The Cooking Gene Quotes

“So much was lost—names, faces, ages, ethnic identities—that African Americans must do what no other ethnic group writ large must do: take a completely shattered vessel and piece it together,”
― Michael W. Twitty, The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South—A James Beard Award Winner

“Food, racism, power, and justice are linked. What I’m trying to do is dismantle culinary nutritional imperialism and gastronomic white supremacy with one cup of zobo made from hibiscus, one bowl of millet salad with groundnuts and dark green vegetables, and one piece of injera at a time. The next wave of human rights abuse is in the form of nutrition injustice”
― Michael W. Twitty, The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South—A James Beard Award Winner

“The privilege of living now is that I can seat myself at the master's table - the table of my white ancestor, a slaveholder - and interpret his world, and he has no say.”
― Michael W. Twitty, The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South

“When I got back home I told my grandmother everything, detail by detail, and she savored it. I had been to the old country. 'I used to love the crepe myrtles and camellias. You don't see those anywhere like Alabama.' She didn't cry, she didn't look wistful; she turned her head and changed the subject. Once she left Alabama, she never went back. The heart of Dixie was her Poland.”
― Michael W. Twitty, The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South

“The body count alone marks the plantation as a sacred place, and yet that's not what hallows the grounds to most. Traditionally, the plantation is a place where architecture and windows and wallpaper are lauded but the bodies who put them up are not. It is still marketed as the crux of the Old South, a place of manners, gentility, custom, and tradition; the South's cultural apogee. It is where much of Southern culture was born, and that includes much of Southern food, and it is the place where, by and large, black America was born - and that's precisely why I use the plantation as a place of reclamation.”
― Michael W. Twitty, The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South

“We have come to this strange cultural moment where food is both tool and weapon. I am grateful for it. My enter 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. It is a lie that food is just fuel. It has always had layers of meaning, and humans for the most part despise meaningless food. In America, and especially the American South, 'race' endures alongside the sociopolitics of food; it is not a stretch to say that that race is both on and at the Southern table. But if it is on the table alone we have learned nothing; we continue to reduce each other to stereotypical essences.

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. We can choose to acknowledge the presence of history, economics, class, cultural forces, and the idea of race in shaping our experience, or we can languish in circuitous arguments over what it all means and get nowhere. I present my journey to you as a means out of the whirlwind, an attempt to tell as much truth as time will allow.”
― Michael W. Twitty, The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South

“The American plantation wasn’t the quaint village community you saw depicted in your history textbook. It was a labor camp system for exiled prisoners of war and victims of kidnapping. In this light, it is no wonder many African Americans do not flock to but altogether avoid the plantation and urban sites where enslaved people—our ancestors—lived, worked, and died.”
― Michael W. Twitty, The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South—A James Beard Award Winner

“Mr. Wesley Jones’s Barbecue Mop This is my adaptation of a barbecue mop innovated by Mr. Wesley Jones, a barbecue master interviewed by the WPA, and who cooked during antebellum slavery. ½ stick butter, unsalted 1 large yellow or white onion, well chopped 2 cloves garlic, minced 1 cup apple cider vinegar ½ cup water 1 tbsp kosher salt 1 tsp coarse black pepper     1 pod long red cayenne pepper, or 1 tsp red pepper flakes 1 tsp dried rubbed sage     1 tsp dried basil leaves, or 1 tbsp minced fresh basil ½ tsp crushed coriander seed     ¼ cup dark brown sugar or 4 tbsp molasses (not blackstrap) Melt butter in a large saucepan. Add onion and garlic and sauté on medium heat until translucent. Turn heat down slightly and add vinegar, water, and the salt and spices. Allow to cook gently for about thirty minutes to an hour. To be used as a light mop sauce or glaze during the last 15 to 30 minutes of barbecuing and as a dip for cooked meat.”
― Michael W. Twitty, The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South—A James Beard Award Winner

“African red rice is a sacred plant to many of the people who still grow it. It is intimately associated with the ancestors; it was even used to start a revolution in colonial Senegal. According to my friend Senegalese chef Pierre Thiam, “a young, handicapped Jola woman named Aline Sitoe Diatta” had a vision during a drought from the Jola Supreme Being to return to the ancient rituals of their ancestors, and to abandon the broken Asian rice given to them by the French colonial authorities during World War II. It was not enough to grow and cultivate the rice; the Jola were to return to traditional forms of land management and respect for sacred woodlands. Aline Sitoe Diatta met her end in exile in Timbuktu, ultimately dying of starvation. Rice has a long history with culinary justice.”
― Michael W. Twitty, The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South—A James Beard Award Winner

“We know so much, but know so little, and the fine details keep shifting, but unlike any other American ethnic group those details are always hotly debated. We are not allowed the peace of mind of our own self-rumination. Every aspect of our history becomes a contested article on social media, a gospel truth to be disproved by experts at conferences, and a groupthink to be contained. Our cultural myths we design ourselves around are not sacred like other people’s myths; our anchors are constantly being pulled up to make white people feel as if they’re in control, and because of this we have struggled to come up with a cohesive and empowering narrative of our own.”
― Michael W. Twitty, The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South—A James Beard Award Winner

“just think there is a measure of gravitas in black people looking at the same food culture and not only learning important general information but being able to see themselves. This is greater than the intrinsic value of knowing where our food comes from and rescuing endangered foods. That Lost Ark-meets-Noah’s-ark mentality is intellectually thrilling and highly motivational, but it pales in comparison to the task of providing economic opportunity, cultural and spiritual reconnection, improved health and quality of life, and creative and cultural capital to the people who not only used to grow that food for themselves and others, but have historically been suppressed from benefiting from their ancestral legacy.”
― Michael W. Twitty, The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South—A James Beard Award Winner

“In the middle—the few books we have by black folks born into slavery who were cooks—Abby Fisher, Malinda Russell, Rufus Estes, Tunis Campbell.”
― Michael W. Twitty, The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South—A James Beard Award Winner

“Before I officially began the journey to dig deeper into my food and family roots and routes, I was racking up an internal encyclopedia about other people and how food affected their lives as proxy for the stories in my own bloodline and body. This made for really uncomfortable armor. It never really fit me right. These were other people’s tales and paths—not my own. I began to wonder if I ever really would be able to locate myself in the human experience. What good is it to learn the flow of human history and to”
― Michael W. Twitty, The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South—A James Beard Award Winner

“In all of my days, I have been asked to prove everything I have ever said, but I have never heard a single one of these docents challenged for using racist folk history as fact.”
― Michael W. Twitty, The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South—A James Beard Award Winner

“It's generations of clack cooks like Solomon Northup's wife - she's illiterate but she's conversant in haute cuisine.”
― Michael W. Twitty, The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South

“Closing down an event with Confederate reenactors is never really easy for a black guy. Let’s face it, the Confederates lost the War Between the States, but they won a different type of war.”
― Michael W. Twitty, The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South—A James Beard Award Winner

“Your heritage foods are your health and your wealth.”
― Michael W. Twitty, The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South—A James Beard Award Winner

“I have often wondered whether the white people who know we are kin actually see us as family. It's critical for me to think about the possibilities of every Southern white family connected to African Americans on DNA tests truly reaching out and vice versa, to create a dialogue. Would we be better off if we embraced this complexity and dealt with our pain or shame? Would we finally be Americans or Southerners or both if we truly understood how impenetrably connected we actually are? Is it too late?

Maybe I'll just invite everyone to dinner one day and find out.”
― Michael W. Twitty, The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South

“Jewish food and black food crisscross each other throughout history. They are both cuisines where homeland and exile interplay. Ideas and emotions are ingredients - satire, irony, longing, resistance - and you have to eat the food to extract that meaning. One memory is the sweep of the people's journey, and the other is the little bits and pieces of individual lives shaped by ancient paths and patterns. The food is an archive, a keeper of secrets.”
― Michael W. Twitty, The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South

“Before I officially began the journey to dig deeper into my food and family roots, I was racking up an internal encyclopedia about other people and how food affected their lives as proxy for the stories in my own bloodline and body. This made for really uncomfortable armor. It never really fit me right. These were other people's tales and paths - not my own. I began to wonder if I ever really would be able to locate myself in the human experience. What good is it to learn the flow of human history and to speak of the dead if their stories don't speak to you? What of food history and facts and figures and flashpoints? What good is your own position as a culinary historian if you can't find yourself in the narrative of your food's story, if you don't know who you are?”
― Michael W. Twitty, 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 moth indispensable ingredient, so wherever I find it, I hoard it. I tell stories about people using food, I swap memories with people and create out of that conversation mnemonic feasts with this fallible, subjective mental evidence. Sometimes they are people long gone, whose immortality is expressed in the pulp of trees also long gone and in our electronic ether. Other times they are people who converse with me as I cook as the enslaved once cooked, testifying to people and places that only come alive again when they are remembered. In memory there is resurrection, and thus the end goal of my cooking is just that - resurrection.”
― Michael W. Twitty, The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South

“The travels to discovery my heritage revealed to me that the South might not be a place so much as it is a series of moments, which in proper composition communicate an indelible history that people cling to as horseshoes do to old barns. In cooking, the style of Southern food is more verb that adjective; it is the exercise of specific histories, not just the result. In food it becomes less a matter of location than of process, and it becomes difficult to separate the nature of the process from the heritage by which one acquired it. Southern cuisine is a series of geographic and gastronomic mutations made long ago by people whose fade into the earth provides half of the justification for why their descendants keep the process going at all. Our ancestry is not an afterthought; it is both raison d'etre and our mise en place, it is action and reaction.”
― Michael W. Twitty, The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South

“Today's American food culture is a contested landscape in search of values, new direction, and its own indigenous sense of rightness and self-worth. It's a culture looking toward ecology, the regional flow of seasons, and opportunities for new ways to invigorate and color the American palate. Our new foodies are concerned with health, sustainability, environmental integrity, social justice, and the push-pull between global and local economies. Our food world is a charged scene of culinary inquiry continually in search of ancestors, historic precedent, and novel ways to explore tradition while surging forward. The chefs and culinarians of twenty-first-century America have become hungry for an origin story all our own.”
― Michael W. Twitty, The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South

“You have to know a lot of songs to cook the way our ancestors cooked. The songs are like clocks with spells. Some enslaved cooks timed the cooking by the stanzas of the hymns and spirituals, or little folk songs that began across the Atlantic and melted into plantation Creole, melting Africa with Europe until beginnings and endings were muddied.”
― Michael W. Twitty, The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South

“The Old South is a place where people use food to tell themselves who they are, to tell others who they are, and to tell stories about where they've been. The Old South is a place of groaning tables across the tracks from want. It's a place where arguments over how barbecue is prepared or chicken is served or whether sugar is used to sweeten cornbread can function as culinary shibboleths. It is a place in the mind where we dare not talk about which came first, the African cook or the European mistress, the Native American woman or the white woodsman. We just know that somehow the table aches from the weight of so much . . . that we prop it up with our knees and excuses to keep it from falling.”
― Michael W. Twitty, The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South

“Jewish food is a matter of text expressed on the table.”
― Michael W. Twitty, The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South—A James Beard Award Winner

“JJ, as a professional chef, defends the ground on which he stands. “ When we were promoting the cuisine of the Cecil, I got into a little argument with one sister. I said our cuisine is the celebration of the food of slaves. She winced. ‘ How can you celebrate the slaves?’ No, I’m not celebrating slavery, I’m celebrating how they survived, and you have to know the source and what happens when people from that background met incoming migrants from Asia. But that’s the part I really need to know. I never made it to the slave castle and that’s why I need to get back. I’m going to learn more about our cooking, the way our ancestral grandmothers cooked because at the end of the day, your goal as a chef is you want to cook like your grandmother.”
― Michael W. Twitty, The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South

“Cracking the code of the vernacular is just half the battle. Fish are as seasonal as birds or fruit. Their world is invisible to us unless we are on intimate terms with it. I felt nauseous writing about this part of the foodscape because unlike my father and ancestors before him, I had never spent any measurable time "gone fishin" in my life. I felt deprived of a harmony robbed of me by pollution, fear of nature, overpopulation, and poor stewardship of water and air, but something in me felt healed knowing the explorers of the next generation could identify bream and its habits, getting knowledge passed down from the generations gone fishin' before.”
― Michael W. Twitty, The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South

“I picked cotton so you could pick up a book.”
― Michael W. Twitty, The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South

“Jewish food and black food crisscross each other throughout history. They are both cuisines where homeland and exile interplay. Ideas and emotions are ingredients—satire, irony, longing, resistance—and you have to eat the food to extract that meaning. The food of both diasporas depends on memory. One memory is the sweep of the people’s journey, and the other is the little bits and pieces of individual lives”
― Michael W. Twitty, The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South—A James Beard Award Winner