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

Round Two

She told herself she would quit. She told Noelle on Wednesday night that she would call Sabine on Thursday morning and withdraw.

On Thursday morning she called Sabine and asked what time the call was on Saturday.

"Seven," Sabine said. "And Odette? Round Two is the Heritage Round. Everybody tells the story of their gumbo on camera before they cook. Two minutes each. Think about what you want to say."

"I'm not allowed to say anything."

"You can talk about your family. That's not disparagement. That's heart." Sabine's voice warmed like a car dealer's at the end of a sale. "Just don't mention Beau. Legal will kill me."

Saturday, the fourth of October, was cool for Lake Charles, with a wind off the lake that rattled the big doors of the Civic Center. Nine cooks were left. Odette was at station four this time, next to Rustin again, and across from a young schoolteacher from Moss Bluff who made a duck and andouille gumbo that people talked about.

She stowed her purse and her little cooler in the green room at seven-fifteen. Every cook had a cubby along one wall, with a strip of tape and a name on it in black marker. In the cooler she had two bottles of water, a pimento cheese sandwich Noelle had made her, and an apple. She had not brought a single ingredient. She knew the rules.

A young woman in black was in the green room when she came in, arranging bottled water on a folding table. She was maybe twenty-seven, with a sleek dark ponytail and a lanyard that said LANIER BRANDS. She smiled at Odette very politely and did not say a word.

At nine, the heritage interviews began. One by one, the cooks sat on a stool in front of a backdrop painted to look like a bayou at sunset, and told their stories.

Rustin talked about his grandmother in Sulphur, who made gumbo every Christmas Eve and fed the whole fire station. The schoolteacher talked about her father's duck camp. A man from DeRidder cried about his late wife and had to start over twice.

Then it was Odette's turn.

She sat on the stool with her hands in her lap. A light glared in her face. She thought about paragraph nineteen. She thought about her house.

"My mother was Josephine Batiste," she said. "She opened Josephine's Kitchen on the north side of Lake Charles in July of 1958. She cooked there for forty years, and I cooked there with her, and then I cooked there by myself until Laura took the roof.

"In 1957, when I was six, Hurricane Audrey came in at Cameron and killed hundreds of people. The ones who made it came up here with nothing. My mother cooked for them in a church hall for three weeks. She didn't have much. Some flour that got scorched. Some oil. A case of cane syrup somebody donated. She learned something in that church hall that she put in her gumbo the rest of her life.

"She taught me to make a roux with a towel over my eyes. She said your nose tells the truth when your eyes won't. That's the gumbo I make. It's hers. It was always hers."

She stopped. She had not mentioned Beau. She had not said one word that could cost her a dime.

Behind the camera, Sabine was frowning at a monitor. Off to the side, standing with his arms folded by a pillar, Beau Lanier was not frowning. He was looking at the floor.

The cooking went well. Better than well. Her roux came up to Josephine's color in fifty minutes, and she smelled it the second it got there. Her stock was rich. Her andouille was perfect. When she ladled it out at the end of ninety minutes, she knew, in the quiet way you know something true, that it was the best gumbo in the room.

Then the judges tasted, and while they tasted, Sabine walked up to station four with two cameras behind her and a production assistant carrying Odette's little cooler.

"Odette," Sabine said, loudly enough for the boom. "We've had a report. Can you tell us what this is?"

The production assistant set the cooler on Odette's prep table and opened it. The sandwich was there. The water. The apple.

And under them, folded flat, was a red cardboard box with a sunbonnet on the side. Mawmaw Lanier's Legacy Gumbo. Family Size. Next to it was an empty black plastic tray, still smeared brown inside.

The hall went silent. Odette heard Rustin, at station five, say, "Oh, come on," under his breath.

"That's not mine," Odette said.

"It was in your cooler," Sabine said. "In your cubby. With your name on it."

"I've never bought one of those in my life."

Sabine looked at the camera, then back at Odette. Her face was serious and almost kind, the face of a woman who had practiced it.

"We're going to have to review this," she said. "Don't leave the building."