The Cooking Gene

Part memoir, part history, part genealogy: Twitty, a culinary historian, traces the food of the American South through three centuries of his own family's story — through slavery's foodways, the African crops and techniques that crossed the Atlantic, and his search of records, recipes, and his own DNA for the people behind the dishes. The book moves between archive and kitchen, arguing that Southern food cannot be honestly told without the Black hands that made it. It won the James Beard Foundation Awards for writing and for Book of the Year.

Author: Michael W. Twitty · Original publisher: Amistad (New York), 2017