The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.13 (876 Votes) |
| Asin | : | B01BSJIBJI |
| Format Type | : | |
| Number of Pages | : | 206 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-05-22 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Michael W. “Slavery made the world of our ancestors incredibly remote to us. Thankfully, the work of Michael W. Twitty approaches his ancestral and culinary history from Africa to America, and occasionally back to Europe, with the precision of a surgeon and the passion of an artist. Twitty’s culinary and linguistic gifts are beautifully intertwined in The Cooking Gene, but it’s Twitty’s agency here – the way his journey through the South’s cultural history tackles race, gender, faith, morality, and sexual orientation in a way earlier historians ignored – that makes this volume essential reading for all Americans. Twitty’s no-nonsense style and interlaced with moments of levity, The Cooking Gene is gritty, compelling, and enlightening &ndash
Twitty is a noted culinary and cultural historian and the creator of Afroculinaria, the first blog devoted to African American historic foodways and their legacies. Twitty has appeared throughout the media, including on NPR’s The Splendid Table, and has given more than 250 talks in the United States and abroad. He has been honored by FirstWeFeast as one of the twenty greatest food bloggers
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 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. In this unique memoir, culinary historian Michael W. He sifts through stories, recipes, genetic tests, and historical documents, and travels from Civil War battlefields in Virginia to synagogues in Alabama to Black-own