Curating Culinary Culture: The Rhetorical Function of Cookbooks and Their Paratexts
Curating Culinary Culture: The Rhetorical Function of Cookbooks and Their Paratexts

Summary/Abstract: Cookbooks are more than mere collections of recipes; they are also repositories of nonculinary information. Those featuring the cuisine of the American South are no exception, reflecting as they do the cultural, historical, and social contexts related to that region’s complicated racial history. A prominent part of that history are the Gullah Geechee people—an African American community inhabiting the coastal areas of the Carolinas, Georgia, and northeastern Florida—who have preserved their distinctive cultural heritage in part through the oral transmission of traditional recipes that function as a medium of shared memories that help sustain their communal identity. Recently, these recipes have made their way into print. A notable example is Emily Meggett’s bestselling cookbook, Gullah Geechee Home Cooking. In this study, we examine how this venerable matriarch’s cookbook creates a rhetorical space facilitating reader engagement with her people’s history and culture while simultaneously sharing traditional recipes. In particular, we focus upon how her skillful use of what Gérard Genette calls “paratexts” serves to compliment the main text of her cookbook by offering personal and communal context for such dishes as her famous fried okra. And, we point out how those paratexts situate traditional Gullah Geechee cuisine within the broader culinary conversation of contemporary American food culture.

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