Unpalatable
Unpalatable
Stories of Pain and Pleasure in Southern Cookbooks
The cookbook genre is highly conventional with an orientation toward celebration and success. From glossy photographs to heartwarming stories and adjective-rich ingredient lists, their tradition primes readers for pleasure. Yet the overarching narrative of the region is often one of pain, loss, privation, exploitation, poverty, and suffering of various kinds. While some cookbook writers go to great lengths to avoid reminding readers of this painful past, others invoke that pain as a marker of southern authenticity. Still others use stories of southern suffering as an opportunity to make space for reconciliation, reparation, or apology for past wrongs.
In Unpalatable: Stories of Pain and Pleasure in Southern Cookbooks, author Carrie Helms Tippen attempts to understand the unique rhetorical situation of the southern cookbook as it negotiates a tension between the expectations of the genre and the prevailing metanarratives of the southern experience, one focused on pleasure and the other rooted in pain. Through an analysis of commercially published “southern” cookbooks from the 1990s to the present, Tippen examines the range of rhetorical purposes and strategies writers have employed, some of which undermine the reality of a painful past and cause harm or violence, and others which serve as tools for truth and reconciliation.
Unpalatable: Stories of Pain and Pleasure in Southern Cookbooks presents a novel and sophisticated analysis of conventions within the cookbook genre within the metanarrative of the South. Author Carrie Helms Tippen extends previous work that grappled with notions of authenticity in southern cookbooks and looks specifically at how particular cookbooks contend with pain of various forms—slavery and racism, poverty, gendered labor, body shaming and illness, and death.
Carrie Helms Tippen is associate professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Tippen is author of Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity. She is series editor of the Ingrid G. Houck Series on Food and Foodways at University Press of Mississippi and one of the hosts of the New Books in Food podcast from the New Books Network. Her work has been published in Gastronomica, Food and Foodways, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society.
