Because North Carolina doesn’t have a long-established high-end restaurant culture, female chefs didn’t have to fight through classic male-dominated, military-style kitchens, said Marcie Cohen Ferris, a professor of Southern and food studies at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and the author of “The Edible South,” which chronicles in part the role of women and feminism in Southern food. “They are not beleaguered by how they will move up through the system,” she said, “because they are the ones who are inventing it.”

As a result, it’s easier to be a culinary star here than in cities like Chicago, Los Angeles or even Portland, Ore.

“Take someone like Katie Button,” said Helen Schwab, a food writer for The Charlotte Observer. “You leave some of the best restaurants in the world and head out to do your own thing. Do you go to New York? I don’t think you do. You go somewhere where you can immediately stand out.”

Others posit that the state’s rich agricultural offerings and its relatively compact size have fed an intimate cooking culture that favors a feminine style of connection and collaboration over a more masculine, competitive one.

About one-third of the state’s land is given over to farms, and a chef can readily get to know the people who pull fish from its coastal waters or grow vegetables in its Piedmont plateau. “There are more high-quality farmers per capita in these 50 square miles than maybe anywhere else but Northern California,” said Ms. Reusing, whose restaurant is in Chapel Hill. “If you cook here, you are automatically part of that network.”

Perhaps more than any other region, the South expects women to shine when it comes to children, church and food. North Carolina’s fairly loose regulations on home-based food production support that, allowing women to take advantage of the new market for small-batch cooking.

April McGreger, whose Farmer’s Daughter pickles and preserves have a national cult following, has benefited from it, as has Phoebe Lawless, the owner of Scratch bakery in Durham, who started by making pies at home.