Writing in the kitchen
Subtitle: essays on Southern literature and foodways
By: edited by David A. Davis and Tara Powell ; foreword by Jessica B. Harris
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2014
Language: eng
Number of pages: 245
ISBN-13: 9781496807977; 9781628460230
Subjects: Food in literature; Food; History and criticism; American literature
Description: "Scarlett O'Hara munched on a radish and vowed never to go hungry again. Vardaman Bundren ate bananas in Faulkner's Jefferson, and the Invisible Man dined on a sweet potato in Harlem. Although food and stories may be two of the most prominent cultural products associated with the South, the connections between them have not been thoroughly explored until now. Southern food has become the subject of increasingly self-conscious intellectual consideration. The Southern Foodways Alliance, the Southern Food and Beverage Museum, food-themed issues of Oxford American and Southern Cultures, and a spate of new scholarly and popular books demonstrate this interest. Writing in the Kitchen explores the relationship between food and literature and makes a major contribution to the study of both southern literature and of southern foodways and culture more widely. This collection examines food writing in a range of literary expressions, including cookbooks, agricultural journals, novels, stories, and poems. Contributors interpret how authors use food to explore the changing South, considering the ways race, ethnicity, class, gender, and region affect how and what people eat. They describe foods from specific southern places such as New Orleans and Appalachia, engage both the historical and contemporary South, and study the food traditions of ethnicities as they manifest through the written word"--

"Scarlett O'Hara munched on a radish and vowed never to go hungry again. Vardaman Bundren ate bananas in Faulkner's Jefferson, and the Invisible Man dined on a sweet potato in Harlem. Although food and stories may be two of the most prominent cultural products associated with the South, the connections between them have not been throughly explored until now. Southern food has become the subject of increasingly self-conscious intellectual consideration. The Southern Foodways Alliance, the Southern Food and Beverage Museum, food-themed issue of Oxford American and Southern Cultures, and a spate of new scholarly and popular books demonstrate this interest. Writing in the Kitchen explores the relationship between food and literature and makes a major contribution to the study of both southern literature and of southern foodways and culture more widely. This collection examines food writing in a range of literary expressions, including cookbooks, agricultural journals, novels, stories, and poems. Contributors interpret how authors use food to explore the changing South, considering the ways race, ethnicity, class, gender, and region affect how and what people eat. They describe foods from specific southern places such as New Orleans and Appalachia, engage both the historical and contemporary South, and study the food traditions of ethnicities as they manifest through the written word"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Foreword / Jessica B. Harris; title: Reading southern food / David A. Davis and Tara Powell; title: Book farming: Thomas Jefferson and the necessity of reading in the Agrarian south / David S. Shields; title: Culinary conversations of the plantation south / Marcie Cohen Ferris; title: Marketing the mammy: revisions of labor and middle-class identity in southern cookbooks, 1880-1930 / Sarah Walden; title: The cookbook story: transitional narratives in southern foodways / Elizabeth S.D. Engelhardt; title: The double bind of southern food in Willa Cather's Sapphira and the slave girl / Ann Romines; title: Eating poetry in New Orleans / Ruth Salvaggio; title: A matter of taste: reading food and class in Appalachian literature / Erica Abrams Locklear; title: Invisible in the kitchen: racial intimacy, domestic labor, and civil rights / David A. Davis; title: Eating in another woman's kitchen: reading food and class in the woman-loving fiction of Ann Allen Shockley / Psyche Williams-Forson; title: Consuming memories: the embodied politics of remembering in Vietnamese American literature of the U.S. south / Lisa Hinrichsen; title: The economics of eating: native recipes for survival in contemporary southern literature / Melanie Benson Taylor; title: "Gnaw that bone clean": foodways in contemporary southern poetry / Tara Powell.