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Stories of southern cooking: Defining authentic new southern identity in recipe origin narratives
Tippen, Carrie Helms
Tippen, Carrie Helms
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2015
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This dissertation contributes to the fields of literature and rhetoric by focusing on the circulation of identity formation narratives written by, and for, non-professional writers. In Stories of Southern Cooking: Defining Authentic New Southern Identity in Recipe Origin Narratives, I argue that writing about food traditions, what I call ¿origin narratives¿, has significant implications for larger cultural narratives, especially in the South. Although these writers have no professional status, as composers of culinary knowledge they are arbiters of culture with the status of rhetors who have the power to shape the identity of a region and its people. My analysis draws from contemporary food writing, chiefly cookbooks and lifestyle magazines, to account for the contextual, historical narratives that accompany recipes and to reveal their explicit and underlying rhetorical agendas. For example, some texts position the writer¿s ethos as iconoclast whereas others direct attention to people beyond mainstream representation. Given my work with a large corpus of texts from Nathalie Dupree¿s New Southern Cooking (1989) to Sean Brock¿s Heritage (2014), I show how the written works accounting for the founding of Southern cooking function as a means to validate individuals and groups as ¿true¿ Southerners. Conversely, such identity-formation texts can also serve to deny cultural power through revisions to¿or outright rejections of¿the established origin narrative.
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English