and broccoli with a "Horse-radish Cream." Of course several pages featured New Orleans-style seafood including "Old Plantation Okra Gumbo," fried shrimp and "Mandy's Oyster Loaf." Each recipe page had a "Mandy Lee Says..." section at the bottom, with a cartoon illustration of Lee's smiling face and a handy tip or ingredient alternative.

A great book of Southern recipes by a young Black cooking star who came to an untimely end. OCLC locates three holdings, and there is another copy presently available online.