This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.

In 1949, as the chef Lena Richard stirred steaming pots of okra gumbo and shrimp bisque on live TV in New Orleans, viewers across the city — mostly white housewives and the few Black women who could afford a television set — scribbled down ingredients and instructions, eager to bring her Creole flavors into their own homes.

After the studio lights cooled on the set of her show, “Lena Richard’s New Orleans Cook Book,” on WDSU-TV, cameramen pushed past one another for leftovers. Viewers moved from couch to kitchen, measuring, chopping, boiling and frying, adding a little pinch of this, substituting a little dash of that.

During the Jim Crow era, when domestic work was the primary form of employment for Black women, Richard found a measure of fame as a champion of Southern cuisine, and in particular Creole cooking — a fusion of primarily French, Spanish, West African and Native American ingredients and techniques that originated in New Orleans and often includes a roux (a mixture of flour and fat used as a thickening agent) and a “holy trinity” of onions, bell peppers and celery.

Not only was Richard the first Black person to host a television cooking show and to write a Creole cookbook, but she also owned three popular restaurants, established a line of frozen foods, and founded a catering company and cooking school, according to the historian Ashley Rose Young.