The bestselling author, TV host, and teacher was celebrated for her sauciness, but also her commitment to elevating women in the culinary arts.
Bestselling author, television host, teacher, and chef Nathalie Dupree died in Raleigh, North Carolina, on January 13, 2025 at the age of 85. Best known for her Southern food evangelism — slathered in saucy wit — she leaves behind her husband Jack Bass (who she told The Daily Meal “liked me because I ate with my fingers”); children Audrey, Ken, David, and Liz; seven grandchildren, and a legacy of education and advocacy for women in the culinary arts.
As the author of the James Beard Award-winning Mastering the Art of Southern Cooking (co-written with frequent collaborator Cynthia Stevens Graubart), New Southern Cooking , Cooking of the South , and 12 other volumes, Dupree’s cookbook sales reportedly topped 1 million copies over the span of her career. She was similarly prolific — and popular — as a television guest and host, appearing in more than 300 episodes across PBS, The Food Network, and The Learning Channel, as well as nationally-aired shows including Good Morning America and The Today Show . She co-founded the International Association of Culinary Professionals in 1978 along with Julia Child , Jacques Pépin , and Martin Yan .
Dupree was born in Hamilton, New Jersey, in 1939 and according to the Charleston City Paper , developed a strong interest in politics while growing up in Virginia, eventually becoming a precinct captain for John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign and running a write-in campaign of her own against sitting U.S. Senator Jim DeMint in 2010 in her adopted state of South Carolina. Though she lost that particular race — larded through with quips about how she’d “bring home the bacon” and “cook his goose” — Dupree had no shortage of kitchen coronations throughout her long career, including the Les Dames d’Escoffier “Grande Dame” assignation in 2011, four James Beard Foundation awards, a 2013 Woman of the Year nod from the French Master Chefs of America, and a 2015 induction into the James Beard Foundation’s “Who’s Who in America.”
A March 1996 Food & Wine feature titled “TV Guidance: A Couch Potato Rates Six Television Chefs” pitted Dupree against contemporaries Martin Yan, Emeril Lagasse , Jeff Smith , Graham Kerr, and “Biker Billy” Hufnagle. The critique acknowledged her celebrity as the host of the PBS television series New Southern Cooking , and noted that she “delivers inspired combinations and clever substitutions,” but added that “Dupree’s endearing klutziness — forgetting to add yeast to bread dough, for instance — doesn’t quite compensate for her sometimes superior attitude.”
Though graded a baffling C for style and B for substance to the only woman in the bunch, \no doubt the indefatigable Dupree blew off the slight. Her focus, eternally, was on education, especially for aspiring female culinarians. After earning a diploma at Le Cordon Bleu in London, Dupree worked as a chef at restaurants in Georgia (her own Nathalie’s Restaurant in Social Circle, which she opened with her “favorite former husband” David Dupree), Virginia, and Majorca, Spain, (she left the latter irked by a review that called her a “kitchen manager” rather than a chef). But over the course of 10 years as director of the Rich’s Cooking School in Atlanta, Dupree mentored scores of students (who she referred to as her “chickens”) — such as Virginia Willis, Marion Sullivan, and Shirley Corriher — who went on to establish notable food careers of their own…