Mama Dips

One of the most successful present-day African-American business owners in Chapel Hill, Mama Dip stands strong and tall in her six foot, one inch frame. Getting her nickname from her long arms as a young child, she would reach the bottom of the barrel, to fetch water, as her siblings watched in amazement.

From her book produced in 1999 entitled, Mama Dip’s Kitchen, Mildred Cotton Council aka Mama Dip describes her childhood growing up not in Chapel Hill, but in a rural North Carolina town. After her mother died when she was two, Mama Dip and her older six siblings assisted her father in the fields as a sharecropper. Although her family wasn’t well-off, Mama Dip states that she didn’t feel as if she was poor and she grew closer with her family when food was scarce because they all had to share the little that they had.

Furthermore, as she grew older and her siblings worked in the fields, Mama Dip’s father would ask her to cook for her family. Through “dump cooking”, she made breakfast, lunch, and dinner for her family daily.

**dump cooking** measuring the ingredients by instinct and not with a measuring cup and also cooking off memory and not with recipes.

The move to Chapel Hill:

“When papa made up his mind that we would move to Chapel Hill, I was really upset because we would come to town and see these girls in bobby socks, pleated skirts, sweaters and magnolias and shiny combs in their hair. I couldn’t see myself sitting in a classroom with them rich looking girls with lipstick on their lips.”

Due to WWII, Mama Dip’s father couldn’t survive off of their family farm so they all migrated to Chapel Hill where she attended Beauty school and worked as a cook in one of UNC’s dorms. Trying to feed her seven children and still be a wife to her husband Joe, Mama Dip assisted her mother-in-law in her catering business, Bill’s Barbacue, and this is where she became business savvy.

An offer by a local real estate agent to take over a restaurant in Chapel Hill that was failing was Mama Dip’s only gateway to spread her good food to the local community. In 1976, and with only $64 in her pocket, Mama Dip began her own business and made $135 on her first day. To save money, she employed her children.

Mama Dip is an example of how African-Americans have advanced, despite all the strong holds and obstacles due to racism. She has been on Good Morning America, on the Food Network, and in the magazine Southern Living.

Citation:

- Baker-Clark, Charles Allen. Profiles from the kitchen: what great cooks have taught us about ourselves and our food. University Press of Kentucky, 2006. Print.

- Council, Mildred. Mama Dip's Kitchen. The University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Print.