Unpalatable : stories of pain and pleasure in Southern cookbooks / Carrie Helms Tippen.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Tippen, Carrie Helms, author.

Series:

Ingrid G. Houck series in Food and Foodways

Ingrid g. houck series in food and foodways

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Cooking--Psychological aspects.

Cooking.

Food writing--Southern States--History.

Food writing.

Cookbooks--Social aspects--Southern States.

Cookbooks.

Food writers--Southern States.

Food writers.

Cooking, American--Southern style--Social aspects.

Cooking, American.

Rhetoric--Social aspects.

Rhetoric.

Southern States--Social life and customs.

Southern States.

Physical Description:

x, 251 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, [2025]

Summary:

"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"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Preface

Acknowledgments

"Party with a purpose": celebration, suffering, and social justice

The urgency of pleasure: theorizing a rhetoric of pleasure in cookbooks

"A lot of past to reckon with": grappling with slavery and racism

Making do: pain of poverty and pleasure of resilience

A season of sweetness: gardening, canning, and women's labor on farms

Keep Southern and cut the fat: body fat and illness in wellness cookbooks

"Useful in a fearful time": responding to grief and death in funeral cookbooks

Towards a conclusion: intersections and implications

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Tippen, Carrie Helms. Unpalatable

ISBN:

9781496854797

1496854799

9781496854803

1496854802

OCLC:

1431973175

Publisher Number:

90101084394