As a cookbook author, TV personality and mentor, she sought to burst the chicken-fried stereotype of the South. Sometimes her life was as messy as her kitchen.
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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 fixing an honest lens on the ways race, gender and politics informed its subtle, seasonal and varied cooking.
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