Southern Cooking Legend Nathalie Dupree Dies at Age 85

Bestselling writer, tv host, instructor, and chef Nathalie Dupree died in Raleigh, North Carolina, on January 13, 2025 on the age of 85. Greatest identified for her Southern meals evangelism — slathered in saucy wit — she leaves behind her husband Jack Bass (who she informed The Day by day Meal “appreciated me as a result of I ate with my fingers”); kids Audrey, Ken, David, and Liz; seven grandchildren, and a legacy of schooling and advocacy for ladies within the culinary arts.

Because the writer of the James Beard Award-winning Mastering the Artwork of Southern Cooking (co-written with frequent collaborator Cynthia Stevens Graubart), New Southern Cooking, Cooking of the South, and 12 different volumes, Dupree’s cookbook gross sales reportedly topped 1 million copies over the span of her profession. She was equally prolific — and well-liked — as a tv visitor and host, showing in additional than 300 episodes throughout PBS, The Meals Community, and The Studying Channel, in addition to nationally-aired exhibits together with Good Morning America and The At present Present. She co-founded the Worldwide Affiliation of Culinary Professionals in 1978 together with Julia Youngster, Jacques Pépin, and Martin Yan.

Dupree was born in Hamilton, New Jersey, in 1939 and based on the Charleston Metropolis Paper, developed a robust curiosity in politics whereas rising up in Virginia, finally changing into a precinct captain for John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential marketing campaign and operating a write-in marketing campaign of her personal in opposition to sitting U.S. Senator Jim DeMint in 2010 in her adopted state of South Carolina. Although she misplaced that exact race — larded via with quips about how she’d “carry dwelling the bacon” and “cook dinner his goose” — Dupree had no scarcity of kitchen coronations all through her lengthy profession, together with the Les Dames d’Escoffier “Grande Dame” assignation in 2011, 4 James Beard Basis awards, a 2013 Lady of the 12 months nod from the French Grasp Cooks of America, and a 2015 induction into the James Beard Basis’s “Who’s Who in America.”

A March 1996 Meals & Wine characteristic titled “TV Steering: A Sofa Potato Charges Six Tv Cooks” pitted Dupree in opposition to contemporaries Martin Yan, Emeril Lagasse, Jeff Smith, Graham Kerr, and “Biker Billy” Hufnagle. The critique acknowledged her celeb because the host of the PBS tv collection New Southern Cooking, and famous that she “delivers impressed combos and intelligent substitutions,” however added that “Dupree’s endearing klutziness — forgetting so as to add yeast to bread dough, for example — would not fairly compensate for her generally superior perspective.” 

Although graded a baffling C for fashion and B for substance to the one girl within the bunch, little question the indefatigable Dupree blew off the slight. Her focus, eternally, was on schooling, particularly for aspiring feminine culinarians. After incomes a diploma at Le Cordon Bleu in London, Dupree labored as a chef at eating places in Georgia (her personal Nathalie’s Restaurant in Social Circle, which she opened together with her “favourite former husband” David Dupree), Virginia, and Majorca, Spain, (she left the latter irked by a evaluation that referred to as her a “kitchen supervisor” moderately than a chef). However over the course of 10 years as director of the Wealthy’s Cooking Faculty in Atlanta, Dupree mentored scores of scholars (who she known as her “chickens”) — akin to Virginia Willis, Marion Sullivan, and Shirley Corriher — who went on to determine notable meals careers of their very own.

Dupree informed The New American Kitchen host Gary Duff in a 2015 radio interview, “What means a fantastic deal to me is educating so many ladies to cook dinner, and most of them had been Southern girls. With this full time participation college — I used to be the one cooking college actually within the South — I had lots of and 1000’s of ladies that went out on this planet, and so a lot of them now have written cookbooks.”

It is a prime instance of Dupree’s so-called “Pork Chop Concept,” which she defined in a 2018 interview with Rien Fertel for the Southern Foodways Alliance — one other group that she helped discovered. “A very powerful factor is for ladies to study to assist one another. So we developed the pork chop principle,” Dupree stated. “One pork chop within the pan goes dry. Two or extra, the fats from one feeds the opposite. We have to discover a method to elevate two or extra girls at a time. I simply need these girls to have the ability to have their place within the solar.”

On a private observe, whereas I did not know Dupree effectively, on the 2015 Charleston Wine & Meals Pageant, I had the actual honor (and slight terror) of moderating a dialogue together with her and Graubert entitled “50 Shades of Earl Gray: Excessive Tea With Nathalie Dupree” — enjoying into Dupree’s predilection for entendre and sometimes racy material. Tickets had been $125 (together with a bounty of roe-topped cucumber rounds, pimento cheese sandwiches, cold and hot tea-based cocktails, and a duplicate of Mastering the Artwork of Southern Cooking), tables had been set with silver, flowers, and china cups and saucers, and a well-heeled viewers was primed to hold on her each phrase. Trying again at my texts from the day, I observe that I would heard from a pal in attendance that folks at her desk had been “scandalized” by the dialog. One other responded, “Hell, it was clearly branded as a saucy discuss. Nathalie was holding a whip. I guess the viewers cherished it.” One other stated, “I do know all concerning the on-your-toes-ness necessities. She is the unique Southern meals diva.” Saucy to the top and the entire means via.

Donations in reminiscence of Dupree might be made to the Atlanta Chapter of Les Dames d’Escoffier‘s Scholarship Fund to assist additional the careers of younger girls within the culinary arts.