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

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On Friday the line at St. Martin de Porres went out the fellowship hall door and around the corner of the church.

For five years, Odette's Friday gumbo had drawn the same people. Retired refinery men. Nurses from the hospital on their lunch break. The Catholic Daughters, who sold pralines at a card table by the door. Eighty, ninety, on a big Friday a hundred and twenty plates, twelve dollars each, cash or the little card reader Noelle had set up on her phone.

This Friday there were more than two hundred people, and half of them were holding phones up.

"Are you the Cheating Grandma?" a boy of about nineteen asked at the window, grinning. His friend was filming. "Can I get a box gumbo?"

"Twelve dollars," Odette said.

He paid, tasted it on camera, and his face changed. Then he remembered what he was there for and made a show of gagging. His friend laughed. They walked out.

A woman in a Saints jersey had brought a red box of Lanier's Legacy Gumbo from the grocery store. She set it on the counter next to a bowl of Odette's and filmed the two of them side by side, narrating into her phone in a whisper. "Okay, y'all. The color is the same. I'm just saying."

At noon Father Remy Babineaux came into the kitchen with his sleeves rolled up.

"I'll take the register," he said. He was fifty-eight, a big man from Opelousas with reading glasses pushed up on his bald head. "You stir."

"Father, you don't have to."

"Odette, I've been eating your gumbo every Friday since I got here. Nine years. I know what's in that pot." He took the cash box. "Let them film."

She sold two hundred and four plates. It was the most money she had ever made in a single day at St. Martin's. She went home and could not eat.

The envelope came on Monday, the twenty-ninth of September, by FedEx. It was thick and cream-colored, with a New Orleans law firm's name engraved in the corner. Noelle signed for it. Odette read it at the kitchen table with her reading glasses on and her coffee going cold.

It was from the lawyers for Lanier Brands, Inc.

It said that on September thirteenth, at a taping of Gumbo Throwdown with Beau Lanier, Ms. Odette Batiste had made "false and disparaging statements regarding Mr. Lanier and the origin of his proprietary recipe."

It said that Lanier's Legacy Gumbo was a registered trademark, and that any use of the words "Legacy Gumbo" or any suggestion that Lanier's products were derived from Ms. Batiste's family recipe would be "aggressively pursued."

It said that Ms. Batiste was bound by the Participant Agreement and Release she had signed on September thirteenth, and it attached a copy.

Odette remembered signing it at six-thirty in the morning at a folding table by the door. Just the standard release, ma'am. Everybody signs. Initial here, here, and here. There had been a line of forty people behind her and the forms were twenty-two pages long.

Noelle, who was a nursing student and not a lawyer, read every page to the bottom while Odette poured fresh coffee.

"Okay," Noelle said. "Paragraph fourteen. The network owns everything they filmed. Your face, your voice, your recipe as you cooked it on camera. They can edit it however they want, 'including in a manner that may be unflattering or that participant may consider inaccurate.' That's a direct quote, Grandma. You agreed they could make you look bad."

"I didn't read that."

"Nobody reads it. That's the point." Noelle turned a page. "Paragraph nineteen. Confidentiality and non-disparagement. You can't talk about the show, the network, or the host to any press or on any social media without written permission. Not during the season and not for two years after."

"So I can't say he's lying."

"You can't say anything." Noelle's finger moved down the page and stopped. Her face went pale under her freckles. "Grandma. Paragraph twenty-two."

"Read it to me."

Noelle read it slowly.

"'Participant acknowledges that any breach of Paragraph 19 would cause the Producer and Network irreparable harm, the damages for which would be difficult to calculate. Accordingly, Participant agrees to pay, as liquidated damages and not as a penalty, the sum of two hundred fifty thousand dollars for each such breach.'"

The refrigerator hummed. Outside, a dog barked twice and stopped.

"Two hundred and fifty thousand," Odette said.

"For each one, Grandma." Noelle set the paper down as though it were hot. "If you go on Facebook and say it's Great-Grandma's recipe, that's one. If you tell a reporter, that's two. If you say it to those kids at the church window and they post it, that could be three."

Odette thought about her house. It was a shotgun house on Gieffers Street that her mother had bought in 1964 for nine thousand dollars. It had a new roof, paid for with the last of her savings after Laura. It was worth maybe a hundred and ten thousand dollars on a good day. It was all she owned in the world.

"So he can say I'm a cheat," she said, "on television, to two million people. And if I say I'm not, they take my house."

Noelle did not answer.

Odette got up and went to the cabinet over the stove. She took down a stained, swollen, cloth-covered notebook with a rubber band around it. The cloth had once been green. Now it was the color of river water. Josephine's recipes were in there, written in pencil and then ink over fifty years, page after page, in her small slanted hand.

On the third page, at the top, it said Gombo. July 1958.

Odette laid her hand flat on the cover.

"Grandma," Noelle said. "That's proof. That's real proof."

"Baby, it's a notebook." Odette's voice was steady, but her hand was not. "Anybody can write in a notebook."