From her first televised “y’all” in 1999, Paula Deen has worked harder to promote Southern food than anyone in the modern media era, wielding frosted hair and frosted doughnuts as her weapons.

But her campaign came to a clumsy halt last week when the unpalatable side of Deen’s sweet-and-saucy persona made a sudden public appearance. First, her deposition in a discrimination lawsuit showed she had admitted using racist language and tolerating racist jokes and pornography in the kitchen of one of her restaurants. Then she fumbled through a series of videotaped apologies that were widely criticized as vague and self-serving.

In response, the Food Network canceled her longtime contract on Friday and pulled her shows from the air; on Monday, Smithfield Foods dropped her as a spokeswoman. And a public outcry, both in support of Deen and against her, is still growing; as of Tuesday, the Food Network’s Facebook page had more than 20,000 posts.

But nowhere, arguably, are passions running fiercer than in Deen’s own field: Southern cooking. Just as her words revived painful truths about race and language, they have stirred up long-simmering issues in the culinary business, including accusations of industrywide racism and sexism, and the fight over the true heritage of the region’s food.

In interviews, many black Southern chefs and even some of her fans said Deen’s words seemed to reveal a disrespect for the people and traditions at the roots of Southern cuisine, the culture that made her famous, rich and a role model for many culinary entrepreneurs.

“She did not invent the hush puppy,” said Therese Nelson, a New York chef and caterer who has worked in the South and writes a blog at blackculinaryhistory.com. “By being Southern, of course she has a right to represent. But there comes a point where reverence or respect for the heritage has to show.”

Nelson, like other students of cooking in the South, pointed out that slave cooks and, later, domestic workers who cooked for their own families and white employers developed most of the recipes that the world identifies as Southern.

Online, many commenters have accused Deen of hypocrisy for profiting from the work of African-American cooks, including those who work in her restaurants, while harboring racist attitudes toward them. “You got rich off the recipes of the slave women your grandfather owned,” read one Twitter message last week, a reference to the fact that Deen’s ancestors, like those of many white people in the South, owned slaves.

Certainly, many working chefs can claim Southern cooking as their birthright, but have profited from it much less than Deen has.

Matthew Raiford, 45, a sixth-generation farmer in coastal Georgia who has been a chef for 20 years, said his father, a baker, had tried to dissuade him from going into the restaurant business because of the open racism in Southern kitchens. “He didn’t see a future for me in this field,” Raiford said. Like many other African-American chefs, Raiford found his way to running his own kitchen by taking corporate and hotel jobs, where diversity is encouraged and human-resources departments are careful.

‘Glass ceiling’

But even where there is no overt sign of racism, African-American cooks often feel as if they are being held back. “There is a glass ceiling for black chefs, an assumption that you will not get to own your own restaurant,” Nelson said. “As a black woman, and a pastry chef, it’s clear to everyone I’m not threatening and also that I’m never going to be the executive chef.”

Still, some black chefs see Deen’s success as an inspiration.

“My heart goes out to her,” said Charlotte Jenkins, 70, a chef in Mount Pleasant, S.C., who said Deen’s accomplishment in building a business from scratch was something all Southern women could respect. “Even though her take on Southern cooking is different from mine.”When Deen was simply a benign, sassy television personality, her personal politics and racial attitudes never became an issue. Her humble beginnings in Albany, Ga., her starter business selling boxed lunches, and her years of hard work at the restaurant she started as a single mother of two sons endeared her quickly to many home cooks. She often brought her longtime employees, mostly African-Americans, on her TV shows to demonstrate techniques for biscuits or pie crusts, hugging and joking with them.

Now, those episodes have a sad and ambiguous edge. Some people have raised questions about how much her cooks are paid and how much credit (and compensation) they have received for their recipes that fueled her empire.

Deen, 66, has long been a polarizing figure.

The critics grew louder last year when Deen announced that she had Type 2 diabetes, brought on by high sugar consumption, on the same day she unveiled a lucrative endorsement of the diabetes drug Victoza. And they grew deafening last week, when racism was suddenly added to the older charges of hypocrisy and inauthenticity that have swirled around her without sticking.

‘Spoof of Southern cooking’

But her food has always made some Southern cooks squirm.

“It’s almost like a spoof of Southern cooking,” said Nathalie Dupree, the author of “Mastering the Art of Southern Cooking,” a cooking teacher and food historian in Charleston, S.C. Dupree, 73, said that in her childhood fried food was a once-a-week treat, that rich desserts were served even less often, and that vegetables and grains like rice and grits made up most of what was a healthy, farm-based diet.

“That is not how the people I know cook, and that is not how the people I know speak,” she said.

Dupree, who is white, is especially incensed by the notion (advanced by many of Deen’s defenders) that whites who grew up in the segregated South routinely use racist language without attaching any significance to it. “I’m beginning to take umbrage at being lumped together with people who haven’t taken the trouble to learn what is offensive and what isn’t,” she said. “It puts the whole region back again.”

Many chefs who look at Southern food through this lens see Deen as neither an embarrassment nor an influence — in fact, they barely see her at all.

“I don’t see her smoking ducks and hams, studying the preservation techniques that the ancestors used and that made Southern cooking what it is,” said Todd Richards, the chef at the Shed in Glenwood, in Atlanta. “I don’t look to how she cooks. I look to the top 100 restaurants in the world.”

Now, if they do they see her (she is scheduled to resume her effort at public rehabilitation with an appearance today on the “Today” show), they may see a job opening.

“I wish the Food Network would call me,” Jenkins said. “I could show them a few things about the real South.”