September 4-6, 2009

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The AJC Decatur Book Festival Presented by DeKalb Medical

Nathalie Dupree

Festival Appearance(s):

After years of experience and determination, Nathalie Dupree has created the perfect recipe for a successful, well-balanced culinary career. The ingredients include her roles as teacher, author, and TV cooking show host.

As a celebrated cook, Dupree’s success is a combination of her easy and practical food expertise combined with her warm, inviting personality. She has hosted more than 300 top rated television-cooking shows airing on PBS, The Learning Channel, and the Food Network. She is also one of the few cooking celebrities to be featured on all three national network television programs (“The Today Show”, “Good Morning America”, and “CBS This Morning”) as well as CNN. Her daily “Home Cooking” tips have run on more than 1,000 radio stations, and she is frequently interviewed for magazine and newspaper features. Two of her books, Southern Memories and Nathalie Dupree’s Comfortable Entertaining, have received James Beard Awards, the food world’s equivalent of the Academy Awards.

After receiving an advanced certificate from London’s Cordon Bleu, Dupree started her restaurant career as a chef in Majorca, Spain. She then moved to rural Georgia and started the “new Southern cooking movement” in the early 1970s by blending regional ingredients with French and Southern cooking techniques in her own restaurant in the country near Atlanta. She later opened another regional restaurant in Richmond, Virginia, for the Marriott Corporation.

She founded Rich’s Cooking School in 1975. There she served as chef, instructor and director for more than a decade, teaching over 10,000 students, many of them now in their own food enterprises as chefs, writers, cooking school operators and TV personalities. She continues to do cooking demonstrations and special appearances throughout the United States.

As an award-winning author, she has written ten cookbooks: Cooking of the South, a Tastemaker finalist; New Southern Cooking (1986), an International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) Cookbook Award finalist; Nathalie Dupree’s Matters of Taste (1990); Nathalie Dupree Cooks for Family and Friends (1991); a trilogy of cookbooks offering ways to make home cooking simpler, easier, and less time consuming including Nathalie Dupree Cooks Great Meals for Busy Days (1994), Nathalie Dupree Cooks Everyday Meals From a Well-Stocked Pantry (1995), and Nathalie Dupree Cooks Quick Meals for Busy Days (1996); Nathalie Dupree’s Southern Memories (1993), a 1994 James Beard Award winner; Nathalie Dupree’s Comfortable Entertaining (1998), a 1999 James Beard Award winner; and Nathalie Dupree’s Shrimp and Grits. She is currently working on two books.

Dupree has written for Charleston Magazine, the Charleston Post and Courier, the Los Angeles Times, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Traditional Home, Atlanta magazine, The Washington Post, and Cook’s Magazine, among other well know publications. She is currently hosting cooking webcasts at PostandCourier.com.

As a businesswoman, companies frequently solicit Dupree for her food expertise. She has served as spokesperson or consultant for Best Foods, Proctor & Gamble, Kraft, Lea & Perrins, Borden, General Foods, The White Lily Company, Publix, Campbell’s Soup, Sam’s Club, Maxwell House, Astra, Sport’s Illustrated and Johnson & Johnson/Merck, The Catfish Institute and Wild American Shrimp, among others.

Dupree has been a leader in the U.S. food community as a founder and two-term president of IACP, founding member of The Southern Foodways Alliance, where she served on the board of directors, and is currently active in the James Beard Foundation. In Charleston she was the founding Chairman of the Charleston Food and Wine Festival, as well as organizer and first co-president of the Charleston Chapter of Les Dames d' Escoffier. She also helped organize the Atlanta chapter of the American Institute of Wine and Food (AIWF) and the Atlanta Chapter of Les Dames d’ Escoffier, and currently is president of the Atlanta Chapter of the International Women’s Forum. She has dedicated time and effort to the March of Dimes, Girl Scouts of America, and as a member of the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention AIDS Task Force. She is married to author Jack Bass with whom she is renovating an historic home in Charleston, South Carolina. Her Web site is NathalieDupree.com.

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