Three Souths, One Table

Global culinary traditions come together on the plate for cookbook author Dale Gray

by

Small Town Chefs

Myspace was where Dale Gray first met @MrLouisiana. When she saw the handle, she laughed and thought “Oh my gosh. How cheesy.” 

His real name was DJ Gray, and he was a native New Orleanian. As for Dale herself (then Van Der Merwe), she had come from the Cape Malay community in Cape Town, South Africa. The two encountered one another in the unlikely meeting place of South Korea, where DJ was stationed on his first tour of duty with the United States Army, and where Dale was teaching cooking and English to elementary school students. 

On their first date, he told her, “My goodness, my mother would absolutely love you. You seem so Southern.” 

“Southern?” she asked. 

He was the first person she’d ever met from the American South. He told her all about where he was from, about why he felt she’d fit in as a woman who loves to cook, who teaches, who has such a gentle nature.

“Well, what is the food like over there?” 

“Trust me,” he assured her. “You’re gonna love it.” 

Meals have always been intertwined with family for Dale. She comes from a long and diverse line of ancestors, many of whom were enslaved and transported to South Africa from places like Indonesia and Malaysia, as well as the area’s first European settlers, the Dutch. “A lot of my ancestors were actually cooks in wealthy landowners’ kitchens, and so cooking has remained an important part of our history,” she said. The Cape Malay regional cuisine is influenced by the dozens of cultures that made a home on the Western Cape, as well as the area’s agricultural products—fruits like grapes for wine and vinegar, apricots, peaches, and oranges. “We make a lot of sweet and sour things, like chutneys and sauces, a lot of hot sauce,” she said. 

It is tradition, she went on, for young South African girls—whichever culture you might come from—to help their mothers and grandmothers in the kitchen. “The old recipes, techniques and things, are always passed down,” Dale said. Every Sunday, she and her sisters would report to the kitchen to take turns peeling potatoes and carrots, chopping garlic. “That’s how we learned to cook.” 

Dale always imagined a career that incorporated her passion for cuisine in some way. At Stellenbosch University in South Africa, she originally majored in food science, before switching to social work after a couple days in chemistry class. “I was like, ‘nope!’” she laughed. 

Not long after graduation, while navigating the struggles of the emotionally challenging social work field, she got the opportunity to join some friends who were traveling to South Korea to teach English. “I had to look on a map to see where South Korea was,” she said. “I didn’t know anything about the world. But it felt just right. This was what I was going to do.” 

Immersed in a totally new culture, she found herself navigating her work through the kitchen, via cooking classes. Over meals, the kids were learning English, and Dale was learning how to prepare Korean food. “I just fell in love with it,” she said. “I became so fascinated with the culture and ingredients.” She began switching out her South African breakfast of oatmeal and semolina porridge for rice and miso soup with seared yellow croaker. 

“In South Korea,” she said, “if you haven’t seen somebody in some time, they’ll ask you, ‘Have you eaten yet?’ Which is their way of saying, ‘Hey, how are you? Are you well?’ They’re not intending to feed you—this is how they express concern about your well-being, through food!” 

At the same time, amidst all this change, she often found herself missing home. During those times, she’d invite her friends over and would call her mom—staying on the phone with her while she prepared traditional South African dishes, like malva pudding. “I became kind of the go-to person to make foods we missed from home.” 

Find Gray's recipe for bobotie, a South African casserole, here.

Shared appreciations of family, home, and culture via cuisine were part of Dale and DJ’s instant connection. After six years in South Korea, seven months of courtship, and a marriage proposal, she agreed to move with DJ back to the states. “I was scared,” she said, “but at the same time excited, because of all he had told me about living in the South.” 

They started their lives in El Paso, Texas, where DJ was stationed. The topography reminded Dale of South Africa, and the Mexican cuisine of the region enthralled her. “It was a culture shock, still,” she said. “But that’s where I learned how to be a wife. To cook our meals, I kind of fused all these Mexican ingredients with my knowledge about South African and South Korean cuisines.”  

Later, she carried that knowledge and spirit of adaptability with her to McComb, Mississippi, where DJ’s family had a house waiting for them. His service with the army concluded, he followed his dream of starting a trucking company—which left Dale home alone a lot of the time. “My task was to renovate the house, make it a home, adjust, and acclimate to this totally new place,” she said. “But I quickly started thinking—‘What can I do?’ I didn’t have any friends. I didn’t have any connection to Mississippi. What could I do to speed up that process?”

"I remember thinking to myself that even though I wasn’t actively practicing social work anymore, here I was, loving people through my cooking.” 

—Dale Gray

It was 2012, in the earliest days of the Instagram blogger era, when Dale started her account, @thedaleyplate. She began by simply sharing what she was making each day—drawing from her many culinary influences, sourcing difficult-to-find ingredients from the local Korean hairdressers and via special trips to Houston to the closest H Mart. She shared about her experience learning to prepare traditional Creole dishes from DJ’s mother, who grew up in Opelousas, Louisiana—étouffées, gumbos, jambalayas. Her early feed was a scroll of aesthetically-photographed plates of Mandu, marmalade, hobakjuk, red beans and rice with andouille—all interspersed with reflections on her life as a transplant, memories of her family back in South Africa or her students in South Korea, vulnerable insights about her and her husband’s fertility struggles, admissions of loneliness, and how she fed herself and her loved ones through every up and down of life. 

“People seemed to resonate with my story,” she said. “It was therapeutic for me, to unpack my upbringing and all those big life decisions. At the time, I had this small group of people online who were connecting with me and supporting me. I remember thinking to myself that even though I wasn’t actively practicing social work anymore, here I was, loving people through my cooking.” 

A few years in, Instagram selected Dale’s account as a “featured user,” earning her around 50,000 followers overnight—“and everything changed from there,” she said. For the first time, she felt like maybe she could make a career as a food blogger. She started spending her days—eight to ten hours sometimes—practicing her photography skills and preparing new dishes, learning more about Southern cuisine. Soon, she had her first client as an influencer—an Italian tomato sauce company. “And from there, it just took off,” she said. 

Today, Dale and DJ have made a home in Brookhaven, Mississippi—where Dale continues to share her daily plates, drawing from the cuisines that have influenced her journey, via her Instagram. These days, her audience of now almost 200,000 followers can take advantage of full-blown recipes, often shared in the captions, for dishes like South African “crispy chops” (lamb chops) and bobotie, Mexican coctel de camerones, Gulf shrimp étouffée, and even a grilled ostrich tenderloin salad drizzled in gochujang. Sometimes, she’ll combine cuisines, though always carefully and with subtlety. 

“I try to be respectful of traditions and don’t fuse in a major way,” she said. “But for instance, when I make a jambalaya, I might use a different protein than is typical in the South, or incorporate South African spices like coriander. When I make a spaghetti, I’ll add cloves and allspice—which is basically just the spaghetti I grew up eating.” 

In 2023, the plate posts shifted from the screen and onto the page in Dale’s debut cookbook, South of Somewhere, published by Simon & Schuster. “Writing the book is something I’ve always wanted to do,” she said. “It’s something I’ve dreamt of, the apex of achievement for anyone who loves food. I totally manifested it.” 

The cookbook, featuring Dale’s own photography (and plenty of shots of DJ helping out), begins with a three-part introduction that tells her globetrotting story, divided between the three “Southern” countries she has called home, and the cuisines that have most influenced her life. She offers a section on kitchen staples (along with flaky salt and peppercorns, she always has gochujang and curry powder on hand), as well as advice for reducing waste and making use of leftovers, and a moment to explain the South African concept of a Braai: a social tradition centered on open-fire cooking. 

From there: the recipes, delivered with a side of story, as is Dale’s way. She tells us about how the brined Grape Leaf-Grilled Camembert is a tribute to the memory of smoking grapevines in her childhood town of Wellington, where at the end of the season the grape farmers would burn their vines to prevent disease. Her Tuesday Night Hot-Smoked Salmon Chowder recalls her mother’s tradition of preparing fish on Tuesdays, and in particular a neon orange smoked haddock poached in milk, and incorporates the flavors of an American southern seafood boil, with red potatoes, Creole spices, and holy trinity. Her version of Marry Me Chicken Soup draws inspiration from the Korean stew, dakdoritang—which she was preparing for DJ the night he proposed. The soup, as is the case with many of her Korean-influenced dishes, is flavored with Perilla, an anise-scented Korean herb that is difficult to find in the states, but which Gray now grows in her garden. 

One book behind her, she’s already dreaming up the next, while also making moves to open a small cooking school for children in Brookhaven. “I’m really passionate about our underserved communities and making sure the kids have healthy ways to express themselves,” she said. 

In the meantime, she’ll keep cooking, and she’ll keep telling stories. “That’s the thing, I’m a better storyteller even than I am a cook,” she said. More than the colors, more than the flavors, it’s the stories that continue to draw people to Dale’s plates—connecting us to each other through traditions and trials, and even across oceans.

Follow Dale Gray on Instagram @thedaleyplate, visit her blog at thedaleyplate.com, and order South of Somewhere at simonandschuster.com.