Editor’s note: The following originally appeared in the G&G book Southern Women: More than 100 Stories of Innovators, Artists, and Icons. The book features interviews with, odes to, and essays by musicians, actors, artists, designers, entrepreneurs, authors, chefs, public servants, and more who have roots in the region.
When the most well-known of Nathalie Dupree’s fifteen cookbooks, New Southern Cooking, debuted in 1986, the soon-to-be best seller redefined for many what Southern food could be. Dupree, who grew up in Virginia, trained at Le Cordon Bleu in London and worked as a chef in Majorca, Spain, before opening her own restaurant just outside of Social Circle, Georgia, in the 1970s, and for ten years she directed thousands of students at the Rich’s Cooking School in Atlanta. It all led to the creation of her own cooking program on public television and her emergence as a personality—she would go on to film more than three hundred episodes, the most after Julia Child. She also founded both the Atlanta and Charleston, South Carolina, chapters of the women-in-food group Les Dames d’Escoffier. “I have this thing called the pork chop theory,” she says of the countless women she has mentored. “If one pork chop is in a pan, it goes dry. If two or more are in a pan, the fat from one feeds the other. So there’s always room to move over for another woman.”
When did you begin to work with food?
I didn’t want to settle down, so I lived all over. I studied at Harvard’s summer school in 1958 and stayed in an international student house. Everybody had a job, and my job was to deal with the mail. I can write a letter, fold it, and maybe get it into an envelope, but the whole stamping and mailing a thing out—it’s just too much for me. These two Mormon boys came back in the middle of the summer and they were supposed to show up for the draft the next day. But I hadn’t forwarded their draft stuff to wherever they were on mission. So they took me off hat job and put me in the kitchen.
I loved the kitchen. I couldn’t cook then, but I learned fast. There were eighteen of us at the house, which is a fair number of people to get mad at you if you didn’t cook a good meal. I discovered a lot during that summer. I was never good at anything until I became a cook.
Was your family supportive?
When I was cooking in the international student house, I called my mother and told her I loved the job. It was really the only thing she ever asked me not to do. My mother didn’t want me to be a cook, because she said I’d have to work at night with men and be on my feet. She said if I could find any woman cooking, and this was in 1959, other than one who was slinging hash in a diner, but who was actually cooking, that she would give me her blessing.
Did you have a role model?
I never had a mentor. Back when I was just getting started, I couldn’t find one woman who ran a kitchen or was in charge of the cooking. When I studied at the Cordon Bleu cooking school in London, I met Julia Child on the day I left. I was the house American, so they trotted me out to meet Julia. I had never heard of her, because I really didn’t watch television when I was young. I asked her what I should do next. She said I should open a cooking school. You see, even Julia had never worked in a restaurant, which is what I wanted to do.
Eventually, you opened up your own.
My favorite former husband and I had an opportunity to move to Social Circle in Georgia. The banker who loaned us the money for my husband’s antique shop said that none of the money could go to a restaurant—my restaurant inside the antique shop. So I ran the largest paper route in Covington, Georgia, all summer in order to make the money to open my restaurant Nathalie’s at Mount Pleasant Village. I was throwing papers. But I never could throw them very far. I hit some geraniums once.
You’ve seen the nation’s interest in Southern food fall and rise again .
A lot of the time, chefs get the flavor right. But frequently, it’s too complicated and precious. Male chefs can’t stop adding something that’s unique or that will cause a little comment. It’s like you get a dollar more per adjective on the menu. Sometimes I just wish they would serve a really good plate of butter beans. That, to me, is the essence of something that’s new Southern—not gussied up, just fresh and well dressed but not overly done.
You have such a long view of the industry—have you ever compared notes with your peers and mentees?
I’ve always believed in telling everybody what you make. Once I was talking with Edna [Lewis] about books we’d written and I said, “Isn’t it nice when those royalty checks come in twice a year?” And she said, “I never got a royalty check.” I was furious for her. Here she was, touted, but she never collected a royalty.
Lewis has been coming back into focus recently for her contributions to the Southern culinary canon. What was your relationship with her like?
Edna was a good friend. I would call her every time I went up to New York, and we would go out to eat. We’d go to the Four Seasons or the ‘21’ Club and the chefs would walk in, see Edna, and then rush over and be so excited to see her.
But I have conflicted feelings about the way people treated Edna and the way she’s being treated even now. She was young, sweet, naive, and she always had a quiet quality to her. But she knew her own style. She wore African dresses and set herself apart. She was very active in the Communist Party. But the way she’s remembered now is almost . . . too safe. It’s safe to just remember a few things about her and say, Edna is wonderful. But what about other black women, women who cooked more and might have cooked more Southern food but didn’t have Edna’s sweetness? I just feel like we could go further with whom we recognize. Edna is a stepping-stone to the rest of the story. She’s heating the fat in the pan.
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