Mildred Lubritz Covert, 1927-2015

Mildred Covert, a tiny woman with a joyous attitude, decided in the late 1970s to inform Southern cooks that Jewish women also stood over their stoves with gumbos, jambalayas, and red beans. Her work, along with that of Sylvia Gerson, spun out of her kitchen and the Sisterhood of Congregation Beth Israel, into diverse groups of others interested in the culinary history of New Orleans. She led with a great curiosity, interviewing Baptist home cooks, Jewish restaurant owners from Iran and Egypt, and plantation enactors who dressed to show how sugar cane was harvested. She was also a wonderful example of aging, becoming a model on television in her late seventies, and reining as a Carnival queen at her assisted living facility in her eighties.