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 in Raleigh, N.C. She was 85.
Her early attempts at cooking went badly. Although she never graduated from college, she spent a summer in 1958 at Harvard University in an international boardinghouse, where she was asked to fill in for a sick cook. Tuna casserole seemed like an easy enough dish to tackle. She reasoned that she could just multiply the recipe so that it would feed 18.
She ended up with alternating layers of grease and tuna, she told The Post and Courier of Charleston, S.C., in 1999. She drained off the grease and gave it all a good stir. She spooned the mixture over toast and called it tuna à la king. The hook was set.
Her culinary break came in London, where she moved in 1969 with David Dupree, her second husband. 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.
She established a cooking school at Rich’s, Atlanta’s premier department store at the time, and cajoled Julia Child, Jacques Pépin and Paul Prudhomme into teaching classes. In 1978, she teamed up with Mr. Pépin, Ms. Child and a few others to form the International Association of Culinary Professionals.
She became part of a small cadre of weekend public television cooks that emerged in the 1980s, including her show “New Southern Cooking With Nathalie Dupree,” which debuted in 1986 and included a companion cookbook. Her television shows, orchestrated solely by her producer and collaborator Cynthia Graubart, were sponsored by a Southern flour company.
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