Carrie Helms Tippen is associate professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Tippen is author of Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity. She is series editor of the Ingrid G. Houck Series on Food and Foodways at University Press of Mississippi and one of the hosts of the New Books in Food podcast from the New Books Network. Her work has been published in Gastronomica, Food and Foodways, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society.

• PrefaceAcknowledgments"Party with a Purpose": Celebration, Suffering, and Social JusticeThe Urgency of Pleasure: Theorizing a Rhetoric of Pleasure in Cookbooks"A Lot of Past to Reckon with": Grappling with Slavery and RacismMaking Do: Pain of Poverty and Pleasure of ResilienceA Season of Sweetness: Gardening, Canning, and Women’s Labor on FarmsKeep Southern and Cut the Fat: Body Fat and Illness in Wellness Cookbooks"Useful in a Fearful Time": Responding to Grief and Death in Funeral CookbooksTowards a Conclusion: Intersections and ImplicationsIndex

Unpalatable: Stories of Pain and Pleasure in Southern Cookbooks presents a novel and sophisticated analysis of conventions within the cookbook genre within the metanarrative of the South. Author Carrie Helms Tippen extends previous work that grappled with notions of authenticity in southern cookbooks and looks specifically at how particular cookbooks contend with pain of various forms—slavery and racism, poverty, gendered labor, body shaming and illness, and death." - Catarina Passidomo, Southern Foodways Alliance Associate Professor of Southern Studies and associate professor of anthropology, University of Mississippi