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Podcast: New Books in Food
Episode: Carrie Helms Tippen, "Unpalatable: Stories of Pain and Pleasure in Southern Cookbooks" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)
Description: The cookbook genre is highly conventional with an orientation toward celebration and success. From glossy photographs to heartwarming stories and adjective-rich ingredient lists, the cookbook tradition primes readers for pleasure. Yet the overarching narrative of the region is often one of pain, loss, privation, exploitation, poverty, and suffering of various kinds. While some cookbook writers go to great lengths to avoid reminding readers of this painful past, others invoke that pain as a marker of southern authenticity. Still others use stories of southern suffering as an opportunity to make space for reconciliation, reparation, or apology for past wrongs.
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