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.