Mess of Greens: Southern Gender and Southern Food

CHAPTER FIVE: Cookbooks and Curb Markets: Wild Messes of Southern Food and Gender

Cookbooks and Curb Markets Besides these treasures there was a collection of recipes, which Granny could not read but which she had carefully preserved in the handwriting of numerous and long dead friends. Olive Tilford Dargan, Call Home the Heart The exchange of produce for money is one thing of value but the exchange of ideas and news is something else again and real friendship and understanding have grown up between town and country until they realize that they are all one community and that neither their prosperity nor their human interests can be separated. Blanche Hanks Elliott, “Women in Different Sections” chapter five Wild Messes of Southern Food and Gender U We have finally arrived at the mess of greens in the southern food and gender story—and I propose we meet it on its own terms rather than force it into order.1 It takes on Granny Starkweather’s recipe collection and other cookbooks and adds in Elliott’s curb market memories, each of which will be supremely messy. The phrase “a mess of,” meaning a serving of food, a portion of a dish, especially of vegetables, is surprisingly ancient. The Oxford English Dictionary dates its origins as a phrase to the 1300s, even while acknowledging that its 166 chapter five use today is increasingly “US regional”—OED-speak for southern. In the South in which the women of this project used the term, calling a serving “a mess” worked particularly well for foods that reveled in their disorderliness— leaves of greens going in every direction with their potlikker in the bottom of a big black pot, servings of beans that did not need to be precisely measured or sorted before being cooked up all together, dishes of cabbage and potatoes thrown together without the assistance of a cookbook or a guide. In addition, “a mess” described well foods that were inherently collective—not one “bean” or a single “green” but many—many of the same kind in a pot of half-runners cooking, for instance, or many of similar but separate kinds, in a pot of turnip, mustard, and creasy greens simmering. Returning to the dictionary and other uses of the word “mess,” we find it could describe “a company of people eating together.” That sense remains in the military’s “mess halls,” for instance, which also evoke another archaic use of the word: “a communal meal.”2 Metaphorically, this chapter and the conclusion of this book embrace all of these messes: the disorderliness of the southern food story; the collaborative, collective moments of the southern gender story within the recipes; and the communal meanings held in the moment of sharing and exchanging. Shared food moments can be inherently elusive, though—difficult to preserve , capture, or re-create. As many have argued, including literary critic Roland Barthes, anthropologist Mary Douglas, and gastronome Brillat-Savarin, to name only a few, food constantly resists and escapes the written page. Experiencing it involves multiple senses simultaneously—taste, smell, sight, sound, andtouch,nottomentionthesynesthesiaoftheircombination.Ourbestfood writers capture a moment, and we sigh because they take us to a set of food emotions parallel to our own lives. Their words, however, rarely capture the whole experience precisely. Food’s symbolisms spiral outward and back, collectingmemory ,culture,history,andimaginedcommunities.Itsprimitiveness delights in welcoming sex, indulgence, taboos, and death right along with it.3 As we have seen with cornbread and biscuits, moonshine, canned tomatoes, and pellagra, struggles over food were never about only the food, or more cookbooks and curb markets 167 precisely were always about more than just the food. Therefore, food resists neat control and simple endings. Onefinalobsoletecompoundwordcanbeculledfromourturnthroughthe dictionary: the “mess-writer.” Although its original sense indicated one who wrote about the mess, often in the nautical sense of keeping the account books around food expenditures, I propose to redefine it for our final explorations of southern food and gender.4 Rather than tell a single story, rather than draw a final conclusion, the mess writing here explores the disorderly, collective, and communal spaces of cookbooks and curb markets. We let them be wild, be what they were or what they might have been; this chapter dwells less on proof and more on possibility, acknowledging that messes are more than their individual parts. Complications in the Southern Food Story We began our turn through the southern food and gender story with three sets of anxieties tangling the pages of the...