1890s:
HOW NELLIE MURRAY BECAME THE FOREMOST CATERER IN LA LOUISIANNE
“Who does not know Nellie Murray, the famous cuisinière, who for so many years has been the chief caterer [in] New Orleans? Indeed, so well-known is Nellie in ultra-fashionable circles, that not to know her is to argue oneself unknown,” proclaims an article in the December 4, 1896 edition of the New Orleans Daily Picayune.
By Sarah Baird It’s no secret that women have long been overlooked, ignored or written out of culinary histories. Despite being those who developed the recipes, cooked the meals, and then passed them down through a matriarchal lineage. If you crack open a historic text or peek into vintage fine dining cookbooks, it’s more likely than not that the person credited with “creating” a recipe actually learned it from an enslaved person, long-gone family member or woman deemed unnecessary to credit at the time. Over the past 130 years, though, a constellation of guiding lights for female chefs has developed in New Orleans: luminaries who pushed boundaries, built businesses and refused to shy away from celebrating their worth. These women not only fought (and continue to fight) for change in the kitchen, but in the community as well, advocating for just policies locally — like Nellie Murray, who spoke out against segregated streetcar laws at the turn of the 20th century — and human dignity on the national stage. After all, you’d be hard pressed to find a chef more deeply entwined with the civil rights movement than Leah Chase. The timeline that follows — which covers more than 130 years — traces how change begets change, and how today’s female chefs are standing on the shoulders of the fearless giants who came before them. Because if we want to build a culinary history that’s fair and true, we must ensure that women not only get credit for their kitchen creations but are remembered for the foundational ways in which they shaped the very fiber of dining in the Crescent City.
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Born in Bayou Goula on the plantation of Paul Octave Hébert, the fourteenth governor of Louisiana, around 1835, Murray came from a long line of esteemed Creole cuisinières: enslaved cooks who were charged with preparing lush, sumptuous meals for high society families. Murray spent her childhood watching as her mother and grandmother labored over seasoning dishes just so, setting tables with the linens perfectly crisp and making sure the drip coffee was prepared just right — skills Murray would forge into a lucrative career in the post-Reconstruction era. During the 1890s, Nellie Murray became the foremost caterer in New Orleans for wealthy, upper-class clientele, carving out her prime position as the go-to chef for families like the Howards and Whitneys. Murray’s aristocratic demeanor paired with her flair for entertaining cemented her celebrity status in the city and beyond, landing her enviable publicfacing roles like the chef de cuisine at the Louisiana Mansion Club during the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago and serving Susan B. Anthony at a private luncheon as part of the 1903 National American Woman Suffrage Association convention. “There is no place in the world outside of Paris where people know how to cook, except in New Orleans,” Murray recounted after an extended transcontinental trip across Europe in the mid-1890s. “I saw a New Orleans gentleman at one dinner, and he said to me en passant, ‘Nellie, this
