BATON ROUGE, La. – One of the Capital City’s most treasured chefs and restaurateurs is back in the kitchen. As the storms moved through Baton Rouge last week, Seabell White Thomas was buzzing about her small brick home preparing for her family’s Mother’s Day feast – a stuffed hen and homemade dumplings.
About a year ago, ‘Mama,’ as she is known to thousands of customers who regularly dined at her legendary Silver Moon Cafe near the LSU campus, was recovering from surgery. In late 2023, she was diagnosed with stage 4 uterine cancer and after a successful surgery, she underwent chemotherapy and radiation treatments.
READ NOW: Silver Moon Cafe’s Mama Seabell facing stage 4 cancer, still feeding her ‘babies’
Doctors recently told her everything “looks good” and she is recovering well, exercising and doing physical therapy twice a week, according to her daughter Sonyja Thomas. That is despite the initial stage 4 diagnosis and series of treatments that blurred her vision and left her with painful neuropathy in her hands and feet.
Mama, who turns 82 this July, isn’t slowing down and credits her positive mindset for helping in the battle against cancer.
“We used to think of aging as a problem, but the mind can keep the body and soul active and healthy,” White Thomas told UWK.
READ NOW: Mama Seabell begins cancer treatment; plans new Silver Moon Cafe cookbook
Positive mindset, acts of kindness are key to health and happiness
For Mama, her purpose has always been giving to others and making them feel loved through food and acts of kindness. She has remained active in the community from cooking hot meals for young children of single mothers and helping them with homework after school to hosting a “day of prayer” on Valentine’s Day or a retirement luncheon for longtime friend Robbie Chandler.
Mama refuses to slow down and credits God and her late father for her strength and resilience.
“Growing up as a child, my father was a very strong man in the community. He was one of the first Black men to purchase property in Wilkinson County, Mississippi. At every opportunity, he encouraged me to learn literature and participate in the community and in our church.”
When her father, Aaron White, passed away when she was only 17 years old, a young Seabell took on the responsibility of helping her mother take care of the five siblings still living at home.
“My Daddy used to always say he had ‘five queens and six kings’ [his children],” she fondly remembered. “When he passed away, I had to stand up, be strong and be a queen to lead my family.”
Mama has also tried to instill this strength and purpose in her two children, Sonyja and Ken Thomas, who are now adults as well as the thousands of students who ate at her restaurant for nearly two decades.
“I have also had the joy of working with other people’s children at LSU and encouraged them when times were tough for them being away from their mamas,” she fondly recalled. “I always wanted them to know they had a mother at the Silver Moon Cafe.”
Mama said she wants people to know they have a purpose here on earth, especially the young people she has met. She wants them to know that God has a plan for them and they have a bright future ahead of them.
Mama Seabell ‘wonderfully blessed’ and busy with new Silver Moon Cafe cookbook
As if Mama weren’t busy enough, she has also embarked on an ambitious project — writing and publishing her second cookbook. This time around, she enlisted a team of people to help her – almost all of them former LSU students from various decades. Several of them also ate at the original Silver Moon Cafe when it was located on Oleson Street near Nicholson Drive and Brightside.
The new cookbook tentatively titled “Mama’s Legendary Silver Moon Cafe Cookbook: Soul Food Recipes and Mother Wit from a Louisiana Chef” will be released this summer and is currently available for preorder.
The special, commemorative cookbook will feature over 100 pages of recipes and stunning color photographs of Silver Moon Cafe favorites like smothered chicken, fried chicken, jambalaya, seafood gumbo, red beans, white beans and rice, chicken and dumplings, candied yams, Mama’s special spaghetti and meat sauce, banana pudding, peach cobblers, pound cake and new recipes like red bean gumbo, crawfish and shrimp pasta, casseroles, side dishes and more decadent desserts.
It will also feature a special section dedicated to some traditional Southern soul food recipes that Mama used to eat growing up on her family’s farm in Mississippi. Mama says those recipes are commonly eaten by Black families in America that are rarely found in modern soul food cookbooks or passed down to today’s generation like chitterlings (chitlins), baked pigs feet, oxtail, smothered rabbit, raccoon and neck bones.
Mama’s team of friends and LSU graduates are busy helping her document and test each recipe, photograph each dish, design the book cover and write and copy edit each page and manage online orders to prepare for shipment later this summer. All that is happening under the close supervision of Mama and her daughter Sonyja.
It has been a labor of love for Mama, who is always happiest in her kitchen and might be more excited about the big book launch party she’s planning than she is about the cookbook itself. She is ready for a grand reunion with her ‘babies’ again.
“I feel wonderfully blessed and still have lots of work to do,” Mama said. “With lots of love to give my family, my babies and all of the people who’ve been part of this incredible journey!”
For more information about Mama’s new cookbook and to send her messages, photos or memories of the Silver Moon Cafe, visit her website at www.silvermooncookbook.com or follow her on Facebook and Instagram.
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