Carrie Helms Tippen - Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity

I come from a family of writing women. The women in my family are committed diarists. They have written memoirs and school plays. They have written poems, songs, local newspaper columns, Sunday School lessons, newsletters for national conventions of music educators, digital databases of American folk songs. I come from saving women, inheriting and bequeathing women. They saved journals and songs and scrapbooks. They saved necklaces and brooches. They saved newspaper clippings, photographs, quilts, dresses, family records, and, yes, recipes. I came to know the women in my family most intimately through their recipe boxes when I began to learn how to cook. I was twenty-six, living far from home, and what I wanted most in the world was a genuine buttermilk biscuit.

I had resisted learning to cook, always. As a child, when it was time to cook or clean or do anything so mundane as set the table, I was somehow never where my mother could find me. Then, as a young adult and fledgling feminist, I had an idea that my mothers cooking was a mechanism of her oppression, that the time she spent preparing meals for men and children would have been better spent in her real work. When I got married and received cookbooks for wedding gifts, I resented them and the implication that cooking was a condition of wifehood. The beautiful silver serving trays may as well have been manacles; The Joy of Cooking, my ball and chain. Id have nothing to do with them.

But on a snowy day in West Virginia, on what felt like (but probably wasnt) the tenth snowy day in a row, I wanted a real Thanksgiving meal with Grandma Taylors angel biscuits. My grandfather, Buck Welty, had died in July, and in early November, my beloved grandmother, Nella Jo Welty, had passed away, too. That Thanksgiving, in the snow, far from home, in a world without either of my grandparents, I was hungry. If I wanted that Thanksgiving meal, I was going to have to do it myself.

I called my mother, Joburta Welty Helms, and as she read recipes for broccoli and rice casserole and pecan pie over the phone, I took them down in a spiral-bound notebook. I knew that she was reading the recipes from three-by-fivenotecards that had an avocado and harvest-gold colored spray of flowers in the top right corner. I knew the cards were kept in a wooden box with a cluster of grapes painted on the lid. I knew that the card for angel biscuits was misspelledAngle Biscuits. Maybe I never cooked a meal, but I had baked a few cookies, and I knew those cards. I knew that most of the cards were written in my mothers own handwriting but that they came from my great-grandmother, Mary Bearden Taylor, of whom I have no memory.