Nathalie Dupree

Dinner with the Imperfect Host
Nathalie Dupree's Haute Cuisine Is Down to Earth
by Jerry Shriver
USA Today
Thursday, Sept. 24, 1998

SOCIAL CIRCLE, Ga.--Nathalie Dupree is so much like you, it's scary.

You have milk film on your refrigerator shelves and "Made in Mexico" stickers clinging to your champagne flutes. So does Nathalie.

When you set up for a party, you find a salad plate or two has defected from your china. Just like at Nathalie's.

Your gas tank is dry when you start your grocery run. Ditto.

And no way does your local market, nor Nathalie's, carry Nepalese ox extract or one of those other pain-in-the-patoot ingredients that clueless cookbook writers so blithely slip into their recipes.

Scary.

The only difference is that Dupree makes a career out of making you feel OK about this daily train wreck that is your life.

For more than 25 years as a cooking teacher, restaurateur, TV and radio host, columnist, cookbook author and lifestyle maven, Dupree has shown that a klutz can still be a class act. Hospitality is holy, she says, and striving to be perfect is pointless and gets in the way of your and your guests' pleasure.

These points are spattered throughout her new 28-part PBS series, Nathalie Dupree Entertains, which begins airing this month, and in the companion book Nathalie Dupree's Comfortable Entertaining (Viking, $29.95).

Both vehicles present a genteel version of a woman who in reality can be an anvil, a marshmallow, a wit and a mother hen. As real as the charred bits stuck to her stove burners. As true as the flowering sage in the simple vase in her parlor.

"Question: Do you want to tie bows on the backs of the chairs?" she asks, tweaking her peer Martha Stewart while bustling about her roomy kitchen. "The reality is, my friends would think it ludicrous. I'd rather spend that time reading The New Yorker, taking a good bath and spending time with my cute husband."

It so happens that 12, or maybe 10, of those friends are coming over for a dinner party the next night, to the recently renovated turn-of-the-century Victorian house into which she and husband Jack Bass have moved. And that affords a perfect chance to observe imperfection in action.

Friday
At 10:30 a.m., the menu is unsettled, the phone is jangling and flour for the olive bread is not being measured precisely. ("You don't have to be accountable to a recipe," says the Cordon Bleu-trained cook.)

Sound familiar?

But Dupree, 58, is confident about this casual shindig for her literary and media friends, most of whom are coming to this charming hamlet from Atlanta, 45 minutes away. "I'm not a bows-and-bangles kind of person. I think you need that when you're not sure how the conversation will flow."

By noon, she's on her third or eighth Diet Coke, the food prep is only a half-hour behind schedule, the list of attendees is at 12, and her Mephisto tennis shoes ("I've got cook's feet") are getting a workout.

She catches her breath and reviews tomorrow's game plan out loud. Her very well-fed cat Minou is somewhat attentive. "It's important that you sit down with friends and talk about what will work, how the flow is," she counsels. "You can't figure it all out yourself."

Bass, her husband of nearly five years (it's the third marriage for each), appears and contemplates his duty, which is to set the table.

"I was not a foodie prior to meeting her," says Bass, a writer and journalism professor at the University of Mississippi. "My palate probably has gone from a zero to a 2."

Later he adds, "She's very efficient in the kitchen. It always strikes me how at ease she is. She truly enjoys it."

Bass searches for the plates and finds them stacked on the kitchen floor. "I'm sure Martha Stewart has hundreds of closets, but we don't," Dupree says. Her slight disdain for Stewart's "fantasy world" may stem from the fact that Dupree grew up poor in the South after her parents divorced when she was young. She notes that she ran a newspaper route to finance her first restaurant, in Georgia in the early 1970s.

Eventually, she built national recognition with nine cookbooks, including 1986's influential New Southern Cooking, and nine TV cooking series. But those successes have been tempered by the strain of two divorces and for caring for her ailing parents, who died within a month of each other in 1994.

"My life has not been perfect," she says. "So I'm the reality cook. I can't spin a web of illusion...I know what things cost in the grocery store and how long it takes to shop. I know what's there for the real person."

After a leisurely lunch across town at the home of Celeste Dupree ("my favorite ex-husband's stepmother"), the work resumes.

"Dear, we have a problem," says Bass, staring at one of the two dining tables.

"What, sweetheart?"

"When you set the glass top on the pedestal, you squashed a bug."

Indeed. A gray moth is nicely preserved under the glass, about where guest No. 6 will place a wine goblet. With a grunt they lift, and a friend flicks off the moth.

"It's always something for every hostess," she says. "Today it's funny. Tomorrow at 6, you're alone and hubby's in the shower--it's not funny. That's why you've got to plan ahead."

By 2 p.m., the menu is set: smoked salmon and pate, cold carrot soup, Moroccan lamb with couscous and vegetables, and panna cotta with fresh fruit. Except for the couscous and cilantro, all the ingredients came from her local market, she notes with satisfaction. "Shopping there helps me stay in touch with my readers."

As she sips cola No. 24, she's asked if Diet Coke is one of her sponsors. Half indignantly, she says, "They pay me nothing! They don't think that older folks exist!"

Corporate underwriting can be a touchy matter with celebrity cooks, and she notes that things have gotten a little slack. She says that's partly because she's been pigeonholed as a Southern cook rather than as an expert on entertaining with broad appeal. But she concedes, "You can't take the South out of me, and I don't want to take the South out of me. I just think there ought to be a lot more South in the rest of the country."

Saturday
The morning of the party begins with more jangling phones. "The hostess's bane. This is when everybody calls you and asks you things they should have asked days ago."

Dupree ties up a few loose ends in the kitchen, takes a break to go antiquing, and by mid-afternoon is finishing off the cooking. Everything looks scrumptious, and the party is coming together with remarkable ease. At 3 p.m., it's supposed to be nap time, but cooking has made her happy, reflective and eager to philosophize. "Entertaining, hosting and all that doesn't start and stop with how good a cook you are or how original your menu is or what your theme is...Each person brings their own imprint to their own home and their own style. If you let yourself be yourself, you can have a good time."

The guests arrive at 7 and gather on the front porch to sip a modest sparkling wine. Suddenly, one of them sees Nathalie motioning for him to come inside. Seems the party for 12 is suddenly for 14.

She hands the friend a can of chicken broth and instructs him to stretch the carrot soup, which already has been poured into the 12 bowls on the tables. He stirs some broth into each bowl, then she pours a little from each bowl into the two new bowls. No sweat.

This has happened to you.

Dinner is served.


Copyright 1998, USA TODAY. Reprinted with permission.