Description: How narratives of suffering balance the conventions of joy and success in the southern cookbook tradition
Brief description: 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.
Review Quotes: 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