Damon Lee Fowler

[Nathalie Dupree, the undisputed Grande Dame of Southern Cooking, died on Monday, 13 January 2025, at the age of 85.]

Nathalie Dupree was the big sister I never had. And while I was never one of her "chickens" (her nickname for the many young interns and students that she mentored), over the more than thirty years that we knew one another, she was indeed a mentor that I was lucky enough with time to know as my colleague and friend.

Our acquaintance began when I was still trying to practice architecture while working on my first cookbook. I'd written to her about her then new book  Read More 

When Southerners begin to talk of the foods that most comfort us in times of grief, joy, or homesickness, biscuits almost always come into the conversation. So it's no surprise that when the Covid pandemic forced us into lockdown, soft-wheat flour, shortening, and buttermilk disappeared from grocers' shelves and were hard to come by for months.

Luckily, I had just restocked those things, and we're a small household, so I never felt the pinch of the shortage. And I probably made more biscuits during that first month than I'd made in the previous couple of years combined.

Most of them were cream biscuits, a simple formula of flour, baking powder, salt, and heavy cream. They're disgracefully easy, practically foolproof, and I'm lazy. The dough is simply stirred together, folded a few times, then cut and baked.

But they do have one big drawback: Read More