“Seasoned With Love”: Nathalie Dupree’s Deliciously Well-Lived Life

As fans across the globe mourn her passing, we remember our former cooking columnist

101
Nathalie Dupree

Photograph by Helene Dujardin

From the first sentence of her 1982 book Cooking of the South, Nathalie Dupree was delectably real and relatable: “When I’m really hungry I want Southern food, because I know it will fill me up.”

Nathalie Dupree’s 1982 cookbook, Cooking of the South

Although the PBS host was only the second woman to film 100 episodes of a cooking show, like her friend and role model Julia Child, Dupree possessed zero pretensions, on or off camera. Since her death Jan. 13 in Raleigh, North Carolina, at age 85, the cookbook author’s legion of friends and fans have shared those same hunger pangs, craving one more dollop of Dupree’s delicious wit and wisdom. Like church ladies delivering homemade casseroles to the bereaved, a steady stream of appreciations in the New York Times, Washington Post, Garden & Gun, AJC, Eater, and Southern Living have kept Dupree’s family and friends well-nourished with the outpouring of love.

Nathalie Dupree on television

Whether researching a story for Atlanta (she was our columnist from 1994 to 1997), developing a recipe for her next cookbook, or instructing on PBS on a Saturday afternoon, Dupree—often covered in flour, searching for a missing measuring cup, or sneaking a sip of her beloved Diet Coke—was one of us. “I don’t think many of the current shows really teach people how to cook,” Dupree told Eldredge ATL in 2019. “If a recipe called for an onion, I chopped the onion. People knew how long it would take. Sometimes, I’d tear a pie crust and just make a mess of it. But I’d tell the viewer, ‘It’s OK, You can patch this.’”

In the early 1970s, with an advanced certificate from Le Cordon Bleu in London, the woman Southern Living would later dub “The Queen of Southern Cuisine” opened the tiny Nathalie’s in Social Circle, Georgia. In a 1998 Atlanta profile, when her latest PBS series, Nathalie Dupree’s Comfortable Entertaining debuted, she recounted the tiny eatery’s modest beginnings to writer and editor Betsy Riley. Decades before the debut of HGTV, a banker would only loan her $1,000 for restaurant equipment, so Dupree built the cabinets, sewed the curtains, and applied the 25-cents-a-yard mattress ticking to the walls of Nathalie’s herself.

Rich’s department store Food Director Richard Hort became a regular at the restaurant and immediately thought of Dupree when he was looking for ways to lure customers back inside the downtown Atlanta store as Rich’s expanded to the suburbs. In 1975, at age 36, Dupree founded the Rich’s Cooking School, with 20 cooking stations and some great advice from Julia Child, who told her to “make it hands-on.” Recounts author Jeff Clemmons in his book Rich’s: A Southern Institution, “The classes varied from lunch-and-learns to a series of courses that lasted a few days or several months. Students learned everything from how to make a difficult Bavarian cream or a turkey en gelee to something as easy as preparing food for a picnic at an outdoor concert.”

Before Rich’s Cooking School ended in 1984, Dupree enlisted Commander’s Palace New Orleans Chef Paul Prudhomme (who also wrote the foreword to her first recipe collection) and Julia Child as guest chefs and taught the likes of Prince of Tides author Pat Conroy in her downtown Rich’s kitchen.

Nathalie Dupree’s 1986 cookbook, New Southern Cooking

In 1985, Dupree was paired with producer Cynthia Stevens for her first public television series, New Southern Cooking With Nathalie Dupree, which spawned both a bestselling companion cookbook published by Alfred Knopf and a 35-year professional partnership and friendship. With a public-television budget, the pair shot that first series live-to-tape at the old Atlanta Area Tech on Stewart Avenue in southwest Atlanta.

While Stevens knew filmmaking and producing, she was a novice in the kitchen. Stevens’ culinary inexperience and public television’s meager budget inspired two hallmarks of Dupree’s cooking series: “If I didn’t understand it, it needed to be further explained,” Stevens recalled in 2019. “We would hear from viewers constantly about how comforted they were. Watching Nathalie, they felt they could carry on if they made a mistake. We’d tell them how to fix it.” Added Dupree: “We also made sure we put the recipes up on the screen so people could write them down. And because we worked live-to-tape, we weren’t going to stop if I made a mistake.”

Working in the middle of a food desert in one of Atlanta’s most colorful neighborhoods in the mid-1980s taught the pair preparedness as well. Explained Dupree: “In those days on Stewart Avenue, the only things nearby were the rooms that rented by the hour. You couldn’t just run out to get something. You had to know what you needed and you packed it up in the car and brought it to the studio.”

Dupree’s videotaped fearlessness and realness on New Southern Cooking inspired more than 300 national and international cooking shows and 14 cookbooks, which netted her three James Beard Awards. She would go on to found two chapters of Les Dames d’Escoffier, serve as president of the International Association of Culinary Professionals, become a founder and board member of Southern Foodways and the founding president of the Charleston Wine and Food Festival. Oh, she was also responsible for one marriage—Dupree introduced Stevens to her pal, Atlanta book shop owner Cliff Graubart. The two later wed.

In addition to writing a bookshelf of toque tomes and shooting dozens of hours of TV cooking lessons, perhaps Dupree’s greatest living legacy is the multiple generations of women she mentored into successful culinary careers of their own. Dupree’s “chickens,” as she called her young charges, include chef and James Beard Award–winning cookbook author Virginia Willis, TV chef Rebecca Lang, baker and bestselling author Anne Byrn, food writer Kathleen Purvis, and Southern Fork podcaster Stephanie Burt.

Without a doubt, the weightiest contribution Dupree made to the culinary arts was the nearly 30-years-in-the-making, 720-page collaboration with Stevens-Graubart, the James Beard Award–winning Mastering the Art of Southern Cooking, published in 2012. Dupree’s lifelong goal was to create a defining book for her beloved regional cuisine, the way Julia Child had introduced the masses to France with Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 1961.

Nathalie Dupree’s 2019 cookbook, Nathalie Dupree’s Favorite Stories & Recipes

Image courtesy of Gibbs Smith

But for fans, her final book, Nathalie Dupree’s Favorite Stories & Recipes, published in 2019, remains a cherished favorite. Affectionately known as “Nathalie’s Greatest Hits,” the book is filled with recipes for the foods she loved to cook and eat, along with rollicking stories from a life well-lived. The photo Dupree selected for the book cover? A simple bowl of creamy mashed potatoes, accented with melting butter. Comparing her six-and-a-half-pound culinary magnum opus with Favorite Stories & Recipes, Dupree dryly observed in 2019, “Well, the new book isn’t nearly as good for maintaining your upper-arm strength.”

As her many local admirers gather to eulogize her on Feb. 22 at 2 p.m. at Meadows Funeral Home in Monroe, Georgia, for a Celebration of Life service, the TV chef, author, and teacher perhaps best summed up her life’s work herself on the back cover of her 1979 Let’s Entertain booklet, sold for $3 at Rich’s.

Nathalie Dupree’s 1979 booklet, Let’s Entertain

Nathalie Dupree's 1979 booklet, Let's Entertain

Dupree told readers, “The real gift of entertaining is sharing yourself and spending time with your guests, as well as feeding them.” And at her countless Atlanta book signings over the decades, in her beautiful cursive handwriting, she would always add, “Season With Love.”

Advertisement