Nathalie Dupree’s Charleston Hospitality  Photograph by Cassi Alexandra / Redux Charles Bethea
Staff writer When I arrived at a home on Charleston’s Queen Street, in September of 2018, as Hurricane Florence was bearing down on the old city, I had only a rough idea of my hosts. Jack Bass was a well-regarded author of books on Southern politics. (A colleague, distantly related to him, had arranged my stay.) Nathalie Dupree, meanwhile, was the author of more than a dozen cookbooks, a four-time James Beard Award winner, a pioneering television chef, and a chum of Julia Child’s. She had also been a precinct captain for John F. Kennedy’s 1960 Presidential campaign, and, fifty years later, waged a write-in campaign for the Senate from South Carolina. Braced for ego, I found soup instead. Before I could put my suitcase down, Dupree, abandoning her crossword puzzle, and the cat on her lap, was serving me her “hurricane soup.” What was in it? Whatever is in the freezers, she said. It was delicious, as were the meals that followed—lamb with a “balsamic and blood” sauce, charred eggplant, peach cobbler—which nearly derailed my reporting. Perhaps, I said, in one post-prandial reverie, I should become a food writer. “You sure you’ve got the chops?” Dupree asked dryly. There was nothing highfalutin or fake about her. Charleston avoided a direct hit, but the coastal flooding from Florence was disastrous. The region’s hog farms were inundated, and the sight and smell of their breached “manure lagoons” made me consider quitting pork. The industry might be broken, Dupree conceded, but she cautioned against taking extreme dietary measures. She was committed to traditional foods—as sustenance, pleasure, and social glue. She loved to host and often shared her table with writers: Pat Conroy, Anne Rivers Siddons, Stuart Woods, Hendrik Hertzberg. (Conroy later wrote about Dupree in his own cookbook, calling her “the inimitable, unclassifiable queen of the Southern kitchen.”) She had a “pork-chop theory”: one chop in a pan goes dry, but two have the fat needed to feed each other. I was single back then when she explained it, and the metaphor didn’t quite stick. (I get it now.) Her playful love of language was evident on TV, in her cookbooks, and in her bootstrapped but not-a-joke Senate campaign, which fell short. Leaning into culinary metaphor, she’d promised to “Cream DeMint”—Jim DeMint, the Republican incumbent—and “cook his goose.” On future reporting trips to Charleston, Dupree set me up in “my old room.” There was always cobbler and laughter. After learning that she’d died, on Monday, I looked back and found more than a dozen e-mails from her: introductions (to a chef, a Times reporter, a storm-shutter expert), political prognostications (“Biden will beat Trump!”), and congratulations on my own James Beard nomination for a story about a brewery. “Good thing you didn’t become a food writer,” she said. | 
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