The Cooking Gene
CBC Books | CBC | Posted: December 5, 2017 6:45 PM | Last Updated: December 5, 2017
Michael W. Twitty
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.
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 He sifts through stories, recipes, genetic tests and historical documents, and travels from Civil War battlefields in Virginia to synagogues in Alabama to Black-owned organic farms in Georgia.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. (From HarperCollins Publishers)
From the book
The Old South is a place where people use food to tell themselves who they are, to tell other who they are, and to tell stories about where they've been. The Old South is a place of groaning tables across the tracks from want. It's a place where arguments over how barbecue is prepared or chicken is served or whether sugar is used to sweeten cornbread can function as culinary shibboleths. It is a place in the mind where we dare not talk about which came first, the African cook or the European mistress, the Native American woman or the white woodsman. We just know that somehow the table aches from the weight of so much...that we prop it up with our knees and excuses to keep it from falling.
From The Cooking Gene by Michael W. Twitty ©2017. Published by HarperCollins Publishers.