“Cooking the Books: Race and Memory in the Contemporary American South”

• In Event: The Invention of Authenticity: Troubling Narratives of the “Real” Southern Foodways

Abstract

This paper explores the negotiation of regional and national identity through cookbook authorship, pointing to the ways in which cookbook authors representing the cuisine of the American South embrace, eschew, or revise both their regional history when writing for international audiences. I examine the ways in which mass-market Southern food cookbooks expand definitions of Southern identity while authenticating their recipes and voices as “Southern.”
First, I argue for a reading of cookbooks through the lens of performance; the medium of a print cookbook literally authorizes an individual’s version of Southern cuisine, sedimenting resourceful, improvisational, and ingredient-centric cuisine into a canonical, archival script. By treating cookbooks as performance scripts that actively produce meaning in non-Southern audiences, this reading moves beyond a consideration of cookbooks as merely expressive of the author’s own family history or identity.
The eight cookbooks I discuss are chosen both for the fact of their popular acclaim: these books are James Beard and IACP award winners, they are reposted and praised on cooking and lifestyles blogs—and the authors are almost entirely white. Some authors, such as Korean-American author Edward Lee, might challenge this narrative by combining Asian ingredients with “essentially” Southern foodways. Others, such as Martha Hall Foose, turn to their community to showcase the complex ethnic foodways already enmeshed with “essentially” Southern food, as she strives to represent the varied Greek, Lebanese, and Mexican foodways of the Mississippi Delta. Yet how does the conversation about the roots of Southern cooking in poverty, slavery, or sharecropping begin when these cookbooks look insistently forward? I then trace the myriad ways in which these cookbooks place regional food within elite gourmet or “locovore” discourses, creating a so-called “new turn” in Southern food that privileges pleasure and novelty.
In order to do so, I look closely at substitutions offered by cookbooks authors for hard to find ingredients. I argue that ideologies of “eating local” are in fact separated from hard-to-source local foods in these cookbooks. I turn an eye towards the language of performance, embodied behavior, or experiential knowledge employed in these cookbooks. The stakes of regional Southern identity change when the reader must hunt, fish, or source ingredients in the ways described by the cookbook author rather than purchase ingredients at a luxury food shop. I articulate the tension for these cookbook authors between re-inventing Southern food for international audiences and crafting the embodied experiences of the reader, arguing that these cookbooks walk a fine line between paying homage to the history of Southern food as regional and celebrating the future of Southern food as gourmet, fun, and freed from the burdens of history.

Author

• Lily Kelting, University of California, San Diego (CA)