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Television & New Media
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Country Cookin’ and Cross-Dressin’

Television, Southern White Masculinities, and Hierarchies of Cultural Taste

Greg M. Smith

Georgia State University

Pamela Wilson

Reinhardt College

This article investigates Cookin’ Cheap, a regionally produced, nationally available cooking show that mixes Southern humor with overtly cheap recipe preparation. "Cheapness" (of food and cooking technique) is positioned as both nostalgia for simpler "country" values and as differentiation from slick television norms. By showing the hosts engaging in timeconsuming, often clumsy food preparation, the show pokes fun at the flawless professionalism of television cooks, reemphasizing the chaos of the domestic kitchen. Based on viewer letters, textual analysis, and ethnographic participant/observation, this article discusses the way Cookin’ Cheap makes a place for the viewer in the text, reappropriating strategies of earlier television. When the show’s hosts impersonate their aunts in unconvincing drag, they also emphasize the passing of tradition from matriarchal figures to an underexamined form of masculinity: the feminized Southern working-class man.

Key Words: South • Southern • masculinity • regional television • cooking show • "country" • reception • drag • nostalgia • social class • working class • whiteness • gender • media studies • television history

Television & New Media, Vol. 5, No. 3, 175-195 (2004)
DOI: 10.1177/1527476403260644
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[Abstract] [PDF]