2018 James Beard Foundation Book of the Year | 2018 James Beard Foundation Book Award Winner inWriting | Nominee for the 2018 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Nonfiction | #75 on The Root100 2018A renowned culinary historian offers a fresh perspective on our most divisive cultural issue, race, in this illuminating memoir of Southern cuisine and food culture that traces his ancestry—both black and … his ancestry—both black and white—through food, from Africa to America and slavery to freedom.
Southern food is integral to the American culinary tradition, yet the question of who “owns” it is one of the most provocative touch points in our ongoing struggles over race. In this unique memoir, culinary historian Michael W. Twitty takes readers to the white-hot center of this fight, tracing the roots of his own family and the charged politics surrounding the origins of soul food, barbecue, and all Southern cuisine.
From the tobacco and rice farms of colonial times to plantation kitchens and backbreaking cotton fields, Twitty tells his family story through the foods that enabled his ancestors’ survival across three centuries. He sifts through stories, recipes, genetic tests, and historical documents, and travels from Civil War battlefields in Virginia to synagogues in Alabama to Black-owned organic farms in Georgia.
As he takes us through his ancestral culinary history, Twitty suggests that healing may come from embracing the discomfort of the Southern past. Along the way, he reveals a truth that is more than skin deep—the power that food has to bring the kin of the enslaved and their former slaveholders to the table, where they can discover the real America together.
Illustrations by Stephen Crotts
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Michael W. Twitty blends his passions for cooking and geneaology in The Cooking Gene. He traces his own ancestry as far as he can, then relies on genetic testing to give him a better idea of where his ancestors came from. He also outlines the ways that African slaves fused their own cooking traditions with New World foods to create the Southern food that’s beloved by so many today.
This book was an obvious labor of love for Mr. Twitty and his passions shine through the pages. Unfortunately, I don’t particularly enjoy cooking or genealogy so the book fell a bit flat for me.
I glanced through quite a few reviews on GoodReads before I decided to check this out and saw others frequently complaining that the text is disjointed and hard to follow. Deciding that “forewarned is forearmed,” I jumped in. I was still a bit lost. I know that the author had a lot of valid points and connections to make but I had a hard time following his train of thought. Part of the problem is that he writes in a stream-of-consciousness style and I rarely do well with that.
“My aim has been to give a sense of the bric-a-brac mosaic that is the average African American’s experience when he or she attempts to look back to recapture our cultural and culinary identities obscured by the consequences of racial chattel slavery. If it were possible to give a linear, orderly, soup to nuts version of my story or any of my family’s without resorting to genre gymnastics, I would have considered it.”
That’s a fair point.
But I also lack much of my own knowledge base to draw from. As Mr. Twitty writes in his Afterward:
“It is really difficult to write outside of your own headspace and to remember that your reader may, in many cases, be unfamiliar with elements of the subject matter.”
Yes. That was exactly my problem.
There were sections that were very powerful to me. The author works (worked?) as a historical interpreter, preparing food at plantations in the ways that his enslaved ancestors would have. What an emotional calling that must be.
“I would have to learn to maneuver the cooking utensils of old and learn how to keep time as I cooked. I lost arm hair and eyebrows, a little blood here and there; I was scalded and branded, burned and seared. These are the marks of my tribe.”
Wow. He also goes out to a field and picks cotton while listening to slave spirituals, watches molasses being made, tracks down long-forgotten cemeteries, and generally lays his hands on as many pieces of this puzzle of a book as he can. I give him huge points for that. I personally wouldn’t want anything to do with cotton in his shoes but he wants to experience the reality of his forebears.
Sometimes Mr. Twitty writes about terrible things that I would know if I took time to think about them, but I haven’t from my place of White privilege. When he explores his European ancestors, he blatantly says that White slave owners raped his Black ancestresses. Did I understand that somewhere in my brain? Yes. Has anyone really presented it to me in a way that opened my eyes like that? No. What an unbearable thing to incorporate into your family history. But it’s an undeniable reality.
Readers with a stronger background in culinary history and/or genealogy will most likely follow the labyrinthine thread of this narrative much better than I did. I personally lost my way pretty early on and unfortunately took away very little from the book.