The Legitimacy of Cookbooks as Rhetoric of Southern Culture

Community cookbooks operate through a rhetoric of place as ways of thinking
about belonging and influencing communal identities. They reveal much about a
community, including the sharing of memories and tradition, geographical identification,
and representation of socio-cultural hierarchies and habits. For that reason, this paper
advances the claim that the discourse and visuality in community cookbooks, specifically
the cookbooks 200 Years of Charleston Cooking, Charleston Receipts, and Charleston
Receipts Repeats published during the height of a renaissance in Southern literature,
influenced the identity of “Southerness” which, taken in conjunction with place, space,
and time has resulted in a unification of the changing American South. Using Carolyn
Miller’s notions of genre criticism on the basis of genres as social movements,
community cookbooks qualify for the genre label of domestic literature in terms of
content and rhetorical influence. To prove my claim, the use of images, recipes, and
folklore within the pages are analyzed with five a posteriori themes that discuss relations
between a sense of place and its foodways.