When the great Southern chef, television host and cookbook author Nathalie Dupree passed away last week at age eighty-five, Salvation South editor Chuck Reece remembered his first discovery of her, when he was in his twenties, living in New York City, and feeling hungry for Southern food. 

 

Nathalie Dupree

Nathalie Dupree

Credit: Collage by Jake Cook

 

Chuck Reece: It’s easy to find good Southern food these days. Not just at your mama’s house, but in fine restaurants all over America. Heck, all over the world.

But that was not the case when I first moved to New York City. I was fresh out of college, a little homesick, and I discovered it was awfully hard to find decent fried chicken—much less an edible biscuit—in the Big Apple. The longer I lived there, the more I missed the kind of home cooking I grew up with. 

After a couple years in New York, a TV show that helped me out started running on PBS. It was called New Southern Cooking With Nathalie Dupree. 

Nathalie Dupree: Hello, I’m Nathalie Dupree. Welcome to New Southern Cooking today.

Chuck Reece: Today, it’s easy to make the case that without Nathalie Dupree, Southern cooking might never have won the global admiration it has today. 

But maybe the best thing about Nathalie Dupree was how deeply she understood an essential truth. That cooking nourishes not only the body but also the soul. And through her fourteen books and over 300 episodes of various cooking shows, she communicated that understanding with great humor and humility. 

Dupree was a founder, in 1999, of the Southern Foodways Alliance, an organization that invites—in the words of another founder, the late Nashville writer John Egerton—“women and men, blacks and whites…one and all—to sit down and break bread together around one great Southern table.” The common table, in the SFA’s eyes, provided a place where Southerners could seek racial reconciliation. 

A quarter-century later, the SFA is still doing that good work. I’ve been friends with Melissa Hall, one of the SFA’s co-directors, for a long time. And after Nathalie passed away, I called Melissa. I wanted to ask her to recall what Nathalie did for the SFA, and she told me about Nathalie’s abiding belief that food could bring different Southerners together in community, when nothing else might be able to. 

But Melissa also told me what Nathalie Dupree did for her.

Melissa Hall: When I got married , it was Nathalie's cookbooks and Nathalie's presence on public television that got me through probably the first four years of my life as a person who makes supper every night and a person who starts hosting things. And so I assume that there are hundreds of thousands of “me”s out there, women who Natalie taught them what they know about how to hostess and how to cook and how to be gracious using the kitchen as your platform.

Chuck Reece: There is an old African American folk song about the hope to “eat at the welcome table some of these days.”

So Nathalie Dupree will be missed not only for her recipes or her books or her humor. She will be missed because she had that gift: the ability to create a welcome table and a heart that was big enough to invite everybody to gather around it. 

Come see us any time at SalvationSouth.com.

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Salvation South editor Chuck Reece comments on Southern culture and values in a weekly segment that airs Fridays at 7:45 a.m. during Morning Edition and 4:44 p.m. during All Things Considered on GPB Radio. Salvation South Deluxe is a series of longer Salvation South episodes which tell deeper stories of the Southern experience through the unique voices that live it. You can also find them here at GPB.org/Salvation-South and wherever you get your podcasts.