“Squirrel, if You're so Inclined”

Abstract

This paper examines how a rhetorical reading of recipes as narratives can reveal much about how recipe writers interpellate their audiences and what arguments they make about collective identity. I examined two iterations of Brunswick stew recipes from contemporary Southern lifestyle magazines Southern Living and Garden and Gun to see how these two magazines compare in their approach to food, composition of audience, and definitions of Southern identity. I found that the recipe writers of Southern Living used narrative elements in their recipes to reinforce the importance of cooking in the home, addressing the audience as busy suburban mothers, and defining authentic Southern identity as middle class and progressive. Garden and Gun's recipe narrative emphasized cooking in the restaurant, interpellating the audience as upwardly mobile and cosmopolitan. Both magazines use the recipe narrative to direct attention away from the South's “checkered past” and present a post-race New South.

Keywords:

• rhetoric
• narrative
• recipes
• Southern states
• identity
• magazines

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Carrie Helms Tippen

Carrie Helms Tippen is a doctoral candidate in English at Texas Christian University studying food and culture in twentieth and twenty-first century American literature. Her dissertation, entitled “Stories of Southern Cooking: Writing Culinary Knowledge and Cultural Power in Recipe Origin Narratives,” examines the rhetorical functions of recipe origin stories in contemporary Southern cookbooks and magazines. Department of English, Texas Christian University, TCU Box 297270, Fort Worth, TX 76129, USA ([email protected]).