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 death, in a skilled nursing center she had entered after she broke her hip, was confirmed by Cynthia Graubart, her longtime producer and collaborator.
Ms. Dupree had a particular blend of Southern hospitality and risqué charm. Over the course of her career she was called “the Julia Child of the South,” “the queen of Southern cooking” and “the anti-Martha Stewart.”
She shocked the host Katie Couric by ending an elegant entertaining segment on the “Today” show, in which she prepared an entire pork crown roast, by presenting a supermarket chocolate cake. She filmed episodes of her television show with a red AIDS ribbon pinned to her apron, a bold move in the 1980s, when conservative suburban women made up much of her audience.
“She is one of the few people in my life who seems more like a fictional character than a flesh-and-blood person,” the novelist Pat Conroy wrote in “The Pat Conroy Cookbook: Recipes and Stories of My Life” (2009), after taking one of Ms. Dupree’s classes. “You never know where Nathalie is going with a train of thought; you simply know that the train will not be on time, will carry many passengers and will eventually collide with a food truck stalled somewhere down the line on damaged tracks.”
Ms. 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 wrote 15 cookbooks and hosted more than 300 television episodes, yet she grappled with a desire to reach a level of fame that she felt had been wrongly bestowed on Southern cooks like Paula Deen.
“I was really lucky that I got to support myself nicely, but that I never wanted to be rich. My goal was just to have a good life,” she said on the podcast “The New American Kitchen” in 2015. “I saw the other day Paula Deen’s house was up for sale for $12.7 million or something in Savannah, and I thought, ‘Gosh, you know, if I’d come later, would I have been Paula Deen?’ And then I thought, ‘I never wanted that.’”
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.
“I ended up with alternating layers of grease and tuna,” she told the The Post and Courier of Charleston, S.C., in 1999.
Ms. Dupree 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. (An earlier marriage to a political activist had lasted a year. Although she and Mr. Dupree would later divorce, she always referred to him as her favorite former husband.)
Ms. Dupree 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.
The couple moved to Social Circle, Ga., her husband’s home state, and she was determined to create a restaurant that used French techniques with Southern ingredients. In 1971, that restaurant, Nathalie’s, opened 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. She 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.
But Ms. Dupree wanted to be on television. Sandwiched between Ms. Child’s black-and-white era and the birth of Food Network in the 1990s, she became part of a small cadre of weekend public television cooks that emerged in the 1980s.
The debut of “New Southern Cooking with Nathalie Dupree” in 1986 included a companion cookbook. Ms. Child’s editor, Judith Jones, took it on. “New Southern Cooking” was reprinted 25 times.
Her early television shows, orchestrated solely by Ms. Graubart, were sponsored by a Southern flour company. Ms. Dupree wanted the kitchen segments to run with no edits. With a smear of flour on her face, she might leave ingredients half prepared or forget to add them altogether. She wiped her hands on her apron a lot and once searched around for her diamond ring that had fallen off as she cooked.
“Whatever happens to me is going to happen to you,” she’d tell audiences after a mistake.
“She was a hot mess, and that’s what people loved her for,” Ms. Graubart, who coauthored “Mastering the Art of Southern Cooking” in 2012 with Ms. Dupree, said in a phone interview.
Nathalie Evelyn Meyer was born on Dec. 23, 1939, in Hamilton, N.J., the middle of three children of Evelyn (Kreiser) and Walter Meyer. Her mother was a secretary and a Christian Scientist, a religion Ms. Dupree would struggle with as she grew older.
Her childhood home in Alexandria, Va., was a violent one, dominated by her strict father, an Army colonel. Her mother divorced him in 1949, and the children grew up worrying about eviction notices and empty cupboards.
School and politics became refuges. At 20, she worked for John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign as a precinct captain, and in 2010 she staged her own campaign as a write-in candidate aiming to unseat Jim DeMint, a Republican senator from South Carolina. One of her slogans was “Cream DeMint.”
By that time she was on to her third husband, the political writer and historian Jack Bass, whose books include an extensive biography of Strom Thurmond, the former senator and governor of S.C.
The two became darlings of the Charleston literary and political scene. They hosted parties and fund-raisers in their charming, cluttered, art-filled Charleston home on Queen Street, where she served dishes from recipes she was always testing.
Ms. Dupree had long been a heavy drinker who could lash out at those close to her, Ms. Graubart said. She eventually replaced liquor with Diet Coke and dedicated herself to helping others who wanted to get or stay sober.
She founded several chapters of the Les Dames d’Escoffier, an international association for women in the culinary industry. She fostered teenage girls and became a mentor to a group of aspiring chefs and food writers she called her chickens.
The cookbook author Virginia Willis was one of them. She still cites Ms. Dupree’s pork chop theory of collaboration: If you cook one pork chop in a pan on high heat, it will burn. But if you cook two pork chops in a pan, they feed off the fat from each other.
“She explained it as a way to manage jealousy and how to work with others,” Ms. Willis said. “It’s not about competition; it’s about sharing the fat, sharing the love.”
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.
Ms. Dupree never missed an opportunity to offer an opinion. Three months before she died, she gave Ms. Graubart a quote to be included in her New York Times obituary: “Food is a control issue in relationships, which has fascinated me all my life. It is the very first thing we control as an infant and the very last thing we control when we are dying. The person that controls the food, controls the family.”