The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South

The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South, a memoir by Michael Twitty, describes his efforts to uncover his culinary and ancestral roots. Twitty is a living history interpreter who has devoted his career to researching African American foodways. He maintains Afroculinaria, a food blog that highlights the contributions of the African diaspora to Southern cuisine. The Cooking Gene is a 2017 James Beard Award winner for Book of the Year.

This guide is based on the 2017 paperback edition published by HarperCollins.

Content Warning: This study guide obscures the author’s use of the n-word.

Summary

In The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South, Michael W. Twitty describes his efforts to discover his genetic roots and to inhabit the lives of his ancestors, both of which are linked to, and through, food. The author embarks on what he calls a “Southern Discomfort Tour,” cooking in plantation kitchens and laboring in cotton fields as enslaved people did, in order to better understand what his predecessors experienced while learning more about himself and them through genetic and genealogical research. This guide discusses three central themes of the book: Identity and Self-Discovery, The Impact of Slavery on American Foodways, and Beauty and Ugliness.

In the opening chapters, Twitty sets the scene for his memoir by describing the Old South and the plantation kitchen where he works. Frustrated by those tourists for whom plantations represent a genteel past, he sees them as sites of cruelty and violence, but also resilience and survival. As he inhabits the work of his ancestors, Twitty also recalls his own family kitchen, where he began to learn about his complex heritage and to embrace his identity.

For Twitty, learning about the cultures of others helps one to better understand one’s own. Judaism serves that function for Twitty, who is attracted to its spirit of critical inquiry. It is in this spirit that he undertakes research into his own particular heritage and the foods that contributed to shaping it as well as Southern cuisine.

While research on his ancestors is challenging—Black people and their histories have been erased from American records or even ignored—his family stories serve as a rich resource. From them he learns that his kin are not immune to the racism on which the United States was founded and that he also has white ancestry in the figure of his fifth great-grandfather, a wealthy farmer whose son fathered Twitty’s lineage through an act of violence. Further genetic research reveals that he is most closely linked with the peoples of West Africa, particularly Ghana.

In the course of his research Twitty realizes that just as his genetic heritage hails from Africa, so, too, does much of the culinary heritage of the South. This heritage comes from two strands of history: one found in the kitchens of enslaved people, the other in the kitchens of their enslavers. Thus, while enslaved people were denied access to meat or were given only the parts that white enslavers did not want, a rich, diverse, and creative culinary tradition was born out of restriction. At the same time, foods with African and Indigenous roots, such as okra and corn, contributed to what is still thought of today as Southern food. Also known as “soul food,” it bears the impress of slavery just as surely as the cotton fields in which enslaved people labored.

Working in cotton fields as his ancestors had, Twitty takes a broader view of agriculture and slavery, considering not only the role of sugar, tobacco, rice, and other crops in the expansion of slavery, but also the ways that slaveholders relied on the knowledge of their enslaved workers to sustain their plantations. Connecting this past to the present and to the failure of Southern cuisine to acknowledge its African roots, Twitty expresses his hope that contemporary discourse about food will recognize Africa’s contributions.

In the closing chapters, Twitty returns to his own personal story and describes traveling to Europe and Africa to further understand himself. In Europe, where he is unable to connect to the food and people, he finds it difficult to reconcile the fact that this heritage is a part of him. In Africa, by contrast, he encounters something familiar and vibrant. There, he feels welcome, at home.