The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South

"Culinary historian Michael W. Twitty brings a fresh perspective to 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 from 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 touchpoints in our ongoing struggles over race. In this unique memoir, 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. Twitty travels from the tobacco and rice farms of colonial times to plantation kitchens and backbreaking cotton fields to tell of the struggles his family faced and how food enabled his ancestors' survival across three centuries. He sifts through stories, recipes, genetic tests, and historical documents, and visits Civil War battlefields in Virginia, synagogues in Alabama, and black-owned organic farms in Georgia.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 South's past. Along the way, he reveals a truth that is more than skin deep--the power of food to bring the kin of the enslaved and their former slaveholders to the table, where they can discover the real America together."--Jacket.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member laytonwoman3rd

[[Michael Twitty]] is a culinary historian, an interpreter of living history at such sites as Colonial Williamsburg and Monticello, and an impressive story-teller. The subtitle of this book is "A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South"--that's more than a mouthful, in

more than one sense. And it still really doesn't do justice to the content. Twitty explores the origins and history of many of the ingredients and preparations we associate with Southern cooking, in the context of his own family history and origins. Twitty is a black man, with both Scotch-Irish and Native American ancestry; he is also gay, and a convert to Judaism. "Complex" does not begin to describe the journey he undertook with the aid of professional genealogists, chefs, historians, relatives and friends to trace his ancestral lines, and to connect himself--and all of us--to the rich heritage of so-called soul food, barbecue, Low Country cuisine, and Southern cooking in general. He shares a few recipes, attacks a few myths, locates many varieties of veg in their African or Caribbean homelands, and instructs us in the realities of picking cotton, staking tobacco and curing meats. The book is dense with information, and includes an extensive bibliography as well as a number of color photos. A fascinating read, which I highly recommend.

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LibraryThing member bell7

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.

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LibraryThing member SpaceStationMir

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.

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LibraryThing member ThomasPluck

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.

LibraryThing member rivkat

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.

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LibraryThing member ladycato

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.

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LibraryThing member LibroLindsay

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.

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LibraryThing member arosoff

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.

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LibraryThing member KittyCunningham

More family history than culinary history. Not what I was looking for.

LibraryThing member PattyLee

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.

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LibraryThing member raschneid

This is a fascinating, masterfully researched book that explores not just African American foodways but genetic (and archival) genealogy, oral history, and the cultivation of a personal and spiritual connection with one's ancestors. Twitty's a great storyteller (if you can see him speak, I

recommend it), and comes from a family where everyone seems to live into old, old age, so his experience of history has an immediacy that's often lost when we talk about the antebellum and post-Civil War period.

Had to return this one to the library before I was finished, as so often happens with my nonfiction reads - hoping to finish it up one of these days.

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LibraryThing member Daumari

ugh I once again forgot to put in the right edition (and I thought I did, but maybe this was before I deliberately entered ISBN numbers) so my page numbers are off.

anyway, Twitty is a lyrical author, and here he has crafted a gorgeous, personal narrative that feels the weight of historical trauma

and a yearning for what was lost due to institutional slavery obscuring names, places, and lineages. This knowledge (and book) is derived from his crowdfunded Southern Discomfort tour, seeking out the old foodways and digging into his own ancestry with genealogists and historians. The family tree in the book goes back generations, but this is the achievement of hard digging, as many slave records merely give first names, if at all as part of the dehumanizing process.

The structure felt rambly, which I initially disliked, but in the author's note at the end, he says if he could've given a linear timeline he would've considered it, but instead the genre-shifting narrative that revealed itself to him as he learned about the ancestors is what he arrived at, and it makes the story all the more stronger. At the end of most chapters are relevant recipes, though once again I did not try to cook any of them.

Between genealogists and a DNA test, Twitty finds he's about a quarter Caucasian, and there are several points in his great^3 grandparent line where forcible assault introduced white men into his family tree, and this is explored through visiting both the Bellamy plantation and a few weeks in Ireland/England (though for the latter, he finds more familiar culinary DNA between the foodstuffs of west Africa to the South than England).

I initially started reading this last spring, but had to return it. I resumed at the beginning of 2019 when a library hold came back. Might reread earlier chapters too.

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