Reading Southern Living makes me feel inferior as a Southern lady

Southern Living: the quintessential Southern magazine. It’s Better Homes and Gardens, except in the South. It’s sweet potato pie in print.

My home always had copies of the magazine lying around the house, but I only ever read them when I was desperate. They were the reading material of my mother and sister, not for me.

Southern Living definitely caters to the more genteel Southern populace. It is mostly comprised of gardening, road trips and food, with a smattering of beauty advice and articles about dogs. You roll your eyes, wondering who in their right mind would spend so much time making everything this perfect, especially in the trademark Southern humidity. Many coarser aspects to Southern living are excluded, like deer hunting, heated Confederate flag debates and working for a living.

This week, I hunkered down with a stack of Southern Living issues from years past and present to see if I could learn about how to live in the South. If knowledge was gold, I now have many golden knowledge nuggets about living in the South.

For instance, northern Missouri is not a part of the “South.” Only southern Missouri. Also, there is no such thing as small gardens, only small gardeners. There were whole articles on how to turn small spaces into picture-perfect plant places. After spending all summer grudgingly staring down a 5’x3′ weed plot, I feel a little bit like an underachiever.

I learned that all self-respecting Southern men should carry knives, because one never knows when you’ll need to stab something. And Southern men who don’t carry knives are “helpless no-accounts.” I have no idea what a no-account is. Please comment below if you know.

Many of the recipes and how-to’s focused around a single theme: “This is simple but it will look impressively complicated but will also look like it was easy because you are a perfect housewife who doesn’t want to make guests feel uncomfortable by making them think you went out of your way to host them.”

No place was this more apparent than in the Lemon Hand Towel Holders. Core lemons, soak small towels in lemon juice and water, roll them up, place them inside the lemon, then freeze them. It’s some Martha Stewart type nonsense. Guests will then use these lemon hand towels instead of rinsing off in a rusty old hose, like I told my sticky house guests to do until Southern Living showed me the error in my hillbilly hick ways.

The real knowledge came from the food section (probably because I pay more attention to the food section than the other sections, but who’s keeping track). Apparently Southerners don’t drink wine. In all the issues I flipped through, it never got a mention.

This was the first magazine I’ve seen since 1962 that advertised Spam. If a household doesn’t have a grill, the inhabitants might as well starve because all the best Southern food is grilled. The best way to photograph ice cream is to scoop it into a cone then lay it flat on the counter.

This magazine has recipes for every type of Southern food and (almost) all of it looks delicious. The one recipe that didn’t look delicious was for “Cornmeal thumbprint cookies with tomato jam.” Southerners love making traditionally savory foods sweet – it’s why we put sickeningly sugary barbecue sauces on meat and put sun-sweetened peaches on anything that leaves the kitchen. But making a sweet food like cookies savory is bogus. Do I serve them as a dessert or as a savory foodstuff? Why would I eat a lump of corn tomato disappointment when I could have a real cookie? These “cookies” are useless.

Reading Southern Living left me with an air of inferiority. Clearly my gardening, cooking and hosting skills are not up to snuff. I do not plan my summer vacations based on which beaches are the best to bring my dog to, and I don’t carry a knife around with me to dig out splinters.

Yet this is truly a Southern magazine in that although it tore you down a little, it was so nice about it that you actually came out of the experience feeling encouraged. Instead of leaving you with a feeling of hopelessness that sends you to cry in the squalor that is your home, still with a weedy garden and still sipping store-bought beverages, you feel that you can do this. You can have the quality of life that this magazine believes you can create.

If you need me, I’ll be pickling radishes and stuffing hand towels into lemons. I’m under the preppy rustic, unattainable housewife, magic spell of Southern Living until I turn my fickle attention to the next magazine.