-Funding for "The Dooky Chase Kitchen: Leah's Legacy" was provided by the... -For over 80 years, Dooky Chase's restaurant has anchored Faubourg Tremé, supporting the neighborhood's institutions, including its schools and churches.

Chef Leah Chase understood the importance of good works, generously providing food for many fundraisers.

Chefs Dook Chase and Cleo Robinson recall her many acts of community service with three significant dishes.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Soft-shell crabs with crawfish sauce is one of Chef Dook's favorite Lenten dishes.

-All right.

We're talking seafood season.

And when I know that, I go back to my Catholic faith.

It's lent time, right?

And every Friday we're having seafood, whether it's a fish fry or crawfish boil, crab boil, and one of my favorite -- soft-shell crab.

I have two beautiful crabs right here.

These soft-shell crabs -- you have to clean them.

So how do we clean them?

We take those aprons off.

I'll put that on the side.

We'll flip them over.

If you buy your crabs, you know you're gonna do the same thing.

There's a thing called the dead man.

You don't eat that, right?

So this piece here, we're just cleaning that up.

Crabs are just so beautifully flavored.

You really don't have to do too much to them at all.

Here, we'll start with a little salt.

'Course, you want to pick up that shell, get underneath there.

I'll hit this guy with pepper, and I'll put him in that flour right here.

Come back on top.

Salt.

Pepper -- lightly dust.

I'm gonna shake off this excess.

You see that I did not use any egg wash 'cause I don't want it to stick too much.

I just want it to be lightly coated.

Another reason why I have it in this paper towel, too, is you want to try to get as much of that excess water off of these crabs.

When you sauté or when you're deep frying, soft-shell crabs have a tendency to pop, right?

They're releasing that water and it'll pop in that grease.

So I'm trying to minimize that effect as much as I can.

So I'll do the same here.

Salt.

Little pepper.

Put this guy right here in this flour right here.

A little salt.

Little pepper.

Just enough.

Shake him off.

Let him drain for about two seconds.

So I'll have a little oil right here.

And we're sautéing, right?

So we're not bringing all the oil all the way up.

Just enough to cover the bottom of that pot.

Have a little butter.

And right as that butter melts, I don't want it to turn brown.

I want it to melt.

And then I'm gonna add in that soft-shell crab.

I'm on a low to medium heat.

And I'm going shell side down.

♪ And you'll start to hear it'll pop.

It'll release some of that water.

Now, while that's going, we're gonna start our crawfish sauce.

So add our butter.

And if your pot is going, you don't want it to brown too much.

Always remember, pull it off the heat.

And I'm gonna add a little bit of our flour that we dredged in there.

And this is just to thicken our sauce.

To slow that down, I'm gonna add a little bit of our onions here.

Let that go a little bit.

To that I'm gonna add a little bit of our garlic.

And this is a real quick sauce.

Add a little salt.

Little cayenne pepper.

And a little dry thyme.

And you can start to wake up those vegetables, that onion, that garlic.

I can smell my soft-shell crabs.

They're getting that brownness that I want.

Look at that color.

That's beautiful, right?

Look at that.

Just beautiful.

That goes on that side for about another maybe two to three minutes.

We'll deglaze with a little water that we have here.

And see that little brown?

That's what we want to pick up.

And now we add in our beautiful crawfish tails.

This is just gonna flavor that sauce.

♪ When you buy crawfish tails at the store, these have already been cooked, right?

So you don't have to take them much further than what they are.

That's why two to three minutes, they are ready to go.

And add a little bit of our green onions.

And you all should know me by now.

To finish the sauce, I'm gonna finish that with butter.

And here we have a little brabant potatoes.

These are potatoes that we just cut in an inch cube.

Right?

Similar to the recipe that you have for our French fry po'boy, how we work those French fries -- that's exactly how you work these brabant cube potatoes.

I'm gonna put that down.

And what they do for this dish, right -- Remember, there's three things we love here to cook with.

You got to cook with your eyes, your nose, and you got to have that texture.

That's that balance that we look for.

These crispy brabant potatoes gives you that texture that you're looking for.

I'm just gonna finish my crawfish sauce with a little butter just to cream it up.

And I'll take him off the heat and let that cream up.

And while that's creaming up, it's time for me to pull out these beautiful soft-shell crabs.

I mean, if you're smelling this, oh, you got something magnificent here.

Look how beautiful that is.

Get in there.

And I have a little heavy cream that I'm just gonna finish this guy in.

I do want to taste it to make sure it's right where we want it to be.

Mmm!

This is just ready to go.

And we're going right on top of this.

Okay.

This is speaking Good Friday.

This is speaking those seafood Fridays.

Soft-shell crabs, crawfish.

Oh, man.

Brabant potatoes at the bottom, just to give you that crisp.

We're gonna finish that off with a little parsley for color like we always do.

Right?

It has to look beautiful before you even try it.

I just add a little bit of garnish here.

When you're looking for seafood, and soft-shell crab is on the menu, you know you're in heaven, and you top that with crawfish sauce -- oh, my goodness.

-Chef Leah Chase was born to Creole parents who believed strongly in hard work and practicing their Catholic faith.

Her love of feeding people reflected her deep commitment to the church.

-Grandmother's faith was remarkable because she practiced and she lived it.

And as her granddaughter, you get to witness the intimate part of how someone practices their faith, and you reflect on your own.

But grandmother, until she couldn't anymore, always knelt down to say her prayers.

So in church, you see some of us slouching when we're kneeling.

Grandmother never did that.

-Every day you would see my grandmother saying the rosary.

Every day she would attend mass.

And you see that in those next generations.

Every morning my aunt goes to church and my mother goes to church, and they pray for the family.

So faith and family has always been the guiding principles for this family.

It has gotten us thus far.

It's gonna continue on and get us through each and every thing that we face.

-This meatless bean dish is a staple during Lent -- lima beans and shrimp.

-Lima beans and shrimp were started for.

our Good Friday tradition because after we got finished with Holy Thursday, with all of the meat and then we were going to the fasting stage, the only thing that we could have was seafood.

So it's just instead of the red beans with the ham and the smoked sausage, we do the lima beans and we incorporate seafood in it.

My aunt's motto was to work, pray, and do for others.

And that's what we do here at Dooky Chase's.

So we're gonna begin by putting in the lima beans.

They're gonna take just about 30 minutes to soften up, not too, too long.

We will put them in the pot... just with some regular water.

A little different on the Trinity on this one.

I'm going to add some onions.

A little celery.

And a little garlic.

I left out the bell peppers because our colors would kind of fight a little bit since our lima beans are green and our bell peppers are green.

We really don't need them.

And it's gonna kind of go against the grain on this one.

So we'll let that come up to a boil, let the beans soften, and in the meantime, we can work on a roux, which is not gonna take long because we're gonna do a blond roux.

So for our roux, we're gonna start with a little vegetable oil.

Not much because we don't want it to be a greasy dish.

We're gonna... just a little bit.

And what we're trying to do is we're trying to cook the flour without getting our deep-brown color.

♪ ♪ You can use the dried lima beans or the frozen.

The dried lima beans would take you a much longer period of time to boil and to get them tender as opposed to the frozen.

But they will both work in the same way.

Okay, so our roux is where we need it to be at.

The flour has cooked, but it has not taken on any color.

We can add our white pepper.

We are not using cayenne pepper because we're not trying to take on any coloration.

So we incorporate the white pepper there.

We like to do it like this because when you go into the pot, then it won't clump up and you won't have a -- like my aunt would say, "you won't have a [speaks Creole]," which is a mess.

We use ground thyme, not the whole thyme, because we don't want to see the little flakes in there.

And we can turn that fire off because we've reached the level that we needed to reach.

And we're gonna wait for our beans to boil and get tender, and then we will put it all together.

So we have our beans that have been boiling for a while, and they are nice and tender.

And we have our roux that we cooked, just a nice blond roux, and we added our ground thyme and our white pepper.

And they will continue to cook in there for a little bit.

And as you can see, I'm not getting any deep, deep colors.

Just what I want it to stay -- a nice, pale color.

And we will let that continue to cook for about 15 minutes so it all comes together, the roux and the beans.

These are some shrimp that I have purchased.

They're 21/25s.

You can use a smaller one if you like.

Sometimes we have a tendency to use smaller-size shrimp in gumbos.

Being Good Friday, we want it to be hearty.

We want you to have a good feel for the seafood in the product.

So this is a 21/25.

I've already peeled them and I've deveined them.

We don't like any of those little backs in our dishes, so they're nice and clean and we're gonna add a good bit of them, so we'll make sure everybody gets a healthy serving.

♪ I don't see enough in there, so I'm gonna add some more.

Oh, let's be generous.

We will let the shrimp cook with the beans so that all of our flavors marry together.

And it should take about another 15 to 20 minutes.

So since we are on our Good Friday fasting and we have to stick to the seafood, which I don't know why they say it's a sacrifice, because here in Louisiana, I don't think having seafood on any given day is a true sacrifice.

But we're gonna go along with the program, and we have our wonderful lima beans and shrimp that we have boiled until they're nice and tender, and we've added our shrimp, and they've turned a nice little pink color.

And we're going to finish it off with just a little green onion.

Give us just a little, little hint of color in there.

Little green onion and a little parsley.

And then we're gonna serve them up.

It's a luxury.

It's a treat.

So after we've added our roux, we want our beans to stay a little suspended in the stock and our shrimp to stay suspended, so it's not thick, thick where it's a paste, but it's not too loose where it's a soup.

So here we have our nice lima beans and shrimp, and make sure we get enough shrimp for our serving.

And we're gonna get some lima beans in there.

Oh, that looks pretty good.

And as you can see, by making a blond roux, we have kept the gravy nice and light.

So there you have it -- one of our Good Friday staples here at Dooky's, lima beans and shrimp.

-Faith and family were at the core of Chef Leah's strength.

Her father, Charles Lange, was a stickler on helping other people, so she was taught to live by doing for others.

-This is what it's all about.

You have to make every man feel his worth.

People have made me feel like I'm worth everything.

And then you can perform.

If you -- you know, if you get -- just lift people up, you'd be surprised all the things they could do.

-It was just, you know, really beautiful, the ecumenical spirit that thrived with within her and that she shared with other people.

Being inclusive with everyone was her passion and was her mission in life.

And she desired to have a personal connection to being that neighbor, that true friend to each and every one that she encountered every day.

-But faith was everything to her.

And even when times were rough, she never, never gave up.

-Chef Leah baked hundreds of this lemon meringue pie to support church, school, and civic organizations.

-So what we have are three eggs that we're going to separate.

We're going to have the egg yolks in one bowl and the whites in another.

And I'm sure there are some fancy gadgets out there that will allow you to do this, but these God-given gadgets work really good.

We will take those egg yolks and mix them around.

And to that, we want to add one can of condensed milk.

This was my uncle's favorite dessert.

He would not pass up an opportunity.

We would be in here making it by the big, big bowls, maybe 12 pies at a time.

And you have things already measured out.

And then when you put the bowl in the fridge to chill and you come back and you're missing a big spoon of it out, so you're like, "Oh, that's one pie short."

And you could trust and believe that my uncle had passed through the kitchen.

So you just want to mix those up.

Don't have to beat or anything.

As you can see, it's really easy to do.

And to that, we have taken the juice of three lemons and we're going to fold it in real gently.

You don't want to whisk it or beat it in because the lemons will burn the egg and you will separate.

♪ ♪ And once you have done that, you can proceed to put it in a pie shell that I have already pre-baked, blond bake, and I've let it cool.

And we will add that mixture to our pre-baked pie shell that has been cooled.

♪ And... we'll set this one aside.

So once we've added it to the pie shell, we will set it aside, or if you'd like, you can put it in the refrigerator and let it -- it will just set up a little bit.

It will become just a little bit stiffer, but eventually it is going into the freezer where it will set and it will firm up after we get the meringue on it.

But we're gonna put it aside while we whisk our egg whites.

And we have our three egg whites.

Gonna put them in our handy-dandy and make some noise.

[ Whirring ] And you want to set it on high.

♪ ♪ And once your egg whites get frothy, we want to add some granulated sugar.

This is gonna help us to stiffen it and get some nice peaks.

So we're gonna turn it back on and let it go for about another two minutes maybe.

♪ All right, that's about all it is to it.

There we have some nice, stiff egg whites, and we will peak out the meringues on the pie.

♪ ♪ This is a wonderful summer dessert.

It's nice and cool and refreshing.

♪ And once you have your meringue in place, we will take it and we'll put it in the oven.

I have the oven on about 450, 500 degrees.

I like it nice and hot just to pop it in the oven real quick just to get the meringue brown, and then we'll come back and we'll have a nice piece of lemon pie.

We have taken our pie out of the oven.

We have let it chill in the freezer not to get to a solid, solid state, but we want it cold enough where it will set and you will be able to cut it and serve it without it running.

So, and the easiest way to cut a lemon meringue pie is to have your nice knife, and you want to dip it in and let the tip get wet.

That way you will slide through the meringue without tearing the meringue.

And we do that.

Let me go back and we dip again.

And we slice.

And we should be able to get us a nice slice out of there.

Wonderful.

And I just have a few little candied lemon peels that I like to garnish with.

There you have it -- a nice, refreshing lemon meringue pie that reminds me of my aunt that did lots and lots of community work, support her community, support the churches, support the school system was always one of her top priorities.

Pray, work hard, do for others.

-Chef Leah Chase spent a lifetime uplifting the community and building bridges through food.

For more meals that bring people together, join the Chase family next time on "The Dooky Chase Kitchen: Leah's Legacy."

-Leah Chase's iconic book, "The Dooky Chase Cookbook," has been updated and includes all-new recipes from this series you're watching.

The cookbook is available for $27.95 plus shipping and handling.

To order, please call 1-866-388-0834 or order online at wyes.org.

-My mother was very much a celebratory person, and so was my daddy's side of the family.

We celebrated everything, especially birthdays, baptisms, confirmations.

We would have -- especially baptisms, we would have big parties.

-If we were open for Thanksgiving, we would serve the guests first, and then right after, we would have our family meal, and everybody would come in and we would eat right here in the restaurant.

-If I went to a dance, you know, I would have to stop here to show my grandmother my dress.

Or if it was after any big event, a graduation, if she wasn't able to make because the restaurant was open, we were knocking on the back door, "Grandmother."

You know, it was like the second ceremony to come see your grandparents.

-When you think about a restaurant and being around this long, I mean, there are some, but this is not easy, not an easy business.

It can take a toll on families and on, you know, generations to follow.

But they made it work, you know?

-For more information about "The Dooky Chase Kitchen: Leah's Legacy," visit wyes.org.

Funding for "The Dooky Chase Kitchen: Leah's Legacy" was provided by the...