The Cooking Gene

Reading this book, we join chef/historian/genealogist Michael W. Twitty on a journey through his life and his ancestry, by way of the foods that he grew up on, researched and eventually traced back to North Africa. Twitty reconciles his slave ancestry with both the foods that barely sustained his forbearers while they were chained, to the foods that became celebrations of hard won freedom. We learn how, alongside family separation, inhumane treatment, and injustice on a scale and across a spread of time that stands out in human history, a people preserved and developed a culture with the foods they both brought with them on slave ships and developed as a means of survival. Though there are a few recipes, this is not a cookbook. This a history book that both laments the horrors visited upon the people who comprised the largest, longest forced migration in history, and celebrates the cuisine and the resilience of that same people. Twitty shows how many of the foods we associate with African Americans came from West Africa and how many progenitors of the current African American cuisine can still be found in that far away land. He also describes the history of foods that have transcended the African American subculture to become quintessentially American; like Mac & Cheese. Twitty has the voice of a poet and many passages are so beautiful in tone, meter, and construction that I found myself rereading them just for the pleasure of the words. I learned a lot about the history of the food that we embrace as soul food from this book. It is poignant learning that these classic American dishes are only with us as a result of both the greatest stain on American history and the greatest triumph of a people seeking freedom and integration into the American society and the American story.