Leni Sorensen

Leni Ashmore Sorensen is an American chef and culinary historian. She focuses on the lives of Black cooks, with a particular emphasis on the early 1800s and the Colonial period. [1] She is featured on the Netflix television series, High on the Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America.[2]

Sorensen was born in Los Angeles in 1942.[3] Her mother, a Communist who later joined the Unitarian Church, was white. Her father was black; his grandfather was enslaved. Her stepfather, a Black man from New Orleans, sparked her interest in cuisine, and taught her how to cook Southern Creole staples. [1] She was the first of three generations of interracial children.[4]

Sorensen, who later earned a master's and Ph.D. from the College of William and Mary, left high school to play guitar and sing with The Womenfolk, a folk group.[3] They recorded five albums and appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show three times; their cover of "Little Boxes" was on the Billboard Top 100 for three weeks. Her first child was born when she was 18. [1] She began to host dinner parties and teach cooking classes in the early 1970s.[1]

In 1974 Sorensen described herself in a personal ad in Mother Earth News as "31, Black, tall (5’9”) and sorta freaky for around here. I’m a hell of a good cook and am skilled at gardening, canning, raising rabbits, sewing and minor carpentry (have also begun to handspin wool) so favor a man with a country lifestyle over a city-minded dude.”[1] That ad led to her marriage to Kip Sorensen, a carpenter and farmer from South Dakota, which lasted until his death in 2017.[1]

Her career before retirement included time as a food historian specializing in African-American foods at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's home, and working as a costumed interpreter at Colonial Williamsburg, where she "demonstrated how to dye cloth with indigo, spin wool and cook over a hearth".[1] She operates Indigo House, a five acre farmstead in the Blue Ridge Mountains where she teaches classes in canning and presents group dinners prepared from historic recipes.[1]