Princess Pamela Strobel

Princess Pamela Strobel ran a tiny East Village soul food restaurant — Princess Pamela's Little Kitchen — from the mid-1960s through the 1990s. The room sat fewer than thirty people. Diana Ross, Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, and Gloria Steinem ate there. Her self-published Princess Pamela's Soul Food Cookbook (1969) circulated for decades as a near-mythic out-of-print object before Rizzoli reissued it in 2017.

She vanished sometime in the late 1990s and was never publicly found again. The cookbook is the record. It is one of the most singular voices in 20th-century American food writing.