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

“My entire cooking life has been about memory. It’s my most indispensable ingredient, so wherever I find it, I hoard it.”

Memory plays an important role throughout Twitty’s work. As he explores his heritage through research, genetic testing, and oral traditions, he cycles in and out of memories. Each aspect of Southern culture and history that he explores is directly connected to a personal or a family memory.

“Three centuries were explained to me with books full of pictures opened wide, and my hands felt around in the darkness of my imagination for the women and men who felt completely beyond my reach.”

This quotation is related to the broader theme of Identity and Self-Discovery. As a young boy, Twitty did not know what slavery was; nor did he connect to Black food or culture. As his eyes began to open to the history of his ancestors, he fell in love with learning about his history and identity.

“Every time I remember the story it never fails to amaze me that I have never been more than one person’s touch away from the world of American slavery.”

This quotation refers to Twitty’s father describing holding the hand of a grandfather who had experienced slavery. Twitty can see how short the thread is between him and that life, and it impacts his personal identity.

“To know who you are you often have to be able to see outside yourself.”

Twitty’s discovery of Judaism and immersion in its practices and scholarship help him to refine and understand his own cultural heritage. He sees many connections between the experiences of Jewish and Black people in oppressive societies, and his love of learning is cultivated by the religion. 

“I am not enslaved, but by showing the living what the dead went through, I live a scary and unsettling past. I feel like a doorway for all the spirits of the plantations I visit.”

It is important to Twitty both to research and to live the experiences of his ancestors. As he works in plantation kitchens or in a cotton field, Twitty encounters both Beauty and Ugliness. He sees the culinary dishes, rich traditions, and beautiful aspects of his family’s culture while recognizing the hardship and violence they faced. By embracing both sides of history, Twitty is better able to engage with his personal narrative.

“With African American genealogy, it’s more about social justice, regaining a heritage denied.”

An important aspect of Twitty’s book is the arduous journey of uncovering his family’s history. It requires poring over historical documents, visiting sites, interviewing family members and others, and piecing together fragmented stories out of much that has been erased. Twitty contrasts this difficult and painful experience with that of white genealogical research, which many treat as a hobby. The juxtaposition has a rhetorical effect, underscoring the hardship of the author’s ancestors.

“He sat there with a smile as they rode on by in little parades of intimidation, and as they moved on, he openly declared, ‘If they come to kill me, I’ll take them to hell with me, but as for me and my house, we shall not live in hell.’”

Twitty’s grandfather further contributes to the theme of Beauty and Ugliness. The oral stories about him—his bravery, kindness, sense of humor, and gentleness—contrast with those about Twitty’s grandmother, a woman known for her colorism and refusal to eat food Black hands had prepared.

“These were not neutral spaces; these were places of power against the enslaved in the most dehumanizing ways possible.”

While plantation kitchens were the birthplace of many culinary dishes that represent The Impact of Slavery on American Foodways, they were also spaces of terror and brutality. Once more, Twitty confronts duality—the beauty and ugliness that coexist in historical spaces.

“‘Who are you and what does the plate of food you put before me communicate to us who you are?’ We’ve all heard the question. My answer is plain: ‘My food is my flag.’”

This quotation reveals the connection Twitty draws between identity and food. He feels strongly that a person’s food directly correlates with their history and character. The food Twitty prepares is imbued with meaning; each ingredient represents a larger narrative about his ancestors. He rejects the idea that food is merely fuel. Instead, it is a meaningful part of Identity and Self-Discovery.

“Slavery began with food.”

For Twitty, slavery’s origins in sugarcane is symbolic. It represents a complicated linkage of food and slavery throughout American history, which is connected to the theme of The Impact of Slavery on American Foodways. While food created a context for slavery, enslaved peoples created a culinary culture.

“Its post-1492 spread across Africa was a watershed event, but it was not part of some great Columbian ‘exchange’ in which there was a sharing of material culture for the benefit of the greater whole.”

Although Twitty does not name specific historians, it is possible his comments in this passage are directed toward Charles C. Mann and his 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Twitty shows how the arrival of new crops and goods in Africa created a framework for slavery and African poverty rather than the development of a mutually beneficial system of trade.

“Freedom comes in as many forms as resistance; each garden, animal, or fish trap, and hidey-hole, represents a fight against a monotonous diet meant to instill a sense of inferiority and difference.”

With the theme of Beauty and Ugliness pervading the book, it often feels as though there is more ugliness than beauty. For Twitty, though, beauty is found in small ways—through tiny acts of resistance, often connected to food, which are in turn connected to personal and cultural identity.

“Plants were not just plants to us; they were homes of spirit; they were parts of our familial makeup; they were part of our genealogy.”

For Twitty, the central role of plants in the Southern diet speaks to the historical connection between enslaved peoples and plants and thus to the theme of The Impact of Slavery on American Foodways. It also points to ways that plants could connect him spiritually and physically to his ancestors.

“The barbecue was always inherently political, as a ‘gift’ to enslaved people that bought goodwill, discouraged resistance, and rewarded people pushed beyond their limits.”

Here, as Twitty alludes to the political and cultural debate surrounding Southern barbecue, he points to the ways that white enslavers used hog-killing celebrations for cultural and psychological manipulation of enslaved people. This “gift” of meat was another way to maintain and reinforce the institution of slavery.

“For myself, I hate everything I’m eating—even burned matzo tastes better than this crap.”

The food Twitty eats in the cotton field, which is what Black enslaved workers would have eaten in the antebellum South, not only lacks nutrition and taste. It also is the food of brutality and oppression. This recognition is also part of his journey of Identity and Self-Discovery.

“The disruption of the black family, the interruption of an important community-driven ethnic economy, the engendering of a poor diet, an urgent desire to suppress learning and education, and a culture of unrelenting violence—these and all the dependency, instability, and toxic thinking that went along with them were the fruits of King Cotton, none of which black America has been able to fully purge from its system.”

Since cotton created a framework for perpetuating American slavery and brutality, Twitty directly connects that crop to the continued oppression of Black Americans. In the process, he aligns the disdain many contemporary Americans have for soul food with the racist stereotypes that were born out of cotton culture and the reality of what that food meant for workers in the field.

“You know why I did that, boy? So you could write this down in the book. You go on and write this down in the book. I picked cotton so you could pick up a book.”

Twitty’s conversation with his grandfather, who picked cotton as a young man, exhibits the theme Beauty and Ugliness. While Twitty explores the cruel history of slavery and cotton in much of the chapter, here his grandfather turns that history on its head, saying how his picking cotton would enable his grandson to tell his story, a narrative of freedom and escape.

“‘You see those mirrors?’ she said. ‘When the ancestors come out and go toward you, when you look into their face, you see yourself.’”

Twitty learns throughout his journey that he carries his ancestry with him, that his identity is forged by the experiences of his predecessors. He is delighted when a Ghanian man tells him that he can tell Twitty is Ghanian by the structure of his face. His mother joins the faces of his ancestors, and her narrative is etched into his skin.

“But our ancestors had complicated relationships across color lines, or were violated. It’s not our responsibility to make people feel comfortable with this fact or to rationalize the rules of cultural inheritance.”

Twitty’s trip abroad leaves him struggling to grapple with his European heritage, specifically because that heritage suggests sexual assault was committed by his white forebears. However, he determines that this discomfort is as important and meaningful as the connection and familiarity he feels while visiting Africa or the American South. His attitude reflects his dedication to historical truth: Just as Twitty made himself toil in the fields to get a sense of his Black ancestors’ hardship, he now makes himself face the egregious reality of his white ancestor’s violence.

“We have come to this strange cultural moment where food is both tool and weapon. I am grateful for it. My entire life I knew, and many others knew, that our daily bread was itself a kind of scripture of our origins, a taste track of our lives.”

As Twitty participates in the complicated discussion surrounding Black and Southern food, he embraces the fact that people are talking about African American heritage cooking and that they are beginning to recognize the culture and history that endows the Southern table with meaning, including the culture and history of slavery. When Twitty remarks that “food is both tool and weapon,” his words highlight the narrative’s focus on duality: positivity and negativity, beauty and ugliness, joy and sorrow.

“It is not enough to be white at the table. It is not enough to be black at the table. It is not enough to be ‘just human’ at the table. Complexity must come with us—in fact it will invite itself to the feast whether we like it or not.”

Just as Twitty rejects the notion of seeing food as just food, he refuses to allow a societal shift toward letting go and shutting up to further erase the history of Black people in the Americas. Instead, he embraces the conflict and contradiction—the Beauty and Ugliness—that make up the American table.

“Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi, a Twi proverb: ‘It is no sin to go back and fetch what you have forgotten.’”

Using an African proverb, Twitty closes with a call to action: He invites readers to seek out their own identity and history through food and to embrace the complexity of the human condition in a complicated world. The proverb is also germane to Twitty’s motivation in writing the memoir, as his book is a journey to “go back and fetch” what the nation has “forgotten” about slavery’s role in Southern cuisine.

“This would soon be a theme in my West African travels—the feeling of culinary déjà vu one experiences in every hotel and home, market and street corner.”

In direct contrast to Twitty’s experience of Europe, in West Africa every corner and market feels familiar. He connects deeply and meaningfully with the culture and landscape. This trip completes the arc of the Southern Discomfort Tour, revealing the roots of Southern American cuisine and much of Twitty’s identity.