A publication of the Association of College and Research Libraries
A division of the American Library Association
Editorial Offices: 575 Main Street, Suite 300, Middletown, CT 06457-3445
Phone: (860) 347-6933
Fax: (860) 704-0465

FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY

Please do not link to this page.

August 2025 Vol. 62 No. 12

Tippen’s analysis of commercially published southern cookbooks from the 1990s on examines the tension between cookbook audience’s desires for pleasure and joy from upbeat headnotes, mouth-watering recipes, and aesthetic food photography and the reality of the South’s creativity generated within its legacy of suffering, poverty, segregation, enslavement, and violence. All geographic regions struggle with the general expectation of the cookbook genre to erase pain “through its orientation toward pleasure." Thus southern writers are not unique in this practice as they contextualize authenticity and identity (p. 8). Tippen (Chatham Univ.) argues that southern authenticity is achievable when writers “speak the truth of their painful experiences to powerful audiences,” and when they amplify the contributions of Black southerners to regional culture, thus creating space for reconciliation, reparation, and apology for the past (p. 9). Tippen offers multiple strategies for finding new models of storytelling, a spectrum of suffering in southern cookbook writing that may be tools for truth and reconciliation. Each chapter examines southern cookbooks through a different lens: race, class, gender, ability, and grief (via funerary food practices). A delightful book for food scholars, folklorists, cultural historians, anthropologists, community organizers, and activists interested in food justice and memory.

--R. Tolley, East Tennessee State University

Summing Up: Highly recommended. Undergraduates through faculty.