The Cooking Gene.

Michael W. Twitty’s memoir The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South won the James Beard Foundation’s Book of the Year Award this spring, as well as a separate award for Writing. Combining Twitty’s own search for his genealogical and culinary roots with a long exploration of how the enslavement and forced migration of millions of Africans defined what we now think of as the cuisines of the United States, the Caribbean, and much of South America, The Cooking Gene wanders around the globe in prose and subject in a quest for meaning and identity through food.

Twitty is a fascinating character in his own book: born in Washington D.C. in 1977, Twitty is African-American, gay, and a convert to Judaism, and thanks to DNA testing and genealogical research, he can trace his ancestry back to white ancestors in the 1800s. He’s an advocate for black culinary history in this country, leading the “Southern Discomfort Tour” and giving a TED talk on the extent to which African foodways informed and defined American cooking, notably southern cuisine, but have been ignored or underrepresented in discussions of our culinary history. He has spoken, cooked, and served at plantations in the South that formerly housed slaves, and his knowledge of culinary history is largely the result of his own autodidactic nature. He began the project that eventually became The Cooking Gene in 2011, publishing the book in 2017 (via an imprint of HarperCollins, the same publishing house that produced Smart Baseball) to great acclaim.

The narrative in The Cooking Gene is nonlinear of necessity, something Twitty acknowledges in the closing section, which meant that for me it took a while to get wrapped up in any aspect of the story, but once he gets rolling on his own ancestry the book starts to resemble a more cohesive work – even though his heritage is anything but cohesive. Twitty traces his roots back to many places, including presumed white ancestor named Bellamy whose plantation he visits, to various tribes of west Africa including the Akan people of Ghana and Mende people of Sierra Leone, and to … Ireland, of all places, which apparently got him some amusing reactions when he visited and told locals why he was there.

Every trip branches out into multiple anecdotes, just as every new DNA test he takes – there’s one, AfricanAncestry.com, that provides more specific information on African DNA lineages – also leads to new digressions and stories. There’s a lot of slave history in The Cooking Gene, much of it physically brutal, but also much of it putting the lie to the myths of the benevolent slaveholders who sent their cooks to learn French cooking in Paris, but treated them just as badly when they returned, often using the education merely as a way to increase the resale value of their ‘property.’

The broader point of this book, however, is that all cuisines we think of as distinctly American or Caribbean derive heavily from west African cooking traditions, to the point where Twitty flatly accuses many white chefs, writers, and culinary historians of a form of appropriation. Even our words for many ingredients, like okra (from ??k??r??, an Igbo word, spoken in southeastern Nigeria), trace their etymologies back along the slave trade routes from the American South and Caribbean to western Africa, where such foods and the antecedents of dishes like gumbo go back for centuries. Beans and rice, whether the Creole red beans version or the Brazilian feijão or the hoppin’ john of the Carolinas, originate in west Africa. Fried chicken, considered a staple Southern food with Scottish origins, also has roots in west Africa, where the meat was heavily seasoned and fried in palm oil. Yams, peanuts (groundnuts), and watermelon all originated in different parts of Africa, and are also now considered part of the traditional cuisine of the American South. Twitty also offers the rare example of a culinary tradition traveling the other way, from the Americans to Africa, as nixtamalization, the process of treating corn (maize) with a strong alkaline solution to remove fungal toxins while increasing the nutritional value of the product.

Twitty connects his search for his genealogical roots with his exploration of his culinary roots by combining them into a single if meandering narrative around identity – that both types of roots were, in effect, stolen from black Americans when they were captured in Africa and brought against their will to the Americas. Thus, by reclaiming the culinary and gustatory heritage of black Americans, Twitty believes he and others can continue to rebuild their cultural and ethnic identities in a country that still attempts to marginalize and disenfranchise people of color.

I listened to the audiobook version of The Cooking Gene, read by Twitty himself, which was probably not the best decision. Twitty has an endearing, folksy delivery, but pauses constantly at strange points in sentences, even breaking up phrases where no breaks belong, which I found endlessly distracting. It’s not an occasional thing – he regularly does this, as if he’s turning to the next page – and I think I’d recommend the physical or ebook formats instead.

Next up: Ben Rhodes’ memoir of his years in the Obama White House, The World As It Is.