Unpalatable: Stories of Pain and Pleasure in Southern Cookbooks (Ingrid G. Houck Series in Food and Foodways)

Unpalatable: Stories of Pain and Pleasure in Southern Cookbooks (Ingrid G. Houck Series in Food and Foodways)

The cookbook genre is highly conventional with an orientation toward celebration and success. From glossy photographs to heartwarming stories and adjective-rich ingredient lists, the cookbook 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. A delightful book for food scholars, folklorists, cultural historians, anthropologists, community organizers, and activists interested in food justice and memory. Highly recommended. -- R. Tolley ― CHOICE This book left me both challenged and intrigued. It pushed me to think more deeply about the stories behind Southern food, even as I still crave the simplicity of just enjoying a recipe. Tippen’s work stays with you―and that, to me, is the mark of a powerful read. -- Tomeka Jackson ― Georgia Library Quarterly Through an analysis of commercially published cookbooks spanning from the 1990s to the present, Tippen presents a compelling and complicated image of how Southern culinarians talk about food against the complex metanarrative of life in the South. -- Adam Johnson ― The Southeastern Librarian 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. -- Catarina Passidomo, associate professor of environmental studies at Washington and Lee University 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 in 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 .