Southern food readily suggests fried chicken, barbecue, and a generously laid table. Families gather; elders have signature dishes; recipes pass down through generations. Michael W. Twitty asks a less comfortable question. If a dish's history reaches back to a plantation, will we also ask who worked in its kitchen and who was entitled to sit down and eat?
The Cooking Gene, published in 2017, follows a journey through the Old South in search of African American food history. Recipes appear, but family, migration, enslavement, and the author's growing understanding of his origins occupy much of the book. It is neither a comprehensive culinary survey nor a pleasant guide to eating across the region. Food can lead him somewhere difficult to swallow.
Twitty researches food history and demonstrates historical cooking. Period clothing and an open fire bring preparation into view. Discussing the book's beginning in an interview, he mentions dressing and chopping wood. Before a meal is served, the body approaches some of the work behind it. Heat, exertion, and duration become parts of history a dish's name alone cannot preserve.
There Is a Plot of Ground Outside the Kitchen
In a 2017 PBS interview at Colonial Williamsburg, Twitty shows a garden representing aspects of enslaved people's lives. Its untidy rows are not ornamental. People laboring all day in tobacco fields could tend their own plants only around the edges of that work, early or late.
This demonstration offers an entry into the book. Farm to table now often praises freshness and local supply. For someone unable to control daylight labor, the same phrase can conceal extra time wrested from exhaustion. What grows and what reaches the pot are connected to how much someone can decide.
The book follows crops including corn, rice, and sugar through cultivation, processing, and regional foodways. Southern cuisine becomes an overly convenient collective term. Coastal and inland places, labor systems, and migrations do not produce one uniform menu. Following ingredients leads to forcibly displaced people and the practices through which they sustained life elsewhere.
Creative endurance can easily be made too beautiful. Twitty values inherited skills, but their costs must remain present. Preserving a food may also mean repeated improvisation under scarcity or surrendering already limited rest to a garden. Later enjoyment cannot establish that the conditions producing it were worthwhile.
Yet an account confined to suffering loses another part of the people in the kitchen. They recognize plants, manage heat, feed families, and pass on knowledge. Deprivation and accomplishment deserve simultaneous attention. The former prevents slavery from becoming scenery; the latter prevents people from appearing only as victims.
Ancestry Does Not Supply a Simple Answer
Following food means following relatives. Family stories, historical records, and genetic testing all enter Twitty's search. Gene brings together a familiar suggestion of inherited cooking ability with difficult questions of lineage and belonging.
The search does not culminate in a pure origin that finally tells him what kind of person he really is. More information creates more entanglement. In the PBS conversation, he discusses finding Confederate officers among his ancestors. Enslavement cannot be pictured as a history of two wholly unrelated sets of families.
Kinship does not cancel responsibility. Especially when a connection was forced, calling everyone one family would falsify it. A genealogy can require confronting parts of an inheritance one cannot like or simply delete. How to live after that recognition remains a decision.
Genetic clues and learning to cook therefore operate at different levels. Test results cannot season a dish or prescribe a culture to love. Shared life, practice, and choice must make a flavor part of experience. Reading the title as a claim that an ethnic group is innately good at certain food would erase the difficult search itself.
Twitty does not give childhood an uninterrupted cultural pride either. He once disliked food associated with Blackness. This is harder and more consequential to describe than a grandmother's recipe automatically preserving home. Judgments outside a household enter a child's view of its table. Later reconsideration must confront learned shame as well as memory.
Readers who have been embarrassed by a family's accent, lunch, or hospitality may recognize the experience. Asking about origins does not require preserving every custom. It does make it possible to withdraw an earlier dismissal. Before deciding what to keep, something needs an opportunity to become known.
When a Dish Becomes Famous
Once food leaves the household, another question appears. A restaurant profits from a local dish; a chef becomes celebrated. The cuisine seems recognized. The community whose knowledge made it possible does not necessarily share that recognition.
Twitty's 2013 open letter to Paula Deen brought wider attention. Racist speech prompted the dispute, but he wanted the discussion to extend beyond a celebrity's words. Opportunities for Black cooks, the use of their knowledge, and authority to narrate Southern cuisine would remain issues after the immediate controversy faded.
Ownership of a dish is consequently complicated. Cooking crosses borders through borrowing, exchange, and change; Twitty's own table is not closed. Acknowledging exchange need not conceal its inequalities. Some travelers freely name discoveries as their own. Others leave techniques while their names scarcely enter the record.
The question can become practical. When a restaurant advertises an ancestral flavor, how far back does its story go, and at whose name does it stop? Does a cookbook merely list a contributor or help readers understand that person's work? Saying food belongs to everyone does not settle these choices. Sharing remains something that can be done well or badly.
His historical teaching makes this concrete. In a 2017 Ringer interview, he gathers okra leaves rather than the familiar pods and cooks them with sweet-potato leaves. The reporter discovers a part of a supposedly familiar vegetable previously overlooked. Praise for ancestors' contributions becomes a small lesson requiring someone to acknowledge ignorance and learn from another person's knowledge. The contents of a pot show how much of a plant can be used.
A Table That Does Not Demand Purity
Twitty writes as a Black man, a gay man, and a Jewish convert without relegating any part to an appendix. In a Saveur interview, he compares the book's construction to braided bread. Several strands move together rather than taking turns in separate, complete chronologies.
Readers should expect detours. Genealogy occupies considerable space; food, religion, and private life interrupt one another. Those seeking a quick origin story for a dish may become impatient. Historian Kelly Kean Sharp's appreciative review also asks for fuller sourcing of some larger historical claims. The book is best approached as an author's serious attempt to work through an inheritance, not as a final ruling on every aspect of food history.
In another interview that year, Twitty recalls Italian, British, Sri Lankan, and other foods on his childhood table. Their presence reflected people connected with the family. Seeking roots does not remove them to leave only sufficiently authentic Southern dishes. They too record acquaintance and meals shared. A purified tradition would delete life the family actually lived.
Nothing requires every difference to be reconciled at dinner. Learning a dish's history may increase discomfort: a flavor we praised carries labor we never asked about. The discomfort can remain and improve the next account we give, or make us seek a teacher previously ignored.
That shift is among the book's strongest invitations. A familiar meal can still taste good, then prompt another question. Its flavor has not vanished. It simply no longer seems to have appeared by itself. The people who planted, moved, and cooked can enter the story more distinctly than as the anonymous bearers of a tradition.