The Cooking Gene

A moving account of Michael Twitty's personal journey to explore his ancestry through culinary history, genealogy, population genetics, travel, and his own memories. The book is studded with fascinating (and often disturbing) details about the ingenuity required of enslaved people in the United States to survive, and thrive. The narrative underscored for me and enlightened me in a new way about just how much culture and language from West and Central Africa survived the ravages of persecution and time to remain vital and present in the lives of the descendents of enslaved people today - and the descendents of their ancestors' enslavers - especially in Southern foodways.

A few quibbles: perhaps it's because I bought a mass-market edition, but there were multiple issues that a copyeditor should have caught (creative uses of em-dashes made the structure of some sentences unclear, and required me to re-read them multiple times). The book also could have benefited from an index, but my guess is that the publisher/editor wasn't willing to pay for an indexer.

Still, I absolutely recommend this to anyone interested in culinary history (especially of southern American, West African, and/or Central African cuisines), African American history, and genealogy. Michael Twitty is an excellent writer who goes above and beyond in his efforts to get at a personal truth, and is generous enough to give the reader a window into it.