The Cooking Gene

As a transplant to Atlanta from Los Angeles, I’ve been fascinated by the regional cuisines and culinary traditions of the south. But after being caught up in the romance of pimento cheese, mint juleps, and fried chicken, I knew there was so much more to the story that I was missing.

This book tells that untold story, showing us the immeasurable debt southern food owes to Africa and enslaved peoples brought to America. What I love about this book is not just the history being told but how Twitty tells it, combining a mix of genres, from narrative nonfiction to… show more.

I loved this book because of Twitty’s fearless and honest voice and how, as a gay and Jewish Black man, he reached for his innermost self through Southern travels, finding his culinary family along the way. Twitty has pieced together so many components–cooking, history, memoir, genealogy, discoveries as he travels to research, and even religion and sexual orientation issues.

Reading it, I was educated and entertained. I learned how much our American culinary culture contains influences from African Americans all the way back to the beginning of slavery. I also loved that it is a book of triumph as well… show more.

There is a reason my book starts with a quote from this very book. It’s the collection’s rallying cry!

Twitty took me on such a journey of history and identity through food. The deeply historical and regional cooking and agricultural methods of the enslaved detailed in this work were the intersections and the canvas for revisiting historical timelines.

This is a nonfiction book, but it embodied my aspirations for making food in literature a forefront topic. I’ve never done any serious ancestry profile surveys, but this may be my favorite version – as a child of Jamaican immigrants wholly descended… show more.

I’m a sucker for culinary history books, and this one is an absolute must-read, weaving together both food and race history as it spotlights what is, perhaps, America’s greatest culinary contribution to the world: southern cuisine. Twitty uses his own family’s story to highlight the significant contribution African Americans have made to American cooking, addressing the question of who ‘owns’ soul food, barbeque, and other Southern staples, and how that struggle reflects on race tensions and relations today. 

I am recommending this book because it delves deep into a people’s connection to land, plants and animals, food, and ancestors. Even without the privilege of written history, the powerless can find a power in the past.