I have anticipated getting the opportunity to read "The Cooking Gene" for some time as I have followed his work at his Afroculinaria blog and have coworkers and students who have spoken highly of him after attending lectures and meals. It surpassed my expectations and I feel it is one of the most important books to be published this year. It will be a resource, reference and guidebook for classrooms, churches, workshops, and families.
This is not a recipe book as you know it. Recipes are sprinkled within, often at the ends of chapters as a highlight for the topic within. I found it nearly impossible to read without wanting food and drink at hand. It is at once an impeccably researched and perfectly executed ethnography of the cuisine of the U.S. South, and compelling, deeply personal, spiritual discovery of his own place as an African American gay Jewish culinary historian embedded within the inescapable trauma of chattel slavery and settler colonial violence.
"The Cooking Gene" is a family bible that contains the plants and animals, of songs and recipes of Twitty's ancestors, a personal origin story of the foods he hated as a child and has dedicated his life to understand as an adult. The DNA of food within landscape and heartbreak, poverty and resistance is present on each page. It is about race, and it is not. It is compassionate and critical, transcending boundaries while drawing them firmly. It is a book of education, a contemplative account of countless evils that traces a possible path toward redemption from the "second original sin" that lies at the founding of the United States, sins that perpetuate and live in the headlines and protests, the White House and the streets of Charlottesville and Ferguson, Chicago and Detroit, L.A. and Portland.
Much of this book impressed me as a professional public historical archaeologist and educator who worked for some time in the National Parks system. I felt many moments of recognition and familiarity in parts about the archaeology of slave cabins, and how his own personal experiences brings a meaning I can never experience when uncovering a sprinkle of seeds in the packed earthen floor of a dwelling. His position as informant and expert brings necessary critique to the work that white academics do--anthropology, history, and museums are as embedded in whiteness and colonization as much as any other institution, and does much of the work to keep marginalized people marginalized, the past silent and dead rather than in the hands of the people who own it.
I had to read this book twice, because I devoured it like a beignet the first time, knowing that I would need a second bite to really taste it. I will likely take more as I make room to digest what I have eaten so far. My own personal ties to the South lie in a complicated and obscure diaspora from various migrations from the Scotland, Bavaria, Cornwall and London to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Rhode Island and then North Carolina, then west through Missouri, Ohio, to Utah, then Eastern Oregon where I was born. "The Cooking Gene" spoke to these in a way I did not expect.
In each chapter, there were details that finally provided sense of discordant and messy family gatherings in Eastern Oregon. My own career in historical archaeology of colonial west was born of my need to understand the causes of the endless arguments and traumas that divided my family along religious, political, and racial lines, and my community upon lines of religion, class, race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and political ideology. Much like this nation itself, my family were wedded only by accident of birth and the Southern recipes from my grandmother's kitchen.
My mother attributed these recipes to her mother's strategy in the Depression in rural Utah by cooking such meals for her family and sold them to the community of miners in their tiny home--a former chicken coop on Paiute lands. For her, they were both guilty pleasure and secret shame, associated with the taint of poverty and rumors of her mother's mixed Paiute, German, English, Scottish, and Cherokee lineages. Grandma spoke Paiute, and was claimed by her people there. Yet her written genealogy reveals only hints at some of these details.
From "The Cooking Gene" I now know more about how the foods and traditions that united us as family were rooted in a carefully cultivated landscape of power, enslavement, genocide and survival that is the South. I have never planned to pursue DNA testing, but now I feel compelled to follow Michael's journey to understand these mysteries.
Every reader, regardless their race or disparate identities, will make a connection to their ancestors and their experiences within this book. Twitty brings us Southerners--even those removed for generations like me--gratitude and a redeeming hope for a nation that has never been united though we are mishpocheh.
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He begins with Baldwin and ends with Sankofa..that just about sums up all you need to know to be sure this book is genius !!
Michael Twitty is our generation's Baldwin asking questions of our republic that few people are brave enough to confront. Through food and history Michael advocates for POC while finding a safe space in the kitchen and at the table for true fellowship across identities and traditions that usually divide.The Cooking Gene is a book that will go down in the cannon of foundational black culinary studies along with Taste of Country Cooking, High in the Hog, and the Jemima Code, so to have a publisher support 420 pages of unapologetically black history wrapped up in a personal narrative thay confronts so many -isms is exciting and encouraging for the scope and expansion of this work.Please purchase multiple copies, share far and wide and follow the brilliant work Michael continues to do through this gorgeous book because it all supports this crutial scholarship.
Top reviews from other countries
Farah Mendlesohn
I am writing this only because I am shocked there ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 29, 2017
