East Tennessee State University Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University Electronic Theses and Dissertations Student Works 5-2019 Cooking Lessons: Oral Recipe Sharing in the Southern Kitchen Alana Claxton East Tennessee State University Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.etsu.edu/etd Part of the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, Food Studies Commons, and the Interpersonal and Small Group Communication Commons Recommended Citation Claxton, Alana, "Cooking Lessons: Oral Recipe Sharing in the Southern Kitchen" (2019). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 3550. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/3550 This Thesis - Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Works at Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Cooking Lessons: Oral Recipe Sharing in the Southern Kitchen –––––––––––––––––––––––– A thesis presented to the faculty of the Department of Communication and Performance East Tennessee State University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts in Professional Communication –––––––––––––––––––––––– by Alana C. Claxton May 2019 –––––––––––––––––––––––––– Dr. Amber Kinser, Chair Dr. Kelly Dorgan Dr. Delanna Reed Keywords: Oral recipe sharing, cooking lessons, recipes, Southern food, food practices ABSTRACT Cooking Lessons: Oral Recipe Sharing in the Southern Kitchen by Alana C. Claxton This study analyzes oral recipe sharing practices as they emerge in Southern cooking. Researcher and participants were immersed in cooking recipes together in a qualitative research method that combined interactive interviewing with sensory ethnography. Findings revealed a category of oral recipe sharing practices that is missing from the literature: cooking lessons. This study identified cooking lessons as a distinct recipe sharing practice and worked to further operationalize and concretize such practices in hopes of spurring further research 2 DEDICATION To my grandmother and mother, who taught me how to cook. And to Jake, for being my constant cooking companion. 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work would be nonexistent were it not for Dr. Amber Kinser. Her encouraging words and thoughtful feedback helped me become a better thinker, writer, and researcher. She was truly a miracle advisor. Thank you, also, to Dr. Kelly Dorgan and Dr. Delanna Reed, for serving as two excellent committee members and for being invaluable mentors throughout my graduate experience. Finally, special thanks to the six individuals who shared their homes and their recipes with me. It was an especially delicious adventure for which I am extremely grateful to have been a part of. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................... 2 DEDICATION ................................................................................................................................ 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................................ 4 Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................................... 8 Literature Review...............................................................................................................11 Identity and Food practices. .................................................................................. 12 Self-identity and food. .............................................................................. 12 Family and food. ....................................................................................... 16 Community identity and food. .................................................................. 20 Culture and food. ..................................................................................... 25 Recipes as Discourse............................................................................................. 31 Recipes as Narrative acts. ..................................................................................... 35 Studying Recipes. ................................................................................................. 37 2. METHODOLOGY ................................................................................................................... 38 Narrative Identity Research and Sensory Ethnography .................................................... 38 Cooking Interviews. .............................................................................................. 39 The kitchen as interview setting. .............................................................. 40 5 Bringing recipes to life.............................................................................. 41 Recruitment and Participants ............................................................................................ 43 Data Analysis. ....................................................................................................... 46 3. FINDINGS & DISCUSSION ................................................................................................... 48 Knowing What I’m Looking At: A Process of Trial and Error ......................................... 48 Applying the Wrong frame. .................................................................................. 49 Finding the Right frame ........................................................................................ 50 Defining Cooking Lessons ................................................................................................ 51 Learning the “Right” Way. .................................................................................... 55 Attributing Lesson Knowledge ......................................................................................... 57 Recipe Acknowledgements ................................................................................... 58 Gendered Cooking Lessons .................................................................................. 62 Cooking Lesson Functions: Transportation & Recognition .............................................. 64 Sensory Transportation: Layering the Past onto the Present ................................ 65 Recognizing Faces and Places. ............................................................................. 69 Locating Cooking Lessons ................................................................................................ 74 The Southern Meal ................................................................................................ 74 Southern Food and Family .................................................................................... 75 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 77 Future Directions .................................................................................................. 78 6 Limitations. ............................................................................................... 79 4. RESEARCHER REFLECTIONS ............................................................................................. 82 Epistemological Doubts .................................................................................................... 82 Who Burned the Biscuits? ................................................................................................ 84 On (Finally) Completing It ............................................................................................... 85 REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................. 86 APPENDICES ............................................................................................................................ 100 Appendix A: Interview Propmpts ............................................................................................... 100 Appendix B: Transcribed Recipes .............................................................................................. 101 VITA ........................................................................................................................................... 104 7 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION All around us, people are sharing their food. From books, to primetime television, to online streaming websites, to social media and beyond, we are constantly sharing and comparing what and how we eat. Hardly a new trend, reports show the first collection of recipes to be 3,700-year-old clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq), demonstrating that people have documented what they eat for many thousands of years (Graber & Twilley, 2018). Fast forward to today and you can see the Mesopotamians were clearly onto something big. Despite the migration over to digital formats and the explosion of online food blogs, printed cookbooks are still in extremely high demand. Defying expectations, cookbook sales were 21 percent higher in 2018 than the previous year with an estimated 17.8 million cookbooks sold in the United States alone (White, 2018). Food, as a medium for expression, has seemingly endless applications that are rarely confined to one category. Positioned as a central character in countless