Strobel served smothered pork chops, sweet potato biscuits, and buttermilk pie to a crowd of regulars that included Diana Ross and Andy Warhol. “YOU don’t bet against a woman like that,” Matt Lee says of Pamela Strobel, better known to disciples of her cooking as Princess Pamela. Orphanedand alone, Strobel made her way north from South Carolina in the 1940s. She opened the Little Kitchen in New York’s East Village in the 1960s, and in 1969, she published Princess Pamela’s Soul Food Cookbook, an original take on Southern cooking from the perspective of a self-made African-American woman. Later, she opened Princess Pamela’s Southern Touch, where she served smothered pork chops, sweet potato biscuits, and buttermilk pie to a crowd of regu lars that included Diana Ross, Andy Warhol, and Tom…
