Southern Roots, food and family stories: Mama Dip’s daughter publishes cookbook
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Spring Council publishes Southern Roots blending Chapel Hill history, recipes and memoir.
- Book features 100 recipes, honors Mama Dip, and prompts a multi-city February–March tour.
- Council frames food as community practice, preserving Northside memory and family legacy.
Anita “Spring” Council’s new book serves up a healthy plate of Chapel Hill history and Mama Dip’s memories, with a dash of Southern hospitality.
Southern cooking is “not all about the fried stuff,” said Council, 68. “It’s not all about just putting a bunch of grease on some vegetables. It’s about the ingredients that come to the table.”
Her book, “Southern Roots: Recipes and Stories from Mama Dip’s Daughter,” is dedicated to Council’s mother, Chapel Hill restaurateur Mildred “Mama Dip” Council, who “taught me the joy of cooking and the power of sharing meals,” she said.
With 100 of Council’s favorite recipes — from pimento cheese biscuits to grits and sweet potato and pecan pie — the book also describes her youth in the family’s restaurants and the sights, smells and people of Chapel Hill’s historically African-American Northside community.
It will be publicly available Feb. 17 (pre-orders are underway ), and Council launches a book tour Feb. 13. Some of the six stops will also feature guest appearances, including Cynthia R. Greenlee, an award-winning journalist and historian, and former Charlotte Observer food editor Kathleen Purvis.
Publishers Weekly just named “Southern Roots” one of its Top 10 spring season cookbooks.
Finding her own story in the past
Writing her own story wasn’t easy, Council told The News & Observer, because “my mom’s story was out there, and that’s where we lived, within her story.”
Her first book looked at home-entertaining, but it “got rejection after rejection,” she said. A friend suggested a memoir.
“When I sat down to start writing, all these memories just started flooding” back, about her family; tea parties; foraging for summer fruit, nuts and pears; and the culinary legacy inherited orally from previous generations, she said.
“Mama’s kitchen was where I felt loved, where I was happy to sit at the table, to listen and learn through leisure and curiosity,” she writes, as her mother “told stories, shared ingredient knowledge, hummed songs ... as she prepared our family meals.”
Watching her grandmother’s care in setting a table for friends or ladies’ auxiliary meetings taught her the beauty of a welcoming table, she said, noting, “paper plates can never tell the stories that our grandmother’s china could.”
“It was more than about the pretty crystal and the china and the silverware. I saw that beautiful tablescape as her honor and her community, and that’s why I like to set a table, just to honor people and show grace to folks who sit at my table,” she said.
Now retired, Council sets her table with thrifted wares; her favorites are featured in the book.
“We get so busy in our daily experiences that we forget about the joy of every day sitting at the table and enjoying it, even if you just set it by yourself,” she said.
Community, family through Civil Rights era
She was barely old enough to march when the protests and sit-ins reached Franklin Street and her neighborhood in the early 1960s, Council recalled. Black folks still weren’t welcome in some white-owned businesses, but she and her siblings found confidence in the community of Black leaders, teachers and neighbors around them, she said.
Council’s grandfather Bill Minor was a community leader and owner of Bill’s Bar-B-Q in the former Midway Black business district at the end of West Franklin and West Rosemary streets. He fed the protesters when Martin Luther King Jr. visited Northside’s Robeson Street Center, now the Hargraves Community Center, she writes in the book.
Council and her sister worked at Bill’s until it closed in 1968, earning a penny for every chicken box they packed, she said. Her father Joe Council then started one of the town’s first food trucks, serving food her mother prepared to construction workers, she said.
In 1969, the family had enough money to reopen Bill’s, expand the menu, and add a delivery service for UNC students and factory workers. Council and her sister Lane ran the truck by 1971, an early lesson that “having a job and showing up every day builds character, self-reliance, endurance, courage, and confidence,” she writes.
At home, they snacked on baked sweet potatoes, and everyone cooked, including her father, who was “a good man,” she said.
“He was always at our table during the holidays and sat with us and ate with us,” she said. “When he got sick, we gathered around him and took care of him.”
The legacy of Mama Dip’s restaurant
Dip’s Country Cooking opened in 1976, Council said, becoming a place where people “stuck together and supported each other.” Her mother hosted elementary school children, gave jobs to inmates and recovering addicts, and touched peoples’ lives, she said.
“Even when she was going to feed people in the community who didn’t have much of nothing, she always took us along,” Council said. “She always shared with us the art of giving and the art of caring for people.”
Mama Dip died in 2018, and her children continued the restaurant until last year. There’s now a limited, online store, but the property is for sale, a decision Council called “heartbreaking.” But they are older now, and it was time for a break, she said.
“For me, it’s good, because I get to sit back, relax and write, and do the things I want to do. And my siblings get to sit back and relax and travel and do the things that they want to do,” she said.
Tonya Council, her daughter, now carries the legacy, as owner of Tonya’s Cookies and Tonya’s Cafe in Chapel Hill, along with Sweet Tea & Cornbread in Raleigh. She has her own creative spark and flavor profile, Council said, and “I respect that.”
“I think she’s doing a great job,” Council said. “She knows how to get things done and get people to produce the products that she needs, and she just got this mindset of growing and being creative, and she does a good job of it.”
Where to go for more information
Spring Council will hold several book events in February. Some will have special guests and require advance registration or tickets.
- Friday, Feb. 13: Noon to 2 p.m. McIntyre’s Books, 220 Market St., Fearrington Village. Go to tinyurl.com/2kck6p7v.
- Wednesday, Feb. 18: 6:30-7:30 p.m., Quail Ridge Books, 4209-100 Lassiter Mill Road, Raleigh. Go to tinyurl.com/4yes6j55.
- Monday, Feb. 23: 6-7 p.m., Chapel Hill Public Library, 100 Library Drive, Chapel Hill. Go to tinyurl.com/3pvu386p.
- Thursday, Feb. 26: 7-8 p.m., Park Road Books, 4139 Park Road, Charlotte. Go to tinyurl.com/3asvdce2.
- Sunday, March 1: 4-5 p.m., Scuppernong Books, 304 S Elm St., Greensboro. Go to tinyurl.com/3ef8hjnw.
- Wednesday, March 18: 6-7 p.m., The Country Bookshop, 140 Northwest Broad St., Southern Pines. Go to tinyurl.com/56r3z35x.
Uniquely NC is a News & Observer subscriber collection of moments, landmarks and personalities that define the uniqueness (and pride) of why we live in the Triangle and North Carolina.
This story was originally published February 5, 2026 at 10:10 AM.
