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White Trash Cooking, Twenty Years Later
Southern Quarterly, Winter 2007 by Edge, John T
In January of 1986, The New Yorker rejected an advertisement from the Jargon Society, a North Carolina literary press, for White Trash Cooking by Ernest Matthew Mickler. Camera-ready art and a check for $900 were returned. "We thought the title might offend our readers," a spokesperson for the magazine said.
"That just goes to show you how much The New Yorker knows about anything involving gravy," said Georgia-born Roy Blount, Jr., an early proponent of the book and putative kinsmen of Florida-born Mickler.
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Blount did not stand alone; admirers of the work were many. In Vogue, Barbara Kafka wrote that Mickler "sees clearly, without condescension." Bryan Miller of the New York Times dubbed Mickler the "Escoffier of icebox cake and bucket dumplings," and proclaimed White Trash Cooking "perhaps the most intriguing book of the 1986 cookbook season." Colman Andrews, now the editor in chief of Saveur, then the food editor of Metropolitan Home, called White Trash Cooking "the best American cookbook of the century, by far."
Upon receipt of a galley, a correspondent from Monroeville, Alabama, wrote, "I have never seen a sociological document of such beauty - the photographs alone are shattering. I shall treasure it always.. .Now that it's harder than ever to identify the genuine article on sight - with two generations of prosperity white trash looks like gentry - we've long needed something other than the ballot box to remind us of their presence: White Trash Cooking is a beautiful testament to a stubborn and proud people." (Harper Lee knew a good thing when she saw it.)
White Trash Cooking was among the most unlikely best-sellers to ever climb the charts. For those who did not dog-ear a copy, mixing Goldie's Yo Yo Pudding and Mona Lisa Sapp's Macaroni Salad, baking Resurrection Cake, Grand Canyon Cake, and Vickie's Stickies, for those who have never had the pleasure of pondering recipes for Canned Corn Beef Sandwiches, Potato Chip Sandwiches, and Girl Scout One-Eyed Egg Sandwiches - and for those who once knew but have since forgotten their glories - a primer is appropriate.
White Trash Cooking was published with a spiral binding, in the manner of the South's beloved community cookbooks. The background for the cover image of a fleshy-armed woman in a flower-print halter was a patchwork of store-bought Tabasco sauce, Ritz crackers, and Velveeta cheese, bricolaged with those everyday icons Uncle Ben, Aunt Jemima, and Martha White, all of which was overlaid on a photostat of mulched turnip tops and precisely rectangular turnip roots - the sort of vegetable matter that does not come fresh from the farm but straight from the can.
On the inside cover, Jonathan Williams of the Jargon Society declared, "If you were trying to explain these recipes and snapshots and all to some grand maitre like Paul Bocuse, you'd say: 'Listen here, buddy, this be's the victuals of white, Southern rural peasants...Hit'11 eat!'" Williams suggested that the reader imagine Bocuse and his ilk "swooning over such delicacies as 'Big Reba's Rainbow Icebox Cake' 'Tutti's Fruited Porkettes', and the 'Cold Collard Sandwich,' as the Durkee's dressing drips onto their cravats."
But Williams also hinted at a deeper meaning, one that eluded many a wink-and-nod reader who dismissed the book as nothing more than Dogpatch doggerel. After complementing Mickler's "snapbean prose style," Williams, a countercultural poet and publisher who called himself an "artisto-dixie-queer" and called Mickler the "Carmen Miranda of Moccasin Creek," argued that, in congruence with the collected recipes, the forty-six photographs at the center of the book "fill out a picture of Southern living suggested by the photographs of William Christenberry."
Regard the photographs - and the text - of White Trash Cooking closely and you will likely conclude that the citation was apt. Christenberry, among our region's most brilliant and forthright photographers, was born in Hale County, Alabama, the same Black Belt county that writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans chronicled in their Depression-era masterpiece, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). Early in his career, Christenberry claimed the work of Agee and Evans as his lodestar. And after a week of alternately thumbing White Trash Cooking and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, I can't help but conclude that Mickler read the words of Agee or saw the photographs of Evans. At the very least, Mickler, like Christenberry, was influenced by their unflinching and sympathetic style of documentation.
The Agee-Evans-Mickler triangle may not be provable, but we do know, thanks to an oral history collected late in life, that Mickler read Zora Neale Hurston. "Child, that just blew me away," Mickler said of his first encounter with the writings of the Florida-born and Barnard-trained anthropologist, now best known for her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God(1937). "[S]he walked on the same shell ground I walked on. Played out in the same woods, saw the same rivers, and that's what made her."
