Kentucky’s Cookbook Heritage: Two Hundred Years of Southern Cuisine and Culture John Van Willigen. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014. 299 pp.; includes notes, reference, index and annotated bibliography.

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Jess Lamar Reece Holler

Abstract

Although University of Kentucky Professor Emeritus of Anthropology John van Willigen coyly reminds us that “one does not really eat tradition; one eats food,” the line between the two is often delectably hazy (149). Van Willigen’s Kentucky’s Cookbook Heritage: Two Hundred Years of Southern Cuisine and Culture (2014) is an impressive tour-de-force of the history of Kentucky’s cookbook culture. The book takes up the complex process by which certain foods assume regional icon-status. Van Willigen pays equal attention to print culture, foodways, and social and technological contexts for food writing, and his enthusiasm for historic cookbooks’ power to index wider changes in food culture pervades the book. Kentucky’s Cookbook Heritage, however, is also a book that’s as much about gaps as it is about continuities: while focusing primarily on the print culture of cookbooks, Van Willigen nonetheless gently interrogates the complications involved in attempting to reconstruct historic foodways from extant documentary sources.

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