TV Chef Called a 74-Year-Old Grandma a Cheater on Camera — Then She Asked Him One Question About His Own Gumbo

Round One

She did not go home. She went to Mass on Sunday, sold eighty-six plates of gumbo on Friday, and on Saturday morning, the twentieth of September, she was back at the Civic Center at seven o'clock in a blue blouse with her hair pinned up.

The folding tables were gone. Twelve cooking stations stood in two rows under hanging lights, each with a gas range and a numbered sign. Against the back wall, the production had stocked a pantry with flour, oil, chickens, andouille, shrimp, onions, peppers, and a long shelf of spices and bottles.

"Rules," Sabine said through a bullhorn. "Ninety minutes. Our pantry only. No outside ingredients, no notes, no phones. Personal stuff goes in the green room. Judges taste blind, then Beau comes around and talks to you on camera. Places."

Odette's station was number seven. Next to her, at number eight, was the firefighter from Sulphur. He was about forty, with a red beard and arms like hams.

"Rustin Broussard," he said, holding out a hand. "I heard what he said to you last week. That wasn't right."

"My grandmother would've hit him with a spoon."

Odette smiled for the first time that morning.

A horn blew. Ninety minutes started.

She broke down two chickens and set the backs and necks to simmer with an onion and a bay leaf for stock. She sliced the andouille thin on the bias. She diced two big yellow onions and split the pile in half with the side of her knife. Celery. Green pepper. Garlic. Green onion for the end. She did not measure anything. Her hands knew.

Then the roux. Equal parts flour and oil in her mother's pot, over a flame she kept lower than anyone else in the room.

Somebody at station three had his flame high, chasing a dark roux in twenty minutes. Odette could smell it scorching from where she stood.

She stirred with a flat wooden paddle, slowly, in a figure eight that touched every part of the bottom. She did not look at the roux very often. She smelled it.

First it smelled like raw flour and hot oil. Then like popcorn. That was peanut butter color, and most people would stop there. Then toasted bread. That was a copper penny. Then something deeper, like pecans in a skillet. That was the color of a pecan shell.

She kept going.

When the roux smelled like coffee and the inside of an old church, Josephine's color, she dropped in the first half of the onions. The pot hissed and the smell changed all at once, sweet and sharp. The onions are the brakes, Josephine used to say. They stop the roux from running off a cliff.

Then she took a small jar of cane syrup from the pantry shelf and stirred half a teaspoon into the roux.

Rustin Broussard, chopping okra at station eight, glanced over. "Syrup? In the roux?"

"In the roux."

"What's it do?"

She smiled and did not answer.

At the end of ninety minutes, she ladled her gumbo over rice in a white bowl. She put the filé in a little dish on the side, never in the pot, as her mother always served it. Then she stepped back with her hands folded in front of her apron.

The judges tasted at a long table at the front, each bowl numbered, with no name. There were three of them: Beau, a chef from Lafayette with a shaved head, and a woman in her sixties with a gray bob and tortoiseshell glasses whom Sabine introduced as Vivienne Ardoin, "the food critic who's been eating gumbo in New Orleans longer than some of you have been alive."

Odette watched Vivienne Ardoin taste bowl number seven. The woman stopped. She tasted it again. Then she took off her glasses, set them on the table, and stared at nothing for a long moment.

Beau tasted it once and pushed it aside.

Then came the walk-around, Beau going from station to station with two cameras and a boom. When he reached station seven, he stopped and looked at her pot, not her.

"Number seven," he said to the camera. "This is a very good gumbo. Of course it is." He paused for the laugh. "It's my gumbo. Same dark roux. Same andouille cut. Same half spoon of cane syrup, which I didn't think anybody outside my company knew about. Miss Batiste, have you been studying my product?"

"I've been cooking this gumbo since I was ten years old."

"Mm-hm. And how old is my product? Twenty-one years." He turned back to the lens. "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, y'all. I'll take it."

He gave her a six out of ten. The chef from Lafayette gave her a nine. Vivienne Ardoin gave her a ten, the only ten of the day, and did not explain it.

Odette was through to Round Two.

On Wednesday afternoon Noelle came home from her clinical rotation, still in her navy scrubs, and stood in the kitchen doorway with her phone in her hand.

"Grandma," she said. "Sit down."

The network had posted a promo for the new season on every platform it had. It was forty seconds long. In it, Beau Lanier tasted a gumbo at the open call and said, "Ma'am, did you buy a box of my Legacy Gumbo at the grocery store, thaw it out, and pour it in your mama's pot?"

Then it cut, not to Odette's answer, but to Odette's face in silence, her mouth closed, her eyes down, as though she had been caught. A low cello note played. A title card came up: SOMEONE'S COOKING THE BOOKS.

Odette's answer about her mother was gone. The line about washing pots was gone.

"It's had two million views since this morning," Noelle said quietly. "Grandma, they're calling you something."

She turned the phone around. Under the video, over and over, in a thousand comments, was the same hashtag.

#CheatingGrandma.