Patti LaBelle Cooks for Therapy - Review

American Visions, June, 1999 by Fern Robinson

"Back when I started cooking, we thought fat was something God put in food to make it taste good," warns Patti LaBelle in the introduction to her cookbook, LaBelle Cuisine: Recipes to Sing About (Broadway Books, 1999), written with Laura B. Randolph. LaBelle, who is a diabetic, cautions that "dishes high in calories and fat should be special treats, not everyday indulgences."

That said, the chanteuse serves up a culinary feast with nary a calorie or fat index in sight. Not to worry, it doesn't take a brain surgeon to realize that some of LaBelle's recipes are not for daily dining. Even the names of the dishes give fair warning: over-the-rainbow macaroni and cheese; child, that's good cheap pot roast; say-my-name smothered chicken and gravy; and decadent and delicious pecan pie.

LaBelle says that she can't single out a favorite recipe, because they all recall a special moment in her life. "Like my make-you-wanna-holler Maryland crab cakes," she says. "I almost named them 'get a husband' crab cakes because I'm convinced that's why Armstead finally agreed to marry me. He'd been stalling me the whole weekend, but after I cooked those babies, boyfriend said, `Yes!'"

For years we've taken it on faith that LaBelle is as fierce in the kitchen as she is onstage. Countless entertainers have reminisced with the songstress on television talk shows about mean that she prepared for them at her home or on the road. It seems that LaBelle's pots and pans are her American Express card: She never leaves home without them, packing her cooking utensils alongside her gowns and wigs for her concert tours.

Anecdotes accompany a good number of her recipes. Fixing liver and onions for Arsenio Hall in her Caesar's Palace room set off the hotel's fire alarms and almost had her evicted. However, she assured the security guard that she would not do it again as she dished up a big plate of food for him to enjoy with her and Hall.

In another vignette, LaBelle recalls introducing the culinary delights of soul food to the piano player in the British band that backed up Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles on their 1960s London tour. "He played like no other white boy I have ever heard," she remembers. He could play the piano, but not cards, and LaBelle would cook for him after taking all of his money in late-night card games. "The only thing he ever won was my sympathy." But he might have been playing LaBelle, because "sympathy" earned him enough of her smothered cabbage, red beans and rice, fried chicken and potato salad to tide him over to his next paycheck. (The piano prayer was Reggie Dwight, who later became known as Elton John.)

Budd's back-to-life soup originated in a hotel room when LaBelle's musical director, James "Budd" Ellison, returned to the tour after cancer treatments. Doctors had advised Ellison, a vegetarian, to include chicken and red meat in his diet. "I'm going to make you wonder why you ever gave up either one," affirmed LaBelle. That night, Ellison requested a second pot of the chicken-vegetable soup.

Whipping up her specialties in hotels is not just LaBelle's way of avoiding the blandness and expense of room service. It goes far deeper than that. "Singing is such a spiritual experience for me, cooking is the only way I can come down from the high," she says. "I've tried everything--bubble baths, massages, saunas--but nothing relaxes me the way cooking does."

Her cooking therapy is not limited to the road. LaBelle loves to create sumptuous meals at home, too, where she keeps two freezers full of food. "You just never know when folks are going to drop by," she explains.

LaBelle has kept her recipes top-secret until now. If you weren't in her circle of family and friends who cooked in the kitchen with her, you were not going to get the ingredients and procedures for preparing her dishes, no matter how hard you begged. She relented only once, when her funds were tight, to give singer Laura Nyro a recipe as a wedding present.

LaBelle took Nyro through the potato salad recipe, ingredient by ingredient, step by step. "By the time we hung up the phone, I don't know who was crying the hardest," recalls LaBelle, "Laura or me."

LaBelle Cuisine is destined to become a kitchen staple. It contains quintessential Southern-based recipes that have been passed down for generations. If you weren't smart enough to hang around in the kitchen when you were growing up, as LaBelle did when she was, and if you regret not having written down family recipes, this may very well be the book of your dreams. It even features decidedly nonprofessional black-and-white photographs that look as if they came straight out of a home album.

LaBelle says that the book is a "thank-you to my family, my friends, and my fans." It certainly is a gift to us all. Thank you, Patti LaBelle.

Fern Robinson is a freelance writer in Washington, D.C.