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537 reviews for:
The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African-American Culinary History in the Old South
Michael W. Twitty
4.12 AVERAGE
537 reviews for:
The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African-American Culinary History in the Old South
Michael W. Twitty
4.12 AVERAGE
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
This is not my usual type of book and was a bit of a struggle to get through, but I'm so glad I took the time to do it. I enjoyed following Twitty as he journeyed through his own past to discover the roots of popular Southern food through slavery.
emotional
informative
reflective
medium-paced
emotional
hopeful
informative
reflective
medium-paced
challenging
emotional
informative
inspiring
slow-paced
This book is just stunning. Some of the most phenomenal writing I’ve ever read. Identify, religion, family, slavery, history, resistance, trauma, DNA, migration, the South, all explored through Southern foodways. I had to buy a copy (and return the library edition) because I needed to underline and annotate so much. And I was compelled to read and savor this one.
Rambling. Meditative. Brilliant. Insightful. Harrowing. A beautiful book.
Twitty is a master historian mixed with a master memoirist. This book pulls together years of research and reflection to create a work that is part historical narrative , part family memoir, and which is rich throughout with descriptions of the horrors of America’s culinary history and with moments where real people in the present come together to uncover the past and heal the present through understanding food traditions and the way they tie us together.
Twitty traces his own family history in Virginia and other parts of the South through combining oral history, genealogy, and records of the slave trade to pinpoint approximately when and where his African ancestors entered the Americas. Simultaneously, he describes via primary and secondary sources the agricultural world they would have come from and the new landscape they would have encountered and the additional crops and influences that they would use to create a distinct American culinary tradition. Twitty revisited a number of places from his own ancestors’ past during the course of his research, and in his role as food historian interacted with everyone from farmers at black farmers markets in the south to the fishermen of Low Country to the Gullah-Geechee people to the white descendants of plantation owners and Mennonite sorghum-molasses producers. He uses every opportunity to explore the complex and enormously diverse history of the South. I enjoyed his description of Southern Jewish history and foodways as well as his extensive passages on the ways that wild plants from Africa and America became medical repositories for enslaved people that were ignored by slaveholders. Twitty traces the stories of brutality and resistance and survival in a way that is deeply accessible. His occasional personal anecdotes (his white boyfriend chopping down trees for a traditional eighteenth-century barbecue while wearing lipstick, for instance, or his family making persimmon beer and bread together in the tradition of hundreds of their forebears) are joyful reminders of the love and solidarity that can exist in the present.
Twitty notes the indigenous origin of the names and use of American land, flora and fauna, and discusses the way that indigenous American crops were adopted and carried around the world to change food in Ireland and West Africa. He talks about the way that West African food also informed new “American” foods, from the way Southerners cooked and cured meat to the way they grew and ate vegetables. Some of the most emotionally resonant moments are when he switches directly between descriptions of old food and accounts of the way he recreates or revisits it now.
This is a must read for anyone interested in Southern history or American history. Its broad perspective and interest in everyone and everything enriches it; Twitty’s emphasis on using information about the past to heal and create just futures is a focus all historians should cultivate.
Twitty traces his own family history in Virginia and other parts of the South through combining oral history, genealogy, and records of the slave trade to pinpoint approximately when and where his African ancestors entered the Americas. Simultaneously, he describes via primary and secondary sources the agricultural world they would have come from and the new landscape they would have encountered and the additional crops and influences that they would use to create a distinct American culinary tradition. Twitty revisited a number of places from his own ancestors’ past during the course of his research, and in his role as food historian interacted with everyone from farmers at black farmers markets in the south to the fishermen of Low Country to the Gullah-Geechee people to the white descendants of plantation owners and Mennonite sorghum-molasses producers. He uses every opportunity to explore the complex and enormously diverse history of the South. I enjoyed his description of Southern Jewish history and foodways as well as his extensive passages on the ways that wild plants from Africa and America became medical repositories for enslaved people that were ignored by slaveholders. Twitty traces the stories of brutality and resistance and survival in a way that is deeply accessible. His occasional personal anecdotes (his white boyfriend chopping down trees for a traditional eighteenth-century barbecue while wearing lipstick, for instance, or his family making persimmon beer and bread together in the tradition of hundreds of their forebears) are joyful reminders of the love and solidarity that can exist in the present.
Twitty notes the indigenous origin of the names and use of American land, flora and fauna, and discusses the way that indigenous American crops were adopted and carried around the world to change food in Ireland and West Africa. He talks about the way that West African food also informed new “American” foods, from the way Southerners cooked and cured meat to the way they grew and ate vegetables. Some of the most emotionally resonant moments are when he switches directly between descriptions of old food and accounts of the way he recreates or revisits it now.
This is a must read for anyone interested in Southern history or American history. Its broad perspective and interest in everyone and everything enriches it; Twitty’s emphasis on using information about the past to heal and create just futures is a focus all historians should cultivate.
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced