Nathalie Dupree

Nathalie Dupree, a Southern cookbook author, television personality and culinary mentor whose personal life was sometimes as messy as her kitchen and whose keen interest in literature and politics gave birth to biscuit-fueled salons and a quixotic run for the U.S. Senate, died on Monday January 13 2025 in Raleigh, N.C. She was 85. Dupree was instrumental in creating the new Southern food movement that took hold in the 1990s. She helped form the Southern Foodways Alliance, based at the University of Mississippi, as a means of bursting the chicken-fried stereotype of the American South and fix an honest lens on the ways race, gender and politics informed its subtle, seasonal and varied cooking. She moved in 1969 with David Dupree, her second husband, after a divorce from a political activist. She enrolled in Le Cordon Bleu, the French cooking school, which led to a short stint as a cook at a French restaurant on the Spanish island of Majorca. In 1971, she opened a restaurant, Nathalie’s, in the back of her husband’s antique shop. It drew fans from Atlanta, about 45 minutes away. In 1975, she established a cooking school at Rich’s, Atlanta’s premier department store at the time. In 1978, she teamed up with Jacque Pépin, Julia Child and a few others to form the International Association of Culinary Professionals. The debut of “New Southern Cooking with Nathalie Dupree” in 1986 included a companion cookbook. It was reprinted 25 times. in 2010 she staged her own campaign as a write-in candidate aiming to unseat Jim DeMint, a Republican senator from South Carolina.By that time she was on to her third husband, the political writer and historian Jack Bass. Her husband survives her, as do her stepchildren, Audrey Thiault, Ken Bass, David Bass and Liz Broadway; her sister, Marie Louise Meyer; her brother, James Gordon Meyer; and seven grandchildren.