As we enter a new year, and a season of new chapters, I’m going to share the story of someone who played an auspicious role in my own beginnings.

Nathalie Dupree once told me she was responsible for my existence, and she makes a valid point.

In the late summer of 1969, Nathalie was working as a newly hired secretary for the New York City bureau of The Christian Science Monitor newspaper. Far from the three times James Beard-award-winning chef, author, and cooking-show host that she is today, Nathalie’s primary tasks at the Monitor bureau included typing up correspondence and opening copious amounts of mail. 

My father, David Holmstrom, was a reporter in the same small news bureau, covering politics and the widespread political upheaval that had overtaken New York during those tumultuous times. David and Nathalie soon struck up a friendship “We would sit while I sorted and opened the huge piles of mail, and talk, just the two of us” says Nathalie. “We became instant friends.”

As the two colleagues and confidants discussed all aspects of life and love and spirituality it began to occur to Nathalie that David might enjoy her friend, Patricia, also living in New York City. Nathalie felt so certain that David and Patricia would get along that she told David she “knew the woman he was going to marry.”

My parents had their first (blind) date that September, orchestrated by the prescient Nathalie. They saw the film Alice’s Restaurant in a movie theatre on the Lower East Side and, in David’s words; 

“I was intrigued right away. Mini skirt and short blonde hair. And she had a great smile. Throughout the movie, Pat’s laugh was the best one in the theatre. When the credits rolled at the end, and the lights went up, we went outside and simply started talking and walking, not idle, first-date chit chat, but a kind of frank easy testing and sharing of attitudes, spiritual convictions, and impossible cosmic questions, all sprinkled with laughter and humor.”

I’d like to say the rest is history, but really, the rest is the start of a thirty-four-year partnership, and as a by-product, my own life.

Incredibly, orchestrating my parent’s meeting was not the only role Nathalie played in my family’s formations…my aunt (my mother’s sister) and uncle celebrated their marriage at her apartment in London, and Nathalie and my uncle John Holmstrom (my father’s brother) were also good friends who supported each other’s careers in the media and publishing worlds.

Soon after their Boston wedding in June 1970 my parents succumbed to the call of the West and moved to Northern California. Throughout subsequent decades Nathalie and my folks maintained their friendship, despite her home base in the Southern U.S. and theirs in the West. Nathalie and my mother shared the closest of long-distance friendships–when they were on the phone together my mother’s hearty laugh reverberated around the house.

I relished Nathalie’s visits to our abode in rural Sonoma County as she swept in with her glamorous scarves and tales of television appearances, humorous celebrity encounters, and delectable dishes savored in Paris and London. Entertaining stories of the trials and triumphs of writing her cookbooks and dealing with agents offered me insight into the literary world and showed me how a highly successful woman operated. I wouldn’t be surprised if she helped plant one of the seeds that sprouted years later when I embarked on a career in publishing.

On one of her visits (I must have been around eleven years old), Nathalie handed me a sleek grey box which I opened only to find a delicate strand of freshwater pearls nestled expectantly inside. I still have the pearls, a cherished possession that always recalls her historical importance to my family. A few years ago, as my young daughter and I made the “Home-Style Peach Cake” (Pg. 553 in Mastering the Art of Southern Cooking) together I told her the story of Nathalie’s significance in my life and American life. “Can we make a cake with her sometime?” my daughter asked. 

Through the years when I have, say, read a profile in People Magazine about Nathalie, learned of her award of “Grande Dame” for Les Dames d’Escoffier (which she considers her highest honor as it comes from women who have excelled in the food industry), or watched her gracefully sharing her expertise while making an appearance on Top Chef (Season 3 Episode 2) I feel a tinge of pride. Not only because Nathalie’s vast achievements as a renowned chef were being celebrated but because the larger world was recognizing something my family had known for years–that Nathalie has a rare talent for marrying ingredients together and cooking up delicious love and acceptance for all of us. 

I hope that Nathalie and my daughter and myself make that cake together someday and that she knows how grateful I am to her, for noticing and responding to the spark of true love.