White Trash Cooking: ‘exploding’ the cookbook

Abstract Ernest Mickler’s White Trash Cooking, with its focus on a disparaged population, its addition of a collection of documentary photographs alongside the recipes, and the camp hilarity of its authorial voice, has long been judged to transgress, shatter or even explode the generic conventions of the cookbook. Mickler’s book clearly does satirize the seriousness of cookbooks’ attention to polite norms, lifestyle aspirations and good housekeeping. Its satire is combined (albeit rather awkwardly) with a range of high cultural references deriving from Mickler’s interests and experiences as well as the work of the Jargon Press on the material Mickler had collected. However, the history of Mickler’s composition of White Trash Cooking draws attention to different, unacknowledged dimensions of the cookbook genre, and in particular to the methodology through which it constructs community. Mickler’s book recalls the sub-genre of community cookbook, but both his definition of ‘white trash’ and the relationship between such a community and the contents are sketchy and uncertain. Mickler asserts that his book presents a cuisine new to the cookbook, but with small justification. This essay examines White Trash Cooking’s composition and its context to re-read Mickler’s work, and uses comparison between White Trash Cooking and other cookbooks of its day to think afresh about the cookbook genre.


Introduction
This article takes Ernest Matthew Mickler's White Trash Cooking (1986) as a starting point for considering afresh the practice of cookbook writing. White Trash Cooking offers a compelling case for study. It is one of those rare examples of the genre that not only enjoyed considerable attention on its appearance, but that has also subsequently received that rare accolade among cookbooks, an anniversary edition: a tribute normally reserved for cooks and books that have acquired a talismanic national presence or that have been judged to speak to shifts in cultural attitudes as well as traditional culinary practice. 1 No claims have been made, though, for the impact of White Trash Cooking on national foodways or mainstream attitudes. On the contrary, the commentary on Mickler's book has been distinctive in its emphasis on the distance between White Trash Cookery and the aspirations and efficiencies that usually underpin the cookbook. In examining White Trash Cooking here, I want to acknowledge its distance from cookbook conventions, but also to draw attention to the ways in which Mickler's work follows standard practices within the cookbook genre that are not acknowledged. Certainly, there is a challenge in White Trash Cooking's delight in the foodways of a caste as derided as 'white trash' and the mischief of Mickler's suggestion that 'you'll want to place this cookbook next to the Holy Bible on your coffee table' (5). 2 Readers have also relished the text's campness. Few comments on the book resist citing the recipe for 'Tutti's Fruited Porkettes' with its mischievous reference to the sexual practices of what was, at the time, a population of gay men quite as disparaged as 'white trash': 'fruit,' 'porking' and the porkettes' fitness for 'the table of a queen' (29). 3 There can be no question that White Trash Cooking offered a broad satire on the cookbook. The cover image, in which the photograph (bordered by images of mass-produced food) of a surly young woman -'anything but a southern belle' as one reviewer put it 4 -looks out at the reader with an accusatory glare, is not merely unconventional. It announces a register of social behavior and food consumption altogether at odds with the traditions of self-improvement and lifestyle adaptations that are the bedrock of cookbook writing. The recipes in White Trash Cooking are clearly not the material of healthy diets, good housekeeping or dinner party savoir faire; on the contrary. Those who puffed and reviewed White Trash Cooking responded with a joyful expression of release from the polite culinary norms that it created. The following exclamations adorned the covers of the second edition: 'This is it. I believe this is sholy it. Yep. This is good.' 'This book makes you want to spit in yer skillet and start cookin' vittles. ' 5 Instead, the recipes offer relief from life's vicissitudes and are eaten in response to hunger:

FRIED EGG SANDWICH
Spread two slices of bread with mayonnaise. Put the fried egg (soft or hard) between them after you've salted and peppered it.
Sometimes this is the only way you can eat breakfast. (75) White Trash Cooking, abandoning the realms of contemporary consumption and taste, reminds its readers of what is familiar, on hand, and assembled without effort or instruction:

SUE ELLA LIGHTFOOT'S GRAHAM CRACKER CRUST
Mash up some Graham crackers with a fork. Mix with oleo margarine until all stuck together. Press into a pie pan. That's all there is to it. (111) Beyond the mischief, the embrace of the delights of careless informality and the acknowledgement of the routine need to get fed, though, Mickler's book offered a more specific challenge to his audience by identifying these recipes with a population that the mainstream associated with rubbish. 6 'White trash' is a term that operates, as Matt Wray (2006) argues, 'to humiliate and shame, to insult and dishonor, to demean and stigmatize' those thus named (1). 7 Not only were Mickler's 'white trash' apparently indifferent to their disgrace, but White Trash Cooking offered a comparison between the cooking of 'white trash' and that of Paul Bocuse, the high priest of nouvelle cuisine at the time. 8 Further, the design of White Trash Cooking pointedly referenced a sub-genre of the cookbook form fondly associated with virtuous communities: the community cookbook, with its ring-bound form, brightly covered and simply designed appearance, its pithily-written recipes and its naming of women associated with the church, charity or community identified by the book. 9 A gap yawned in White Trash Cooking between the food of a population identified as disturbing, lazy and poorly nourished and the useful recipes collected in community cookbooks. Recipes such as 'High Calorie Pick-Me-Up' , for example, mocked the sober practicalities of the community cookbook by gesturing toward lifestyles stripped of pretention or display:

HIGH CALORIE PICK-ME-UP
Pour a small bag of Tom's peanuts into a cold Pepsi. Turn it up and eat and drink at the same time.
Raenelle told me this was one of Betty Sue's concoctions. She said: "But it's so trashy she won't own up to it. " (131).
White Trash Cooking also stood out in being published under the high-cultural auspices of Jonathan Williams, poet, folklorist and devotee of rural eccentricity. The first edition of the book was published by Williams's Jargon Society press, a small, financially fragile but distinguished outfit dealing especially in poetry and photography depicting Appalachia and the rural South. 10 The most conspicuous traces of the Jargon Society's interests appear in the form of a group of 45 colored photographs gathered at the center of the book. Instead of the usual glossy shots of perfectly executed dishes and carefully styled kitchens, here was a series of photographs taken by Mickler -portraits, documentary, still life -with an eye to recent traditions of composition in rural photography and demonstrating an esthetic restraint quite at odds with the broad humor and startling verisimilitude of the rest of the book. While Mickler makes no reference to his photographs in his introduction or elsewhere in the text, Jonathan Williams's own congratulatory puff, printed on the inside front cover, refers to the author as 'a visual artist by calling' and identifies the tradition in which Mickler was working as elaborating 'a picture of Southern living suggested by the photographer William Christenberry. ' Meanwhile, Mickler himself proposed another, still more distinguished cultural context for his work in the literary representation of poor and deprived whites of the rural and small-town South: 'Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams' (1). It is surely this combination of a celebration of 'trashy' food and material identified with high cultural seriousness that has prompted John T.  to argue that White Trash Cooking actually 'explodes' the generic conventions of the cookbook, casting aside its characteristic strains of culinary and lifestyle aspiration in favor of recuperating the vitality of a largely ignored population of Americans. 11 Sherrie A. Inness (2006) makes a similar kind of point in arguing that Mickler is bent on the recovery of foodways of the poor in such recipes as the following:

PORE FOLK SOUP
For a light supper, crumble soda crackers in warm milk. Salt, pepper and eat with a spoon (27).
Inness argues that, once Mickler had radically suggested that white trash cooking 'should be embraced, American society would never be the same again' (138). 12 These claims need to be considered carefully. It was not the case, for example, that engagement or identification with 'white trash' was intolerable to the mainstream in the 1980s, or that 'trashiness' could not operate in tandem with high-cultural references to canonical photography or literature. As Wray and Newitz (1997) argue, 'white trash can … be a version of victim chic, where glamorously marginalized white folks attempt to emulate what they perceive to be the privileged authenticity of victimized … groups' (5). So, for example, in 1976 a group of twelve Southern poets published an anthology, White Trash: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern Poets, identifying themselves and their work as marginal to the mainstream poetry scene and authentically of the region. Interestingly, their volume opened with an authenticating reference to food:

Turnip greens, turnip greens
Good old turnip greens,

Cornbread and buttermilk
And good old turnip greens. (xiii) 13 What made White Trash Cooking audacious, however, was not this juxtaposition of high culture with the rural poor, or a sentimentalizing of 'good old turnip greens.' Rather, it was the appearance of that life and those foodways in the instructional setting of a genre that assumed the desire of readers to do better: to produce food that could be categorized as good in whatever terms the cookbook concerned chose to imagine that category. This is not to say that food disassociated from nutritional goals and lifestyle aspirations was necessarily unwelcome in the cookery writing of the time. Junk food, for example, only slightly more distantly associated with rubbish than 'trash' , was not off limits for a cookbook. But the critical difference between a publication such as Lydia Saiger's Junk Food Cookbook (1980) and White Trash Cooking is made evident in the announcement on the cover of Saiger's book that the reader would be instructed on 'how you can make [junk food] the wholesome way.' The food that, by implication, readers might guiltily wish to eat could be transformed into the food that they ought to be eating. There are delicious recipes in White Trash Cooking, but there is no 'wholesome' version of, say, Betty Sue's 'High Calorie Pick-Me-Up'; for no such wholesome variant could deliver the charge of pleasure delivered even by reading about a snack so evidently bereft of nutritional value or cultural capital. These recipes recall a world of culinary practice that readers were denying themselves, or perhaps just wolfing down in private.
Without question, then, White Trash Cooking was a provocative intervention in the genre and intentionally so. Now, however, I want to turn this observation on its head and consider what in Mickler's approach to his subjects and their cooking is characteristic of the cookbook. Mickler's White Trash Cookery not only operates in ways that are found across the genre, albeit ways that are not noticed, but is useful in drawing our attention to the cookbook's often troubled projects.

White Trash and 'white trash' 14 : constructing community in cookbooks
The scholarly discourse on food and cookery is full of statements about the way in which foodways express and foster communal norms at the level of quotidian practice and preference. Narratives of the significance of food and cooking in forging, strengthening and recovering communal links are commonplace and often deeply compelling. 15 Donna R. Gabacciao (1998) describes how 'food … entwines intimately with what makes a culture unique, binding taste and satiety to group loyalties' (8). It is a simple matter to move from this point to argue that cookbooks also closely follow and give readers access to communal cultural practice. Katherine Vester (2015), for example, reminds us of the link between 'cookbooks and the heteronormative organization of gender and society' (137). Seen in this light, the contents of White Trash Cooking record and celebrate the 'group loyalty' of a poor population refreshingly uncoupled from 'the heteronormative organization of gender and society' in the national sense. In this vein, Mickler offers practiced and permissible variations on the recipes. Preparing 'Fruited Sour Cream Salad (White Grapes)' you may cut the grapes in half 'if you want to.' He uses the anecdotal to sharpen our sense of the association between place and recipe: 'Fruited Sour Cream Salad (White Grapes)' and 'Fruited Sour Cream Salad (Bananas)' are, 'Jinny Beaufort Houseworth says,' both 'flavorites [sic] at every brunch in Ty Ty, Georgia!"' Not only recipes are shared but locality, social ritual and jokes. As Walter M. Odum (1986) argued in an early review of White Trash Cooking, Mickler's text 'softens and makes benign' the deviations from societal norms represented in the term 'white trash (72). At the same time, though in a very different register, Mickler's photographs at the center of the book offer snapshots of a much richer world of communal experience and response. Without commentary or names, they evoke the culture of a remote rural setting both fertile and ramshackle; a loyalty to old things as well as a scene of neglect.
Why, then, do we find Mickler getting entangled in a confusing commentary about the very community the book seems to want to lift away from denigration: 'white trash'? Mickler, it seems, is immersed in 'white trash' culture to the point that he understands -and lovingly appreciates -its food practices and culture and wishes to defend both. But even as he embraces the energy and integrity of 'trash' identity, he is evidently hesitant in positioning himself within it. On the back cover of the book, he quotes Raenelle and Betty Sue proclaiming that "Ernie went from white trash to WHITE TRASH overnight."' The nature of the transformation they are describing, though, is not explained. There are clear signs, too, that he wishes to stand at a distance from his subjects. In his introduction Mickler claims that there is a difference between those 'Trash' who are worthy of respect (that we can only assume to be those represented in the book) and those 'trash' who are not. Both the flyleaf comments written by Jonathan Williams and Mickler's introduction stridently address this distinction. Mickler declares that 'There's white trash and there's White Trash. Manners and pride separate the two.' Here is his explanation: Common white trash has very little in the way of pride and no manners to speak of, and hardly any respect for anybody or anything. But where I come from in North Florida you never failed to say "yes ma'm" and "no sir", never sat on a made-up bed (or put your hat on it), never opened someone else's icebox, never left food on your plate, never left the table without permission, and never forgot to say "thank you" for the teeniest favour. That's the way the ones before us were raised and that's the way they raised us in the South. (1) In this passage, Mickler appears to be arguing that 'White Trash' follow mainstream behavioral norms of politeness and self-restraint, and that they understand the 'rules' . And yet the text itself seems to want us to enjoy -as he does -that very indifference to mainstream norms that defines 'white trash' .
Thus, in White Trash Cooking, we have the author's doubly unstable position as Mickler situates himself at a distance attitudinally from both 'trash' and mainstream, while at the same time struggling with the definition and constitution of the social world of his subjects ('white trash' , 'White Trash' and 'WHITE TRASH'). It is this mystification around the position of the cookbook writer and the constitution of the community that the cookbook constructs that I am interested in drawing attention to. Mickler finds himself in deep water with writing about a despised caste, and, as I shall argue later, White Trash Cooking makes more sense as a recovery of the energy and rebelliousness of the gay community of Key West than as a record of the experience of 'white trash culture' . But the task of defining and describing community is one that the cookbook wrestles with, both in situating the writer and in bringing a coherent community into the textual form of a recipe book. Again and again, the completeness and integrity of the community -social, local, regional, national -is announced in cookbooks and, again and again, the value of that cultural and social coherence is undermined.
In turning to another example, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' Cross Creek Cookery (1942), I have chosen a text of a very different provenance and spirit to White Trash Cooking, and deliberately so. Rawlings' book is the work of a more experienced and self-conscious writer. We find her framing her cookbook as a kind of spin-off to her already published and very well-known novels drawing on her life in Cross Creek: South Moon Under (1933), Golden Apples (1935), The Yearling (1938), Cross Creek (1942. 16 In her introduction, Rawlings explains that the references to local food in these previous works have generated admiring correspondences worldwide: 'Eight out of ten letters about Cross Creek ask for a recipe, or pass on a recipe, or speak of suffering over my chat of Cross Creek dishes' (2). Once again, tensions surface in the text: on the one hand, Rawling's subject is the cookery and culture of Cross Creek, a remote and precarious community in which she has become immersed; on the other, she addresses her audience as an exception in that community and in the knowledge of readers' different norms and assumptions. This certainly not a project that seeks to shock or amuse. On the contrary, what we have here is a text grounded in the expectations that Rawlings' previous work has aroused among her readers, as well as, presumably, the author's wish to continue working the material that has brought her fame.
However, as Mickler both relishes his immersion in 'white trash' culture but stutters over identifying himself with it, Rawlings identifies herself as living at the heart of Cross Creek, but presents herself as apart from it as well. She shows the cuisine of this hyper-local culture (Cross Creek was home to seven families at the time that Rawlings settled there) being produced in her own rather genteel household with the help of a cook and eaten by a circle almost exclusively made up of outsiders: her family, friends, correspondents, 'the Embroidery Club' , and the annual 'buffet supper … served to a group of male intelligentsia who paid me the compliment of coming to me once a year for their meeting' (57). Further, Rawlings is wont to distinguish her own Cross Creek recipes from those prepared by 'rural Florida folk' in Cross Creek: Rural Florida folk cook green peas, which we call English peas, and fresh lima beans, which we call Fordhooks, with white bacon, but here I part company with the rest of the Creek. Nothing but Dora's butter, with perhaps a little of her cream, is delicate enough for their pale sweet taste (62) The cooking of Cross Creek seems less a matter of how food is prepared and cooked than what can be locally obtained. Rawlings mediates Cross Creek cooking by using her own more 'delicate' preferences. Finally, as Mickler is at pains to identify himself as the worthier 'White Trash' rather than the more abject 'white trash, ' so Rawlings, a White woman, takes care to distinguish her own Cross Creek recipes from the Cross Creek recipes produced by African American women. She writes that she is 'torn between the type of biscuits made by my mother and my grandmother and by me before I became a Floridian, and the biscuits made by the best of Negro cooks. ' In the absence from the book of a description of biscuits 'made by the best of Negro cooks, ' we must conclude that 'my family sort' is to be preferred (21).
Many writers of cookbooks position themselves in relation to a community -such as 'white trash' or 'Cross Creek' -that supposedly has a homogeneity deriving from broader circumstances of place, economy, status, visibility to the mainstream, and so on. Whatever our assumptions about the sturdy link between culture, foodways and recipes, though, it is the exclusions of community and the impact of differences of class and 'race' that the authors of cookbooks, attentive to their individual identity as author, allow to move toward the surface of the text. In Rawlings, these differences concern the status of Black women in Cross Creek and the distinguishing cultural capital of her own circle of friends. In Mickler, we have the 'white trash' that has no 'manners' and Mickler's own familiarity, made manifest in his series of photographs, with distinguished writers and photographers. This instability of categories of community and the problems of identification with it troubles cookbooks. But the brittleness of their claims of understanding and identification do not end with the construction of community.

'Down every back road between Slap out and Slap in' 17 : collecting the cookbook
Many cookbooks describe writers collecting recipes through purposeful movement as visitors, tourists, travelers, settlers and expatriates. Mickler's account is typical in authorizing his work through reference to a comprehensive research trip: ' Away I went, down every back road between Slap Out and Slap In.' Writers are authorized and cookbooks authenticated by anecdotes, acknowledgements and scraps of arcane 'inside' knowledge of the practices of cooking concerned. Indeed, the work of those cookbook writers with greatest prestige in the field is often explicitly linked with a questing movement. So, for example, the reputation of a canonical cookbook writer such as Richard Olney, and the acknowledgement of a profound integrity in his writing about French cooking are fully explained by reference to his move to France and the significance of particular figures he met in France. 18 But if this kind of quest often structures broad accounts of how the cookbook has been achieved, the detail of references to specific discoveries within the text characteristically speaks to a search less systematic than is suggested by the single overarching movement of quest and discovery.
Before I turn back to how White Trash Cooking's shows this practice in action, I want illustrate the general point by showing how a cookbook that is quite opposed to Mickler's in terms of subject and register describes its on-the-ground research into culinary practice: Paula Wolpert's Cooking of South West France (1983). Here we find the usual arc of culinary discovery as it conventionally appears in the cookbook: a sojourn in a region, South West France, that can be 'gastronomically defined' , in this case as 'the land of preserved meats' (26). A closer reading of the volume's introductory material reminds us, once again, of the difficulty of stabilizing the link between place, community and cuisine: 'To my surprise I have found that food commentators disagree about just which areas are encompassed by the term South West France' (17). The key point here, though, is that finding the cooking of South West France, wherever and whatever that is, does not involve a trajectory in which knowledge is accrued, but is rather the outcome of an assortment of miscellaneous movements with unpredictable outcomes. For example, Wolpert visits renowned chefs who respond to her in different ways: one opens up his family's traditions to her, another 'sent me everywhere' to understand regional cuisine (6). She sets out to find definitive recipes: 'I spent an entire autumn working up brioche doughs -trying different methods, consulting with bakers and chefs, thinking and rethinking ways of achieving an all-purpose dough' (336). She makes protracted searches for particular foods: truffles, for example, take her and her readers to 'the Chateau de Castel Novel in the Corrèze,' to Cahors to visit Jacques Pébeyre, 'one of the leading harvesters of truffles,' to the market in Périgueux in January, and that of Sarlat in December (8)(9). This is not the steady accumulation of a body of knowledge of a regional cuisine, but a mix of encounters with a profusion of sources.
What makes White Trash Cooking an especially rewarding example of the wealth of experiences that generate a cookbook is our unusually detailed knowledge of the movements undertaken by Mickler over the fourteen years during which he collected the contents of his book. In ' About the Author, ' Mickler's movement out of Florida and back again forms the arc of his life and the context that has generated White Trash Cooking: outwards from rural Palm Valley, Florida to Jacksonville, a social, economic and cultural scene characteristic of the Deep South; onwards from Jacksonville to Mills College, Oakland for a master's degree in fine arts; and then, after a period of travel around the South of around eight years and a sojourn in Mexico, a move back to Florida, this time to the coastal community of Key West. However, White Trash Cooking is not, in terms of its content, an especially Floridian cookbook (whatever that might mean), nor does the journey away from and back to Florida organize the contents of White Trash Cooking. Though eight recipes are identified with Florida, five are attributed to Louisiana (including recipes attributed to Louisiana, New Orleans and Cajun cookery), three each from Alabama and Georgia, two from Texas and Mississippi, and one each from Arkansas, Missouri, North Carolina and South Carolina. In an autobiographical fragment printed on the back cover of the book, beneath his photograph, Mickler recalls with evident pleasure that he can 'just hear Raenelle and Betty Sue at every Tupperware party' talking about him. They are located in Rolling Fork, Mississippi.
Mickler's travels in search of 'white trash' cooking actually track the movements that many gay men made in the US during the 1970s. In his account of Mickler's life, Andrew Holleran (1988) explains Mickler's departure from his home with the statement that 'We all had to leave Florida to be gay.' 19 The originating idea for White Trash Cooking was hatched not in the experience of 'white trash' cooking in Florida or elsewhere in the South, but in California in 1972, when a group of Mickler's friends joked together about doing a 'drag queen riff on the camp host of the TV series The Galloping Gourmet ' (1968-71). 20 Then, in traveling subsequently from the Bay Area to New Orleans and then down to San Miguel in Mexico, Mickler followed what  has called the 'gay vagabond circuit' , before moving back, in 1980, to Key West's gay community and its bars, cafes and guesthouses (92). In returning to Key West, Mickler was also following the well-trodden move of gay men to those urban settings where a gay community and self-expression were available. 21 The assembling of the recipes, meanwhile, was achieved across encounters with wealthy high-cultural circles within gay communities across the South. Mickler's relationship with the distinguished curator William Fagaly in New Orleans involved him putting the book together 'at [Fagaly's] side' . Once in Florida, the wealthy publisher, Kit Woolcott, and the artist and playwright, Cal Yeomans, helped Mickler with layout and the introduction as well as, crucially, approaching publishers. Woolcott also contributed generously to the funding of the first edition with Jargon. 22 In short, the process of writing White Trash Cooking is not summarized in Mickler's reference to exhaustive research. Rather, his comments draw attention to the point that, whatever claims may be made, the cookbook's characteristic mode is one of collection from a variety of sources according to the experiences of the writer. 23 It is both interesting and suggestive to find that, after his travels and years of collaborative work, what Mickler delivered to the Jargon Society in 1984 was a collection: 'a shoe box, full of index cards, a few photos, an author, Ernest Matthew Mickler, and the title' (Jones 2018, 250). Gael Sweeney's (1997) description of a 'white trash esthetic' of 'bricolage' and 'random experimentation with the bits and pieces of culture' seems to fit the bill in terms of describing the process by which the contents of Mickler's book were collected together (249-50). There is also the creative tradition of 'tramping' that Williams had practiced in exploring Appalachian culture. This was a custom of veering off -way off -the beaten track, searching out, enjoying and carefully recording what, to the writer, is the forgotten experience unmediated by modernity, the lack of pretense of the rural poor. As Williams writes in Blues and Roots, Rue and Bluets (Williams 1971): My poetic 'method' … is Peripatetic, and such findings-out are inclined to be brief and quick … where you make it up out of the air, on the run … The poet is the one who wants to stop with the local boy who is digging ramps on the side of Big Bald Mountain and hear what kind of talk he has in his head. ('Introduction, ' n.p.) As Williams relishes happenstance experiences, the sound of names, the record of voices, so Mickler has evident pleasure in naming his subjects and recording their gnomic comments, as when he sets the words, unglossed, of Nelda Welch of Hot Coffee, Mississippi opposite the title page of White Trash Cooking: "She don't know me from Adam's housecat." These terms -exigency, bricolage and happenstance -surely offer apt points of departure for considering how a cookbook is put together. They also, in their suggestion of re-using material to hand, point the way to the role of the recipe in the cookbook.

The recipe
Few texts take a more directly instructional mode than the cookbook does in setting down a recipe. The role of the cookbook writer, if not wholly centered on giving directions, certainly includes the task of recording how ingredients should be prepared if the appropriate outcome is to be achieved. Cookbooks may be full of commentary on different ways of producing each recipe: the traditional, quicker, more economical or healthier versions of making it. Variations are given, as when Mickler offers Charlyss's recipe for black-eyed peas involving canned beans and then Bonnie's which involves dried peas (15)(16). At some level, however, the authenticity of the recipe cannot be compromised if it is to be called, say, 'black eyed peas' . What, then, is the intervention that the cookbook writer makes in writing recipes?
Again, the case of White Trash Cooking is useful here, for, at the end of 1986, the Women's Junior League of Charleston took Mickler to court on the grounds that he had plagiarized 23 of the recipes from their 1981 reprint of Charleston Receipts, a Southern cookbook of 'renowned gentility' (Zafar 1999, 465). In essence, their argument was that Mickler had not made his own intervention. The Women's Junior League won, for Mickler had indeed lifted recipes from Charleston Receipts. The recipe for 'Irish Scalloped Potatoes and Onions,' for example, contributed by 'Mrs. Jack Mayback (Lavinia Huguerin)' was taken word for word from the Receipts by Mickler and printed with the omission of the word 'Irish' , the substitution of 'oleo' for 'butter' and 'dish' for 'casserole' . The final sentence in the Charleston Receipts version of the recipe explained that 'These proportions may be varied according to the size of the casserole, ' while Mickler produced: 'These proportions may be varied according to the size of the dish and the number of people you gotta feed' (Charleston Receipts,104;White Trash Cooking,21). Beyond any argument about Mickler's integrity here -happy as he was to attribute dishes to Clara and Tutti but not to Mrs Jack Mayback or the Charleston Women's Junior League -lies the question of whether Mrs Mayback herself could justifiably call the dish her own. When White Trash Cooking was reprinted by Ten Speed Press, Mickler responded to the court action by changing the recipe's title to 'Jolley's Scalloped Potatoes' and describing and arranging its contents differently (21). Nonetheless, the recipe for cooking scalloped potatoes and onions was the same. What significant difference is to be found, after all, between one or another recipe for 'scalloped potatoes and onions'? Meanwhile, Jonathan Williams was impishly keen in his puff inside the front cover of White Trash Cooking, to liken Mickler's recipes to the acme of refined and fashionable eating of the day: the nouvelle cuisine of Paul Bocuse. Bocuse made fulsome reference to his profound debt to rural tradition in France in the preface to his La Nouvelle Cuisine (1977), but his recipe for scalloped potatoes was also much the same (v). When the recipe of a scion of the Junior League of Charleston women (or her cook) and the methods of nouvelle cuisine are more or less replicated in a 'white trash' (or 'White Trash') recipe, intentionally or otherwise, the matter for consideration is not so much originality or plagiarism as to what claims can ever made for the ownership of recipes.
These squabbles as to the ownership of recipes across caste, nation and probably, in the case of Mickler, sexuality, serve to demonstrate a shared, if misguided belief in the power of recipes to express and convey difference. Arguing about the ownership of recipes as they are inherited, shared and maintained, however, obscures the actual differences in the conditions within which food is accessed. Recipes ignore all but passing reference to the availability of food and ignore the controls around what is grown, eaten and sold that shape its consumption. 24 Mickler's book defends the cooking of people who, in the eyes of the mainstream, are considered to choose the wrong food. It celebrates the pleasures of such simple repasts as a tomato sandwich:

KITCHEN SINK TOMATO SANDWICH
In the peak of the tomato season, chill 1 very large or 2 medium tomatoes that have been vine ripened and have a good acidity bite to their taste.
Take two slices of bread. Coat them with ¼ inch of good mayonnaise. On one piece of bread, slice the tomato ¼ inch thick. Salt and pepper that layer. Add another layer sliced tomato, and again salt and pepper. Place the other piece of bread on top of this, roll up your sleeves, and commence to eat over the kitchen sink while the juice runs down your elbows. (74) This, though, is a qualified 'trashiness' of 'vine-ripened' tomatoes, ' with a 'good acidity bite' and 'good mayonnaise. ' White Trash Cooking follows the cookbook's characteristic habit of ignoring questions around how food poverty occurs, why it is tolerated or, in the case of 'white trash' , how the shortcomings (culinary and otherwise) of some people cast them into what Wray (2006) describes a separate 'abject class status' described in terms of rubbish (3). Wray and Newitz (1997) raise the stakes of this discussion of the general silence of cookbooks about poverty and inequality and White Trash Cooking's particular silences, when they track the implications of the term 'white trash' for attitudes around 'race' . Before the contemporary mainstream learned to use 'white trash' as a term for people who did not merit the privilege of whiteness, nineteenth-century slaves used it to describe Whites who had descended to the status closest to slavery (2). Mickler and White Trash Cooking's admirers struggle with the questions of 'race' and difference raised by the term 'white trash' , but in the end they want to confirm a difference that favors Whiteness. 25 Williams' opening note points to 'white trash' cooking's similarities with 'soul food' -itself a problematic term coined to claim ownership of the food practices of the slave kitchen 26calling soul food 'White Trash' cooking's 'dark cousin. ' Mickler refers to soul food less flatteringly and with further qualification ('there's no denying') as related to 'white trash' cooking but distinguishable as greasier: Of course there's no denying that Soul Food is a kissin' cousin. All the ingredients are just about the same. But White Trash food, as you'll see by and by, has a great deal more variety.
[…] White Trash food is not as greasy. (3) As Wray and Newitz argue, the gesture of owning the name 'white trash' may operate as 'a version of victim chic' but the embrace of 'white trash' has not involved recognizing shared experiences of Black and White poverty or abjection (5). And when, in the mid-Seventies, the twelve white Southern poets mentioned earlier embraced outsider status in White Trash their identification of 'turnip greens/good old turnip greens' with 'white trash,' they did not choose to point out that these were the words of a Blues song made famous by the Black musician Bo Carter. Ten years later, Mickler cited a string of White Southern writers to delineate the tradition that had influenced his book but not the literary portrait of rural Floridian communal culture to which the conception and portrait of community in White Trash Cooking seems to owe more: the African American writer Zora Neale Hurston's (1937) novel, Their Eyes were Watching God, depicted the grain of everyday communal experience among African Americans in the rural communities of Northern and Central Florida where she, like Mickler, had grown up. 27 Whether Mickler had read Hurston's book or not, he was wary of recognizing the foodways shared across the rural South. Perhaps his insistence on racial difference, should remind us of what Latoya E. Eaves (2016) describes as the invisibility or visibility that Black and gay subjects share in particular social settings (147). In Mickler's cookbook, the failure to make shared poverty across 'race' visible is matched by his reticence in the text in acknowledging his sexuality.
There is no question that Mickler's White Trash Cooking is a wonderfully exhilarating production. It is one of a body of cookbooks written to give a broader pleasure than that which we expect a cookbook to extend. It belongs to that sub-genre of cookbooks that promotes freedom from the prospect of toilsome work. It also demonstrates the genre's potential at least to explore a culinary practice that represents a broad experience of eating in everyday life. And while it does not, I would argue, take the genre in new directions, its very lack of self-consciousness does bring our attention to questions about what a cookbook is and the significance of how cookbooks are formed. This is a genre that is looser, less stable and altogether sketchier than its appearances would suggest.