Cookbooks for funeral foods make up an unexpected niche subset of Southern cookbooks. They provide instructions for feeding, behavior, and rituals of Southern funerals while promising delicious food and fellowship as a balm for suffering death in a community. In the US South, funerals become an opportunity to ritually perform a distinct and continuous regional identity that transcends both time and geography. The repetition of the same meals, “year after year,” creates a feeling of collapsed time and continuity with a stable identity connected to a distinct Southern homeplace. I argue that Southern funerals may be unique to the South in practice because of an intentional and self-conscious attempt to craft a distinct and continuous place-based identity for the community of mourners, attached through kinship and friendship to a particular Southern homeplace.

The food practices associated with Southern funerals are a tangible, if temporary, means of performing, embodying, and perpetuating a community identity. When cookbook writers share recipes connected to the funeral feast and the stories the accrue to the dishes served, they are essentially enacting the storytelling and communal aspects of the funeral without the occasion of a death. No pain must be endured to experience the joys of the locally-bound and communally-practiced traditions of Southern funerals, even if only experienced in the reader’s imagination. The genre of the cookbook and its requirement for pleasure gives ample opportunity for writers to emphasize the many pleasures of cooking, eating, and imagining what is presented as a distinctly Southern experience.

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