Interview: Carrie Helms Tippen, scholar of cookbooks
I first became aware of the work of Carrie Helms Tippen at the Baltimore Book Festival, where she was in conversation with Hannah Howard and Soleil Ho in 2018. That was my introduction to Tippen and Howard’s work, but now I count all three as people I admire.
Tippen was discussing her book Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity. I picked up a copy. I was delighted to find such scholarly affirmation of my belief that cookbooks are more than just recipes.
With her new book Unpalatable: Stories of Pain and Pleasure in Southern Cookbooks, she continues that discussion. I knew I had to interview her for my blog when I read her takes on how cookbooks are generally meant to promote pleasure, but how recipes can intersect with mourning and death in interesting ways. This is highly relevant to my next book, and my copy of Unpalatable is already full of sticky flags.
Despite her Southern origins and themes, Tippen currently works as an Associate Professor of English and Humanities Department Chair at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In addition to her own books, she is the series editor of the Ingrid G. Houck Series on Food and Foodways at University Press of Mississippi, and has had work published in scholarly journals Gastronomica, Food and Foodways, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society.
Tippen’s books are written more for scholars than casual readers, but as an aspiring scholar obsessed with cookbooks, they are right up my alley.
Can you share a little with my readers about your feelings on cookbooks as historical/cultural documents?
Published or unpublished, cookbooks and recipe collections are hugely important as historical and cultural documents. I was profoundly influenced by a couple of my grad school professors who worked in a niche of literary studies that we call “recovery.” Their goal was to find writers of the past – mostly women and people of color – who had not been given the respect by the academy they had earned. Perhaps in their time they were super popular, but somehow, literary scholars had overlooked them in favor of “The Great Works.” Or they may not have had access to formal publication channels, but their archives show they were ahead of their time or massively influential from backstage. “Recovering” or rediscovering these writers shows us a more thorough picture of the past while also broadening the voices that make up our culture, now and in the future.
I think that cookbooks are a perfect site for this kind of recovery. While the tastes of the marketplace for novels and poetry ebb and flow, cookbooks remain steady and reliable sellers. And unlike novels and poetry, just about everybody’s grandma and auntie can participate. I love how in cookbooks ordinary women document, innovate, and create culture!
Are there any particular cookbooks that really influenced you towards taking these books seriously from an academic perspective?
My interest in cookbooks turned academic, but it started very personally with my grandmother Jo Welty’s recipe collection (I always name my grandmothers so that they are people, not just their family role). It was a giant 3-ring-binder with plastic page protector sleeves. She had helped compile a fundraising cookbook for the elementary school where she taught music, and that cookbook became the organizing structure for her recipe collection for the rest of her life. For decades, she added to it with clippings from newspapers and magazines and cards from friends and family. She was an early adopter of all technologies, and she discovered quickly that the internet was made for recipe sharing. She printed so many! I knew this collection was valuable to me and my family, but I could also see that it was valuable from an academic perspective, too. Jo Welty was making a book, an autobiography and a family history and a cultural archive. What she was doing there was a kind of writing that was creative, collaborative, and completely understudied. It was easy for me to take her seriously as an artist and writer, but I had to find the language to describe what she was doing so that others would take her, and the gazllions of women like her, seriously, too.
For those of us who are not academics but just love cookbooks and recipes, how do you think your research and analysis overlaps with just collecting and/or reading, if at all.
I love talking to cookbook collectors and readers about my work and theirs! I’m one of them! I believe with all my heart that the kind of imagination it takes to be a good reader of cookbooks is special. It takes so much reader participation for “sauté onion until translucent” to become an image, a smell, a sound, and a flavor in your imagination. The store of information and skill that is called up by an instruction to “whip until stiff peaks form” or “make a shaggy dough” or even “mince” is boggling. I hope my work goes at least a little way into making collectors and readers see that what they do is deeper and richer and more worthy of attention than maybe even they have considered.
The second thing that I hope I can bring to a collector or reader is an invitation to expect more and better of cookbook writers today and in the future. You and your readers know that some cookbooks of the past promote a kind of antebellum nostalgia that has racist motivations. Some of the more recent cookbooks that I study still call up those same fantasies about The Old South and The Lost Cause, even if they obscure the more obviously racist statements. I hope that my work can help collectors and readers to see when writers are using stories of the South that have the potential to do harm, to dig deeper trenches for tired old lies that keep us from moving forward. I want my work to recognize and amplify writers who are doing good with their words and recipes so that collectors and readers can use their purchasing power to show editors and publishers what kind of stories and cookbooks we want to see more of.
How has your experience been introducing students to cookbooks in this new way, in an academic setting? Have any interesting insights or revelations emerged?
This is the best part of my job. I incorporate at least one cookbook in almost all of my classes. In my First Year Writing class, I ask students brand new to college to practice analyzing arguments and using the language of rhetoric by reading cookbooks. They write an essay explaining the ways that cookbooks attempt to persuade their readers to cook their recipes: appealing photography and design, descriptions of flavor and texture, assurances of weight loss/muscle gain or other definitions of health, promises that other people will love the food (or the cook), suggestions that this way of cooking is ethical/moral/sustainable, etc. Few of my first year college students have ever used a cookbook for cooking, and even fewer of them have thought about a cookbook as something to read or critique. What surprises me most is how quickly they are ready to accept that something as “common” or “popular” as a cookbook can be full of meaning. They don’t really bring with them the same assumptions about “high” and “low” literature and culture that I experienced as a student.
In Early American Writers, I assign Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery from 1796. It was not the first cookbook published in the US; printers frequently took advantage of the lack of international copyright law to copy European cookbooks that were proven sellers. American Cookery was the first to emerge from a local writer as a record of local cuisine. I mean, it also has a lot of recipes copied from older British cookbooks, but what I think is most important is that it shows a first attempt to define a brand new national cuisine and culture. Scholars sometimes call it a second Declaration of Independence! We only had a ratified Constitution for 7 years by the time the book came out. We barely had such a thing as a unique American government, and already Simmons argued there was such a thing as a uniquely American way of cooking and eating.
I think everyone’s favorite, though, is Maya Angelou’s Hallelujah! The Welcome Table. They find the stories so entertaining, and I almost always have one or two who are ready to go out and try the recipes. We read parts of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and then we read parts of the cookbook that refer to the same events from the memoir so we can talk about the differences in the genres. Not everything from the memoir makes it into the cookbook, and the cookbook stories have a moral or a tidy happy ending that the memoir avoids. We learn a lot about what makes a cookbook a unique form of writing.
Just for fun, if you have them, I’d love to know a few of your favorite cookbooks to cook from versus to read.
My go-to for baking is Joy of Cooking. It has the answer to every question. It is the source of all wisdom. When I want to make it right, I go to Joy. I also love Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Italian Cooking; she demystifies it all and makes complex procedures seem easy. Even if it totally crashes my credibility, I’m going to admit that I have been cooking from meal delivery kits for years, and some of my favorite weeknight dinners come from those recipes.
I loved reading Patty Pinner’s Sweets: A Collection of Soul Food Desserts and Memories. The voice is so strong, and the cast of characters from her family tree are delightful and familiar. I liked Matthew Raiford’s Bress ‘n’ Nyam: Gullah Geechee Recipes from a Sixth-Generation Farmer for the stories and lovely prose. I can’t stop thinking about a headnote for Za’atar Roasted Chicken that is pure poetry. I have never cooked a recipe from Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, but I liked feeling like Samin Nosrat was my very smart, creative, and encouraging friend! I learned so much that I use when cooking every day.
In what ways do you think cookbooks or even recipes themselves will change as more people turn to them for history, genealogy, and cultural study?
Interesting question! I think cookbooks are already changing, even in the few years that I have been researching and writing about them. The narrative headnote per recipe is now standard, but I see them getting less informative (like defining terms or telling you how to serve) and more personal. I think we’ll see headnotes become even more uniformly focused on communicating something about the historical, cultural, and personal significance of the dish on offer. I am also seeing lots of creative ways for organizing the chapters of a cookbook that deviate from the typical “soup to nuts” courses. We may see more that are organized by seasons, ingredients, occasions, themes, and maybe even personal and historical eras.
I’m interested, too, in the ways that home cooks today are making their own personal recipe collections. Janet Theophano’s book Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives Through the Cookbooks They Wrote really convinced me that the collections of ordinary home cooks are vital to historical and cultural study.One of my grandmothers, Jo Welty, had a binder, and the other, Dorothy Helms Grady, had a box of recipe cards, clippings, and handwritten slips of paper. I keep a couple of handwritten notebooks that I started when I was in grad school. But I also have a great big library on Pinterest and scattered things in my phone’s Notes app. I kept a folder of recipes from my meal delivery kits for a while, but once I memorized them, I threw them out. A lot of the time, I look up a recipe online every time I want to use it instead of saving it somewhere! Genealogists and historians of the future will have some really interesting investigating to do to re-collect how we cook today.
