The Mother Cook: Nathalie Dupree
Remembering a champion of southern cooking and southern women
Earlier this week, the great champion of southern cooking Nathalie Dupree passed away at the age of 85.
Though it only happened a handful of times, I was fortunate to speak with Nathalie in several small, casual settings since she moved to North Carolina a few years ago. Each time, I was a guest of one of my mentors and we were always surrounded by other women who became the food writers, cookbook authors, food scholars, and chefs they are thanks, in great part, to the work of Nathalie.
Embarrassingly, I don’t even own any of Nathalie’s cookbooks (something I certainly plan to remedy), though her work has been profoundly foundational to nearly everything I do in the world of food. Nonetheless, writing about her here feels unfair: I wasn’t close to Nathalie like many of these other women, I never studied at her cooking school, and I didn’t consult her for my cookbook writing. But all day long, I’ve witnessed my own community of southern women in the food world share in a collective grief for a woman who changed our field in so many ways. Some of them attended Nathalie’s cooking school, others asked her for culinary advice when they were editors of this food section or that one, and more still turned to her when they needed an expert on southern recipes and food history. Each woman, each in her own little niche of the food world, all connected by Nathalie. It’s easy to get caught up in this tide of grief; before these women shaped my food world, Nathalie had shaped theirs.
So I went off into my own food world to see where I could find Nathalie. I searched for her in one of my favorite food history spaces, the Newspaper Archives, and the findings proved a balm. Stories and features, recipes from across the south, adverts for a new cooking show, and collabs with now bygone hallmarks of southern foodways like White Lily Flour (Belinda Ellis wrote a great piece on White Lily Flour and Nathalie’s role in popularizing the brand in a fantastic little essay for When Southern Women Cook).
When working on her 11th cookbook, Nathalie Dupree’s Shrimp and Grits Cookbook (2006), she dug into southern food history to uncover the broader history of the dish and consulted historical cookbooks in addition to chefs and scholars from across the south. Nathalie lifted up southern foodways, the good and the bad, and made sure to give credit where credit was due.
My favorite find was in an article titled “The Gospel of Cooking Schools Spreads,” published in The Atlanta Journal in 1979 by none other than another beloved friend-of-Nathalie and cookbook author, Anne Byrn. (Anne also wrote a lovely piece about her friendship with Nathalie over on her Substack, Between the Layers.) In this article, Anne calls Nathalie the “Mother Cook of Atlanta,” from whom many other cooks and food writers both home and professional had learned the trade and, perhaps most importantly, learned the power of southern foodways. After four and a half decades and countless culinary students later, it’s fair to say that Nathalie might just be a Mother Cook of the entire south. I’m grateful to be a small part of her extended community and a profoundly honored recipient of a whole host of Nathalie-inspired Mother Cooks to whom I credit my own career.
If you don’t know Nathalie, yes you do, you just don’t realize it. I dare you to pick up any southern cookbook and not find a reference to her and her cooking. And next time you fry a pork chop remember “One pork chop in a pan goes dry; Two or more and the fat from one feeds the other.” A clever bit of science in the kitchen, and a sound metaphorical reminder to find your fellow “pork chops” in life so that you can keep each other fed.
"“One pork chop in a pan goes dry; Two or more and the fat from one feeds the other.” A clever bit of science in the kitchen, and a sound metaphorical reminder to find your fellow “pork chops” in life so that you can keep each other fed." I love everything about this!