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

Twitty shifts his attention from corn and tobacco to rice. He recognizes the important role rice played in African American cuisine and the expansion of slavery: “If cotton was the king of the antebellum South, rice was her queen” (241). Twitty examines the crop through the lens of another ancestor, Hettie. What he knows of her comes from a document that reveals that she was enslaved at the age of 12 in South Carolina and an oral history that emphasized her light skin. Twitty calls her “Elder Woman,” or “Mama Wovei,” according to the culture and customs of the Mende. In Africa, women were gardeners; they understood what it took to make rice grow. Rice is an important crop to African culture, and African red rice is considered a sacred plant.

Enslavers understood that enslaved workers would be better at handling certain crops depending on the region they came from. Men and women such as Mama Wovei would have been knowledgeable rice farmers, and their culinary customs would have influenced how Southern kitchens approached the grain. Slaveholders believed that Africans had developed an immunity to some of the diseases associated with working in rice fields, such as yellow fever and skin infections. While this is partially true, many enslaved Africans died from contracting tropical fevers and working in fields where poisonous snakes and other dangers lurked.

When Twitty grows a garden of his own, he recognizes that this is an act of solidarity with generations’ worth of teaching and survival. Black families in the United States were dependent on their gardens. While enslaved Africans would not have survived on the meager provisions from their enslavers, Depression-era Black elders recalled white men and women coming to their doors to beg for food. On African homesteads, the garden provided the “sauce,” the vegetables and herbs that would perform the aromatic foundation for meat and grains. Twitty utilizes his father’s knowledge to plant sweet potatoes, squash, cowpeas, peppers, and herbs. For enslaved families, gardens were not just sources of food, medicine, and spirituality—they were a form of resistance.

The landscapes of the Americas differed sharply from those of Africa. The plants that had provided physical and spiritual sustenance in the African homeland did not exist on the other side of the Atlantic. Indigenous knowledge and trial and error led enslaved Africans to build a unique food culture that echoed traditional dishes while using new ingredients. As a child, Twitty learned to “look before you cut,” because his family’s property was covered in persimmon, pomegranate, and peach trees, fruits that provided Black families with familiar flavors. Cultivating native plants became another form of active resistance. Pokeweed was medicinal, helping enslaved communities stave off worms. Purslane, mulberries, and pawpaws supplemented the diets of African Americans.

Twitty recalls helping his father harvest persimmons for his grandmother, who turned them into persimmon bread. The rest was made into persimmon beer. Twitty carries this tradition forward and describes sharing persimmon liquor with a group of Confederate reenactors, connecting with them over old plants.