Cookbook Club

At Home with Nathalie Dupree

By: The Local Palate

At age 80, the doyenne of modern Southern cooking reflects on forging her own path, the power of female connections, and why she cooks grits in the microwave

Nathalie Dupree’s kitchen is a mess. The butcher block countertops inside the cadmium yellow Charleston Single house that the award-winning chef, cookbook author, and television personality shares with her husband, writer Jack Bass, are covered in haphazard stacks of colorful Tupperware containers, mixing bowls, copper pots, and a Williams Sonoma’s worth of appliances. To be fair, she’s just wrapped a long-awaited renovation and is still reorganizing. Above the new stove, there’s an oversized measuring cup of grits simmering in the microwave (her preferred cooking method), and in the adjacent sitting room, an entire mini-fridge full of Diet Cokes. Here at least, the breakfast Coke lives on. “I don’t like coffee,” she says. “These are my vices.” A relatively G-rated vice in an industry prone to R-rated excess. Cookbooks (from vintage Edna Lewis to Samin Nosrat’s best-selling Salt Fat Acid Heat), which eat up all available shelf space and spill over into wobbling towers throughout the sitting room, are the only overt display of excess in Dupree’s domain.

Nathalie Dupree in her kitchen.

That and perhaps the “thrown-together” blueberry tart she baked the day before—a testament to an admittedly incorrigible sweet tooth. In today’s photo-ready, celebrity chef-obsessed food world, this kind of everyday approachability and almost startling lack of pretension is wholly refreshing, especially coming from someone with as much reason to preen as Dupree. It’s also the secret to a significant part of her success.

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Date Published: 03.17.20
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