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    The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South: A James Beard Award Winner
    Unavailable
    The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South: A James Beard Award Winner
    Unavailable
    The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South: A James Beard Award Winner
    Ebook554 pages9 hours

    The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South: A James Beard Award Winner

    By Michael W. Twitty

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    About this ebook

    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 2018

    A 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 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 He sifts through stories, recipes, genetic tests, and historical documents, and travels from Civil War battlefields in Virginia to synagogues in Alabama to Black-owned organic farms in Georgia.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

    Editor's Note

    Award-winner…

    Cooks, genealogists, and history buffs will eat this up. Culinary historian Michael Twitty explores the origins of African American cooking and how it shaped Southern cuisine. Filled with rich descriptions of food, mouth-watering historic recipes, ancestral research, and gastronomic lore, it’s no wonder it won the 2018 James Beard Foundation Book of the Year.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJul 31, 2018
    ISBN9780062876577
    Author

    Michael W. Twitty

    Michael W. Twitty is a noted culinary and cultural historian and the creator of Afroculinaria, the first blog devoted to African American historic foodways and their legacies. He has been honored by FirstWeFeast.com as one of the twenty greatest food bloggers of all time, and named one of the “Fifty People Who Are Changing the South” by Southern Living and one of the “Five Cheftavists to Watch” by TakePart.com. Twitty has appeared throughout the media, including on NPR’s The Splendid Table, and has given more than 250 talks in the United States and abroad. His work has appeared in Ebony, the Guardian, and on NPR.org. He is also a Smith fellow with the Southern Foodways Alliance, a TED fellow and speaker, and the first Revolutionary in Residence at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Twitty lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.

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    Reviews for The Cooking Gene

    4/5

    102 ratings9 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Amazing and eye opening. Became a twitter follower after reading. Keeping doing good work @koshersoul
    • 4/5
      Blogger and cook Michael W. Twitty investigates southern food through his own life and the genealogy of his ancestors - Black and white - who have influenced his plate today.This book, a blend of memoir, history, food writing, and genealogy is hard to categorize, but was truly fascinating. It's a history lesson in slavery and the food that people brought from Africa or modified when they found something similar in the U.S., or influenced the way the white Southern population ate when they became cooks for them - or, heartbreakingly, the ways in which slavery decimated a people's diet and caused severe malnutrition. It's one man's genealogy, traced with help from family, friends and professionals, reclaiming some of the past and discovering some of the food, religious and other traditions passed down despite an attempt to erase it. As a result, it's sprawling, dense, thoughtful and chock full of information. I enjoyed it and was challenged by it in equal measure.
    • 4/5
      I can understand some reader comments on the cohesiveness (or lack thereof) of this book, but right from the start, Twitty makes no claims that the book is anything other than what it is- the genetics and geneaology of his family and, by extention, of African Americans in general, as well as the culinary and cultural history of African Americans in the creation of a southern or soul food cuisine. The book is certainly a mosaic and there are chapters in which I did not follow the tribal African names and the like, but I got the point and did not feel compelled to look up every single thing I did not know. The force of the book is in his journey and his contention that black Americans are looking to find pride in their identity beyond slavery. This is very important and has been the focus of some powerful black movements from Marcus Garvey to the Black Panthers. Some facts were astonishing: Two thirds of America's 19th century export value were from cotton alone. Impossible without the African American workforce. Even though the south depended completely on slave labor for it riches before the Civil War, it treated the slaves most abominably, beyond the obvious horrors of family separation, whippings, rape to insufficient diet, the evils of the company store, etc. And, the United States has never faced the truth of their treatment of both African Americans and Native Americans. An interesting book. If you get lost, skim a bit; it's worth it.
    • 4/5
      This is a pleasantly meandering trip through family history, the food of African Americans in the South (particularly under slavery), and how both the people and the food came here from Africa and were changed into the cuisines we know today. There's a lot of fascinating history here (and some recipes) and it's written in a very personal, conversational style that's fun to read.
    • 4/5
      There is so much to be explored in this topic. Twitty's history/memoir is expansive, and I enjoyed his sleuthing. I'd love to get even more granular into the various pockets of history and culture of food in the African diaspora, and I'd love to dig a little deeper into Twitty's own identity as a queer, Jewish Black man.
    • 5/5
      What a beautiful, emotional, thought-provoking book. Mr. Twitty wrote a work that in an autobiography of himself and his known family, and so much more. It's about genealogy, and the ugliness of slavery, and food--food, being more than sustenance, but a source of stories, history, culture, and soul. This is a read that will linger with me for a very long time.
    • 3/5
      An awful lot of lists of places, ethnic groups, and foods, but also a narrative of the meaning of food, heritage, and place to a Black man whose conversion to Judaism and his gayness make him often unusual in any group in which he finds himself. Twitty navigates the fact that there are white rapists in his family tree, and that tracing Black genealogy has been difficult because of the erasures of slavery; he uses genetic testing to identify his various lineages and emphasizes its contingent and probabalistic, but still helpful, results.
    • 5/5
      an enlightening exploration of the history of African-American culinary history--and therefore all of American history--and his trips to the Old Country (Ireland!), down to Electric Avenue, and to see the Akan Drum were enlightening, too.
    • 5/5
      Twitty tells the story of his family and African American food culture through a series of chapters that read like connected essays, centered on topics like rice, corn, sugar, and cotton. It's a compelling and well-researched narrative that few others have explained so explicitly about the African origins of American Southern food. It is also just as much a testament to the fortitude and perseverance of his African and enslaved ancestors, and strangely, an embracing or at least acknowledgment, of his European-descended ancestors as well. Twitty also heartbreakingly illustrates the brokenness of African American genealogy as well as food culture, and his own inspiring journey to reclaim both.