White Trash Cooking, Twenty Years Later

In one of the preambles to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Agee fretted about the "emasculation of acceptance," acknowledging that when an audience brings a work to its bosom, it smothers the potential to shock, to change perceptions, to catalyze action. And so it was with White Trash Cooking.

Within six months of publication, Jargon, overwhelmed by the response, sold the rights to Ten Speed Press of Berkeley, California, an upstart that earned a reputation for savvy marketing with What Color is Your Parachute?(1971). Through the summer and fall of 1986, the book sold strongly, and by January of 1987, White Trash Cooking was number eight on the Publishers Weekly roster of paperback best-sellers. At a time when health-conscious cooking was all the rage - Spa Food (1985), The New American Diet (1986), and The Four Seasons Spa Cuisine (1986) were three of the books that made their debut alongside White Trash Cooking - Mickler's book was a thumb-of-the-nose at the calorie-obsessed.

Mickler became a media celebrity, cooking chicken feet and rice on the David Letterman Show - and starting an on-stage trashcan fire in the process. He became an arbiter of pop culture. When Tammy Faye Bakker, wife of the fallen P.T.L. founder Jim Bakker, offered her sloppy joe recipe to the P.T.L.'s 900-line callers, Mickler defended Tammy Faye's inclusion of canned chicken gumbo soup and her instructions that a cook will "know if you have enough ketchup when it gets the right degree of redness." Mickler told a reporter, "I bet it's delicious. But I like my sloppy joes on cornbread, which is real lowdown."

Soon, more than two hundred thousand copies of the book were in print. But trouble followed money. In December of 1986, in the wake of a People magazine article that referenced a $45,000 royalty payday, an attorney representing the Ledbetter family of Alexander City, Alabama, threatened suit over Mickler's unauthorized use of their daughter's photograph on the book cover.

The Ledbetters joined an unlikely cadre of people who, taking note of the book's success, threatened suit against Mickler. The most curious complainant was the Junior League of Charleston, publishers of Charleston Receipts, the ultimate white-glove Southern cookbook. The good ladies of Charleston claimed that twenty-three recipes in White Trash Cooking, including roast possum and broiled squirrel, were lifted almost verbatim.

Mickler went to work on his second book, Sinkin 'Spells, Hot Flashes, Fits and Cravins. The back cover shows Mickler, in his prime, tending a cast-iron skillet roiling with grease. In the background, at the sink, is a man in briefs and a white T-shirt - his partner, Gary Jolley. With White Trash Cooking, Mickler outed the South's White Trash. With book two, he outed himself.

"I casseroled them to death," Mickler said of Sinkin 'Spells, the book he had written and collected in fits and starts, much of it while on book tour for White Trash Cooking. No matter what Mickler might suggest, Sinkin 'Spells was a more mature effort, one that utilized the recipes and folio form, but shifted the focus to food ceremonies, like dinner after a cemetery cleaning, the casserole luncheon of a quilting circle, and the wake of Mickler's own mother.