FOOD MAVERICK
An entire generation of Houstonians does not recall an era when the city wasn’t known as a thriving, exciting food and dining metropolis.
But in the 1970s and ’80s, local supermarkets weren’t teeming with “exotic,” now commonplace ingredients such as arborio rice, lemongrass, harissa, arugula, diver scallops, fish sauce, worldly cheeses and olive oils. There wasn’t a phalanx of food professionals trumpeting its restaurant offerings and certainly no nationally recognized celebrity chefs. Local media didn’t cover food as pop culture or the economic engine it is today.
Peg Lee helped change that.
The educator who taught many Houstonians how to cook through her positions as
Event set to honor Peg Lee, who ‘set the tone in Houston for what cooking classes could be’
the founding director of the Rice Epicurean cooking school and later in the same role for Central Market, brought national and international chefs to Houston and raised the city’s profile as a culinary destination and hotbed of multicultural flavors.
Now retired, the 88-yearold dynamo will be honored May 3 at the Delicious Alchemy Banquet, a fundraiser for Recipe for Success at the organization’s Hope Farms. It will be a night when the city’s top food and beverage professionals and dining enthusiasts gather to pay tribute to Lee.
“She had an influence on pretty much everyone,” said Greg Martin, executive chef at Bistro Menil. “In those days, it was (longtime Houston Chronicle food editor) Ann Criswell or Peg Lee. As a chef, if either of them reached out and asked you for something, the answer was always yes. It had to be yes.”
And there were plenty of hungry Houstonians willing to say yes when Lee began the city’s first organized cooking classes at Rice Epicurean. For that reason, many of the old guard often refer to her as “the Julia Child of Houston.”
Lee knew Child, along with hundreds of chefs and cookbook authors she brought to the Houston — including legendary French chef Andre Daguin, Anne Willan, Marcella Hazan, Emeril Lagasse and Anthony Bourdain. But she also championed a new era of Houston chefs including those at Brennan’s of Houston (Carl Walker, Randy Evans), Mark Cox, Arturo Boada, Monica Pope and Robert Del Grande, Houston’s first James Beard Award-winning chef.
“She knew how to cook and had a great palate. She knew what food was,” Del Grande said. “But she never overstated herself. It was never about her, it was, ‘How can I help?’ She was making it all happen. She was at the heart of the Houston culinary scene for restaurants and cooking classes. Peg was at the center of that.”
Simmering talent
Lee, who grew up in Massachusetts, is the first to admit she inherited zero cooking talents from her mother, who once served her husband a roast chicken that was cooked with the giblets packet still inside the bird. Her mother’s friends, however, saw her interest in food and encouraged the budding gourmand.
But it was Lee’s own natural curiosity about the world — she has traveled extensively — that did most to shape her relationship with food. She absorbed ideas, languages, cultures and global foodways with the gusto of a seasoned, ravenous explorer.
And she brought that culinary zeal with her when she and her husband, Edwy Lee, an English professor and writer, moved to Houston in 1969. Edwy Lee took a job teaching comparative literature at the University of Houston then and later taught at Houston Community College. Peg impressed educators with her cooking talents demonstrated at home dinner parties, and she soon found herself encouraged to teach cooking classes — basically, home economics — at HCC in 1971.
That led to a stint doing cooking demonstrations for the Magic Pan crepe restaurant, which led to a job in the early ’80s with Marshall Field’s overseeing cookware and food demonstrations. The new Rice Epicurean opened in 1988 and within a matter of years launched the city’s first cooking school with Lee as its director, a job she held until 2001, when Central Market wooed Lee to run its school. She retired in 2006.
Edwy Lee died in 1984. Peg Lee puts in this way when asked why she took the job with Rice Epicurean: “I was a widow. My children were all gone. I lived with a dog. What else was there to do?”
But she came to the job armed. She was a gifted cook, a natural educator, media savvy, well organized in the nuts and bolts of food demonstration and possessed with a natural affinity with chefs and cookbook authors whose publishers were getting wise to the Houston market potential. Lee tied it all together as expertly as a chef-trussed chicken.
Still, she was loath to give herself credit.
“I’m not a restaurant cook, I’m not a chef,” she said. “I cook like a housewife.”
‘A world of food’
Her children — brothers Andrew, Duncan and Matt Lee and sister Rachel Lee Hovnanian — would beg to differ. They grew up well traveled like their parents and with a mother who sent them to school with lunch boxes filled with veal Milanese or Middle Eastern lamb rolls. At a time when kids their age were craving Tang and TV dinners, the Lee siblings sat down to family dinners of duck a l’orange, Senegalese chicken, fresh tomato marinara on house-made pasta, prosciutto and melon, and cow’s tongue.
“When we came home from school, there would be a calf ’s head on the stove,” said Duncan Lee, who lives in Miami Beach, Fla., and works in the single-family rental market.
Rachel Lee Hovnanian, a multimedia artist who lives in Miami, grew up knowing how to make pâte brisée (pastry dough) as naturally as some kids put together a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
“When we were growing up, we didn’t think it was unusual to have a restaurant stove in our family
Accolades
Lee was an early advocate for Recipe for Success, which Gracie Cavnar created to combat childhood obesity and help change the way children appreciate and understand food.
Chef Greg Martin took an early shine to Lee, who welcomed him into her cooking school; he washed dishes in exchange for observing the classes. Years later, when he became chef de cuisine at Cafe Annie, he occasionally found himself conducting those classes.
“I adore her. I love the richness of her life. I want to be like Peg Lee,” Martin said. “Everything was so smooth and elegant, just like her.”
Chef Randy Evans is also an admirer.
“She gave us an outlet before there was food television. Rice Epicurean was doing things nobody else was doing and really set the tone in Houston for what cooking classes could be,” said Evans, director of culinary development for restaurants for H-E-B. “She’s an innovator, 100 percent. She pushed the boundaries.”
Not comfortable with talking about her accomplishments, Lee concedes that at a time people thought about food in a narrow fashion, she might have had something to do with broadening the scope.
“When I think about it, maybe I widened it a little,” she said. “Maybe I opened the door.” kitchen,” she said. “My mother opened up a world of food for us.”
When asked if the Lee children were aware of their mother’s influence on the Houston food scene when they were school age, Matthew Lee said absolutely not.
“All I knew is that everyone wanted to come stay at the Lee House because Mrs. Lee would cook,” said Matthew, the founder of Teo Gelato brand in Austin.