Texas Originals

Lucille Bishop Smith

September 5, 1892–January 12, 1985

Starting with a single recipe at a church fundraiser, Lucille Smith eventually launched a food empire at a time when Black women’s cooking was not recognized or rewarded.

Born in 1892 in Crockett, Texas, Smith demonstrated early prowess as a chef when Booker T. Washington praised her dishes during a school visit. She graduated from Huston College in Austin in 1912 and, interested in training cooks, she became the vocational coordinator for Fort Worth’s public schools. In 1928, she took on management of the kitchens at the exclusive Camp Waldemar outside Kerrville, which she would lead with her chef husband, Ulysses, for decades.

In 1937, Smith created the first college department in commercial foods and technology at Prairie View A&M University. She published her first cookbook shortly thereafter, and, in the 1940s, developed Lucille’s All-Purpose Hot Roll Mix. The first of its kind, it established Smith’s national reputation, leading to a lucrative deal with American Airlines and friendships with Eleanor Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and boxer Joe Louis.

At age eighty-two, Smith incorporated her business as Lucille B. Smith’s Fine Foods to market her brands. Often called Texas’s first African American businesswoman, Smith died in 1985. Her legacies include the Houston restaurant Lucille’s, opened by her great-grandsons in 2012, and the 2019 museum exhibition in Prairie View celebrating her life and work.

For More about Lucille Bishop Smith

In 2012, brothers Chris and Ben Williams, Lucille Smith’s great-grandsons, opened the Houston restaurant Lucille's to celebrate her legacy as chef, entrepreneur, and educator, as well as the larger Black culinary traditions of the South. The restaurant has been featured on the Southern Foodways Alliance website and has hosted dignitaries such as food scholar Toni Tipton-Martin and President Joe Biden.

In 2021, Netflix produced the documentary series High on the Hog about the history of Black foodways, based on Jessica Harris’s book of the same name and hosted by Stephen Satterfield. It traces the movements of the Black diaspora, starting in West Africa, proceeding through the Deep South and urban North, and reaching its conclusion with the Black migration west to Texas. The Texas episode that is the season one finale films at Lucille’s and foregrounds Black chefs and entrepreneurs like her in the food history of the Lone Star State.

In 2019, the Texas Institute for the Preservation of History and Culture at Prairie View A&M University mounted an exhibition centering Smith’s career as an educator at the school and featuring her inventive 1938 "cookbook," which was produced as a recipe box now highly sought after by collectors. Like the Houston restaurant and documentary series, it also places her within the wider context of Black entrepreneurship and vocational education in the culinary professions. Many of the items from the collection have since found a new home at Lucille’s.

Selected Bibliography

DeKnight, Freda. "Hot Roll Mix." Ebony, October 1948, 58.

Duncan, Robert J. "Smith, Lucille Elizabeth Bishop." Handbook of Texas Online.

Engelhardt, Elizabeth. A Mess of Greens: Southern Gender and Southern Food. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011.

Harris, Jessica B. High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America. New York: Bloomsbury, 2011.

Sherrod, Katie, ed. Grace & Gumption: Stories of Fort Worth Women. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2007.

Tipton-Martin, Toni. The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015.

Tipton-Martin, Toni. Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking. New York: Clarkson Potter Publishers, 2019.

Twitty, Michael. The Cooking Gene: A Journey through African American Culinary History in the Old South. New York: Amistad, 2017.

Winegarten, Ruthe. Black Texas Women: 150 Years of Trial and Triumph. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995. 

Listen to the audio

Lucille Bishop Smith. Courtesy of Fort Worth Star-Telegram Collection, The University of Texas at Arlington Libraries.

Lucille B. Smith with her hot roll mix and cookbook. Courtesy of Chris Williams.