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 narrativeof 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 attemptsto 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 r