Mildred Council, a Pillar of Southern Cooking, Is Dead at 89
By Kim Severson
Mildred Council, a slave’s granddaughter who opened a North Carolina restaurant that proved so successful she caught the attention of presidents, publishers and sports stars, died on May 20 in Chapel Hill, N.C. She was 89.
The cause was complications of a stroke, her daughter, Spring Council, said.
Most people called Mrs. Council Mama Dip, a variation on Dip, the nickname she acquired while growing up on a sharecropper’s farm. Mildred was such a tall youngster — she grew to 6 feet 2 inches — that she could reach her long arm down to the bottom of a rain barrel and dip out a drink when the family well went dry.
Michael Jordan and James Worthy also picked up on the nickname and spread it when they were playing basketball for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the early 1980s; they were frequent visitors to her restaurant in town, at the time an 18-seat diner called Dip’s Kitchen.
The name Mama Dip went on to become a brand. Besides a restaurant, now known as Mama Dip’s, it graced cookbooks and a line of food products, including a cornbread mix and barbecue sauce.
Mrs. Council called her approach in the kitchen “dump-cooking.” She never used recipes, she explained; instead, she measured flour with the palm of her hand and then dumped in seasonings and other ingredients until a dish tasted right.
The phrase belied her finely tuned culinary skills, however, which she began to develop when she was 9, a few years after her mother, Effie Cotton, died. Mildred so impressed her father, Eddie Cotton, that she was allowed to take over the family kitchen, using food that grew nearby.
“He told me to go pick something to eat,” she said in 2014.
Mrs. Council, who had eight children of her own, was of a generation of Southern country cooks who inherently understood the importance of food as a way to build and sustain a community. She was cooking farm-to-table food long before the phrase became the vogue among urban chefs.
“She was a voice for that before there was a food movement and all these buzzwords like sustainability and food activism and food equity,” said Marcie Cohen Ferris, a University of North Carolina professor and author whose work explores Southern food ways. “She bridged those generations of an earlier South and a changing new South.”
Professor Ferris and her husband, the Southern culture scholar William Ferris, befriended Ms. Council and were frequent guests at her successor restaurant, Mama Dip’s Kitchen, on Rosemary Street in Chapel Hill, a few blocks from the university campus. One wall was lined with framed newspaper clippings and awards for her civic service.
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Mildred Edna Cotton was born on April 11, 1929, in Chatham County, N.C., her parents’ youngest daughter. As a young woman she began her cooking career, like many African-American women of her time, working in other people’s kitchens.
Her first job was for a white woman she knew only as Mrs. Patterson.
At one point Mrs. Patterson told Mrs. Council to make some sweet potatoes for dinner, so she improvised a dish by mashing boiled sweet potatoes with butter, Karo syrup and orange juice and spooning the mixture into the hollowed out rinds of oranges she had cut in half. She thought she was going to get fired. Instead, the dish was a hit and became her first original recipe.
Mildred Cotton married Joe Council in 1947 and worked with him and his parents at a Chapel Hill restaurant called Bill’s Bar-B-Q. Mr. Council later opened a food truck that would travel to construction sites, serving Mrs. Council’s cooking to workers.
She cooked at so many other restaurants, she said, that she couldn’t count them all; one was a fraternity house where the CBS News correspondent Charles Kuralt lived as a student at the University of North Carolina. The two developed a friendship based on a mutual love of Southern cooking.
Mrs. Council acquired her first restaurant in 1976, when the city’s only black real estate agent helped her take over a failing Chapel Hill diner. She initially had $40 to buy food to make breakfast and $24 to make change, money she saved from her job at a hospital. That morning, she made enough money to buy ingredients for lunch, and then used the lunch profits to run out and buy ingredients for dinner. By the end of the day, she had $135, and Dip’s Kitchen was born.
“When I started my restaurant, it was like a socket,” she said. “It just fit.”
Mrs. Council was a smart businesswoman with a big laugh who built her reputation on consistent and delicious renditions of the staples of a good Southern country kitchen, including fried chicken, pies and seasonal vegetables, like greens, field peas, okra and tomatoes.
By 1999, the business was so successful that she moved across the street to a larger space, where she continued to employ her children, grandchildren and many people who were down on their luck, including those recovering from substance abuse or recently out of prison.
“Her main focus was making sure people who had a hard time in life had an opportunity,” her daughter, Spring Council, said.
As a volunteer, Mrs. Council founded an annual dinner that started out intending to bring black and white people together and then expanded to include people of different religions and immigrant cultures as well. The event’s motto was “Sit down with a stranger and make a new friend.” The 21st Community Dinner, Mrs. Council’s last, was in April.
Mrs. Council’s work attracted the attention of President George W. Bush, who invited her to the White House, and President Barack Obama, with whom she exchanged letters. Television food show producers from New York booked her, and prominent food writers made note of her cooking, including Craig Claiborne of The New York Times, himself a son of the South.
In 1985, after sitting at one of her tables, Mr. Claiborne declared her deep-fried chicken livers “as crisp and tasty as any I have ever had.”
Mr. Claiborne would become a champion of her cooking, writing lovingly about her restaurant, reprinting her recipes and encouraging her to produce her own cookbook. It was not an easy task — she had never written anything down — and it took 10 years to complete. But in 1999, “Mama Dip’s Kitchen” was published by the University of North Carolina Press. It would go on to sell a quarter million copies.
Another book, “Mama Dip’s Family Cookbook,” followed, as did her line of food products, which included Mama Dip barbecue sauce, poppy seed salad dressing and cornbread mix, all of them promoted with the slogan, “Put a Little South in Your Mouth.”
Mrs. Council ended her marriage after 29 years, saying the physical and emotional abuse by Mr. Council had become intolerable. “The biggest turning point in my life was when I left my husband,” she said in an oral history recorded in 1994.
Mr. Council died in 2002. Mrs. Council is survived by their children: Norma Bell, Julia Rhea, Sandra Council, Annette Council, Anita Spring Council, Geary Council, Joe Council and William Council; 18 grandchildren; 26 great-grandchildren; and two great-great-grandchildren.
Several of her children and grandchildren work in the food business, either as chefs or entrepreneurs, and they continue to run her restaurant, which, she wrote in her first book, she had always intended to be her legacy to her children.
Toni Tipton Martin, a food journalist whose 2015 book, “The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African-American Cookbooks,” explored the history of black cooks in America, said Mrs. Council came from the generation of African-American women who emerged from the Jim Crow era to use their talents in the kitchen as a way of building wealth and caring for the community.
Ms. Martin finally met her in 2016, when Mrs. Council was so frail that she had abandoned her customary perch at a front table in the restaurant, where for years she had greeted customers and directed service.
A nurse wheeled her into the restaurant. Ms. Martin, seated at a table, asked Mrs. Council how she had come to develop her cooking style.
Instead of answering the question, Mrs. Council chose instead to offer a simple piece of advice. “What you need to do,” she said, “is cook what you want to cook.”
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