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 

One blustery late autumn evening, Timothy and I had gone up to Charleston to sing in a choir for a special evensong and were staying, as we do whenever we can, with my lovely friend, mentor, and adopted big sister, Nathalie Dupree and her husband Jack Bass.

Our “pay” for singing was a dinner that, to Timothy’s disappointment, did not include dessert. When we got back to the house and had settled in at the kitchen table, Nathalie, who is a text book example of the maxim that Southerners are always talking about food, wanted to know all about where we’d eaten and what we’d had. Read More