Paul Prudhomme: Chef who transformed Cajun cooking into a global phenomenon

The New Orleans chef who made Cajun cuisine celebrated all over the world, Paul Prudhomme, was a good deal larger than life, being just over five feet tall and weighing in at 580 pounds in his heyday. His piercing eyes and all-enveloping beard were striking, and he moved around, and cooked, sitting on a motorised scooter that was a cross between a wheelchair and a goods cart.

Prudhomme was a fixture on the international scene: I can remember meeting him in Monaco in 1990 for a celebration of the American food writer Craig Claiborne’s 70th birthday, and in Jerusalem in 1996, where this virtuoso of pork cookery was, with a fine feeling for paradox, one of 13 chefs chosen to prepare a kosher dinner marking the city’s 3,000th anniversary.

During the 1980s his restaurants, cookery books and television appearances made one of his dishes, blackened redfish (buttered fillets, dredged in cayenne and a herb mixture, black-crusted from being seared in a red-hot pan), so famous and so copied by other restaurants, that commercial fishing of the species (Sciaenops ocellatus) had to be stopped before it was made extinct.

The youngest of 13 children of a sharecropper in Opelousas, the seat of Saint Landry Parish, Louisiana, was only christened “Paul” because the parish priest insisted on a saint’s name; he was actually known as “Gene Autry”, after the Western movie star. He began cooking by the age of seven, helping his mother when all his sisters had left home.

In 1949, aged nine, he learned about a cousin working as a cook in a New Orleans hotel, earning $150 a week, which seemed to him a fortune for doing something he thought was fun, and his ambition was settled. Having graduated from school in 1957, he married his first wife and opened a hamburger joint, Big Daddy O’s Patio; it, and the marriage, lasted 10 months.

In the 1960s he sold magazines in New Orleans, and then travelled around the US, taking cooking jobs and opening more unsuccessful eateries; he created his own mixtures of spices, which he gave away to customers. In 1970 he returned to New Orleans and, despite being self-taught, became a sous chef at the hotel Le Pavillon, where he met his second wife, Kay Hinrichs.

Then at another hotel, Maison Dupuy, he began cooking his own Cajun food. Success beckoned. In 1975 he became executive chef of Commander’s Palace, the well known Creole restaurant, where he introduced his Cajun dishes, such as jambalaya, dirty rice and chicken and Andouille (sausage) gumbo made with an authentic roux of very dark flour cooked with oil.

Creole combines French cuisine with Spanish and Italian in an urban style representative of New Orleans’ mixed ethnic composition, and was developed by black cooks, who added African ingredients and techniques. Whereas “Cajun cooking,” Prudhomme said to Claiborne in 1981, “is old French cooking that was transformed into a Southern style when my ancestors migrated to Louisiana [many from French-speaking Canada]. It is spicier with pepper than authentic French.” But he added that among the Frenchmen who had cooked with him, “those who come from Grenoble… say, ‘That’s how my grandmother used to cook.’”

In 1979 he was invited by a food magazine to give a cooking demonstration in New York with visiting French and Italian chefs and a group from California that included Alice Water of Chez Panisse; this marked his becoming part of a trend, “New American Cooking”, which emphasised the regional character of American foodways. The same year, he and his wife, Kay, opened K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen on Chartres Street in the French Quarter, serving “down-and-dirty Cajun” plus a few Creole dishes such as mirliton or chayote, an intrinsically tasteless gourd but stuffed with fried oysters draped in sauce hollandaise.

K-Paul’s had no freezer, as Prudhomme had long ago accepted the gospel of fresh ingredients, and it also didn’t take credit cards or table bookings for its 64 seats. Tables were formica, drinks were served in jars, and you were often seated at a table with people you had never met. Dinner cost about $5 a head, but as the most popular restaurant in the city it did four or five seatings, and his rent was only $50 a month.

During the 1980s he became a familiar face and Falstaffian presence on US television, urging Americans to spice up their cooking; instructions for doing so were contained in his many cookery books. He took K-Paul’s upmarket and sold a range of his seasoning mixtures nationally.

He got into colourful scrapes from time to time. When he was running a pop-up restaurant in New York in 1985, the Board of Health, before it even opened, cited 29 violations; Prudhomme launched it anyway, and they threatened to jail him. Mayor Koch personally intervened in the “Gumbo War”, and it operated for five weeks with queues reported to be four blocks long. In 1992 he was in trouble for forgetting he had packing a loaded revolver in his carry-on luggage at Baltimore Airport. In 2004 he took 1800kg of food and seasonings to Guantanamo Bay to cook for US troops stationed there.

Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 shut down his restaurant, along with much of the city, and during the restoration he gave his services as a chef at a relief centre for the military and for those residents able to stay in the French Quarter. His team provided 6,000 meals in 10 days, and he was able to reopen in October, as the premises were not badly damaged. In 2008 he was bizarrely struck by a stray bullet while catering a golf tournament in New Orleans. It only grazed his arm, and he thought at first that it was a bee-sting . He was back at the stove in five minutes.

Before his death following a brief illness, he had got his figure back. At a 2013 cooking demonstration, though it was still done from his motorised cart, he revealed to the crowd that he was now a svelte 200 pounds.

Paul Prudhomme, chef: born Opelousas, Louisiana 13 July 1940; married firstly, secondly 1970 Kay Hinrichs (died 1993), 2010 Lori Bennett; died New Orleans 8 October 2015.