A Chatham Professor’s Book Digs Into Pain and Pleasure in Southern Cookbooks

Carrie Helms poses for a photo in her office. (Courtesy of Carrie Helms)

Associate Professor Carrie Helms' "Unpalatable: Stories of Pain and Pleasure in Southern Cookbooks" is her second book on southern cookbooks. This time, she analyzes how writers navigate legacies of suffering while still providing readers with sensorial pleasures.

"The cookbook is set up to be a pleasure-oriented genre, but if you want to be in the south, you can't ignore those painful parts," she says. "They do pull in those painful stories, but they have to do it in a particular way."

Mixing personal narratives with scholarly insight, Helms mines more than a dozen cookbooks for insight into how and why writers weave these stories between their recipes. Pulse@ChathamU caught up with Helms to discuss the book and the writing process. These questions and responses have been edited for clarity.

Your first book was “Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity.” How did you get into researching and writing about southern cookbooks?

It started with my dissertation. In my master’s program, I was really focused on a southern writer named Eudora Welty. I went into my Ph.D. program planning to be a southern literature scholar, but I didn’t really know that food could be something I could do until I went to a few academic conferences and saw the rigorous ways people were treating food.

I just got really fascinated with ordinary women’s writing—that ordinary people, like my grandmother, could be a writer, could put culture into paper. And they could do that without ever making it to the level of what we call “literary.”

So, I wanted to find a dissertation project that would let me think about those people, and that’s how I ended up at cookbooks as a kind of writing that would shape culture. [It] could be related to that big cultural idea but could also include nonprofessional writers.

What did you want to do differently with “Unpalatable” versus the first book?

The first book was my basically my dissertation but with some revision and new material. This book [“Unpalatable”] came fully formed.

What they have in common is that they both look at southern cookbooks published between 1990 and the present.

I also take in the same parts of the cookbook. I’m mostly interested in not the recipes themselves, but the text around it: Headnotes, the introduction, the storytelling elements of cookbooks.

“Inventing Authenticity” was about how writers convince readers that they’re authentically southern, and one way to do that is by rooting yourself in the past, but that’s difficult for southern writers to do, because the southern past is full of really sad things: slavery, poverty, segregation. Some writers use the phrase “a checkered past” as a euphemism.

If you want to be in the south, you can’t ignore those painful parts. A lot of people will use them to say, “I’m authentically southern because I have a connection to a past that slavery is part of,” or “I have a connection to a past where my family is poor farmers.”  If you go about it wrong, you might alienate the audience and make them not want to perform the recipe.

How many cookbooks did you pull from while researching “Unpalatable?”

For my first book, I looked at 90 different cookbooks. I was trying to get a broad view. This one, it’s about 15 or 20. I was more interested in good examples than bad examples.

One of the first ones that really put me on this journey was a book called “Secrets of the Southern Table” by Virginia Willis. It really had a political angle. It was more journalistic in style. She was doing profiles of other people. She intentionally wants to create a portrait of a diverse south.

Through your research into southern cookbooks, what other kinds of cultures and cuisines have you been exposed to or learned about?

There is a basic story of a black-and-white binary, that that’s the only two people who ever lived in the south. But a lot of books are also trying to uncover the indigenous presence in the south and give them a voice in the creation of the culture. Another book called “Victuals” by Ronni Lundy focuses on immigration to Appalachia, and what we think about as Appalachian foodways come from German, Scotch, Irish, and lots of other European influences. And of course, always, African, especially west African cuisine.

What should people know about the book?

It’s not a cookbook! That’s a common misconception. I’ve never written a cookbook. I want to; I want to ghostwrite other people’s cookbooks really bad.

It’s available now. Pre-orders have gone out. And you can buy it from the University Press of Mississippi or you can find it on Amazon. I’m going to have a bunch in my office.