"The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South" by Michael W. Twitty (nonfiction, 2017)

 **An exhaustive look at how slavery influenced Black American cooking, and how Black American cooking influenced American cooking in general.  Spoiler:  Black culture is nearly as significant in American cooking as it is in American music, which is to say that it's absolutely foundational**

The first great American chef was a man named James Hemmings.  I doubt many people know that name, it's certainly not featured very prominently in most American history textbooks.  But in 1784, James Hemmings went to France, where he studied in the great kitchens of the continent and brought this cuisine back to America.  He's credited with the introduction of dishes like crème brûlée and meringue to North America.  And notably, we have very clear documentation of him being the first in America to serve a version of "macaroni pie", a French dish of pasta in a cheese sauce--which obviously evolved into the iconic American dish of macaroni and cheese

So why don't learn about James Hemmings in school?  Why isn't he more celebrated as a cultural hero of early America?  Well, because James Hemmings was a slave.  His mother was an enslaved woman who was impregnated by her white owner (incidentally, she was half-African herself, similarly the daughter of an African woman impregnated by her owner.  This meant Hemmings was only one-fourth of African descent, but at the time, that was enough to render him property, not person)

And how did Hemmings end up in France, learning to cook?  Well, upon his father's death, James Hemmings (alongside his siblings, including his sister Sally) became the property of his half-sister, his father's legitimate daughter.  Her name was Martha Wyles, and ownership transferred when she married a man named Thomas Jefferson.  Ol' TJ took a liking to fancy French food, so when he went to France as an ambassador he brought along one of his slaves and had him learn to cook.  And that's the story of James Hemmings, a story not often told in American history

Hemmings returned to Virginia with Jefferson, where he served as the chef at Monticello for many years.  History books write about the "dinner that saved the union" at which Alexander Hamilton agreed to move the capitol to DC in exchange for James Madison agreeing for the Federal Government to take on the debt of the States.  These books generally don't talk about the man who cooked that dinner, of course

James Hemmings died of suicide at age 36.  Oh, and credit for the invention of macaroni and cheese is often given to Mary Randolph, a white woman who wrote the cookbook "The Virginia House-Wife"

And these are the kinds of stories that are told in this book.  Michael Twitty laments at how difficult it is to trace the heritage of black chefs, and he talks about how difficult that is for modern black chefs, especially in our current climate in which "heritage" and "authenticity" are so key to any chef trying to make it big:

For Therese, and many chefs of color, the classroom was not the place where they learned about themselves and the culinary past of the African American people. “Culinary schools, just like regular school growing up, don’t really teach you your history. You never heard about James Hemings or Hercules or Malinda Russell or Abby Fisher or anybody like that in any of your classes. Or Africa, or that the Caribbean or Brazil have anything to do with Africa, let alone the United States. Here I am trying to be an authentic American chef, which necessitates exploring my African heritage, and we didn’t get that in culinary school, and a lot of students still don’t.”

Much of the first few chapters of the book are discussing this theme, the difficulties faced by a culture that has been cut off from its roots.  In one of the early chapters, he explains the title of the book:

I know there is no such thing as a “racial” “cooking gene.” Let’s get that straight. I am not one to indulge in too much biological essentialism; that can be very, very, very tricky as a black, gay, Jewish guy. “Don’t talk about dry bones around an old woman,” the Igbo of Nigeria say. However, I wonder if blood memory, which I do believe in, contains some clause for the ability not to burn water. For generations, when black cooks were enslaved they were called “born cooks,” our ability to slay in the kitchen considered a genetic ability rather than a combination of circumstance, nurture, and personal choice and ability. Only now that cooking with a story becomes a jackpot and an ideational diamond mine does this particular branding of people of color become conspicuously quiet, and there is something unmistakably peculiar about that.

(that's not to say that Black Americans are the only ones who suffer from this particular switcheroo.  Cooking is so often derided as women's work, until it comes time to hand out James Beard Awards and then suddenly there are mostly male names on the list of nominees)

But while the first few chapters describe this problem, the rest of the book describes the solution.  Or, more specifically, the rest of the book is the solution.  The rest of this book is those stories that aren't told in highschool textbooks or culinary schools

I loved this book because Twitty seeks to uncover a lot of the history that was lost, and show us how much we owe to the proud cooks of the enslaved American South, who were given a whole lot of nothing and managed to make something delicious anyways.  That's worthy of study, and it's worthy of recognition.  He quoted a friend of his, the chef of a restaurant promoting the origins of soul food:

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.

This book bounces back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean.  Many chapters are centered around a specific dish or ingredient, and they start in Africa as he describes how something was enjoyed there by his African ancestors.  He then follows it across the ocean to the plantations of the Southern United States and the Caribbean Islands, explains how the rigors and terrors of enslaved life necessitated it be cooked a certain way, and then draws it down to the present day and the version we eat now.  From Jollof rice and okra soup to jambalaya and gumbo; from pepper and vinegar sauces to the foundation of American 'cue; from black beans braised with cinnamon to Brazilian feijoada.  Twitty does an incredible job of telling stories about food, which in turn tell stories about our entire society's history

And he makes it personal, as well:

Make no mistake, I am now even more defiantly African American than ever before, and I am black, but I am not just black. If I was, I could not adequately tell the stories locked in my body or cook the food that connects to them. In American culture, black is too often viewed as a bubble in which individuality and variation are often seen as destructive to the integrity of the whole structure; we depend on these essences, we depend on these stereotypes for immutable, ready, off-the-shelf ideas about what it means to be a person of African descent in America. This has made it easy to disregard and smudge the names and identities of the cooks and the eaters who came before us, and to mute the music of the tradition they passed down to us. 

The real history is not in the food, it’s in the people. We are working against the loss of our cultural memory; against the consequences of institutional oppression; against indiscriminate and flagrant appropriation; and against courts of public opinion that question our authenticity, maturity, and motives in the revolutionary act of clarifying and owning our past. It is my belief that the very reason we are here in space and time is deliberately connected to our journey with food. The only question I’ve ever wanted to answer for myself was, How was my destiny shaped by the history of Southern food?

Calling out the problem, and encompassing a solution to it, all in one

I loved this book

(one last quote from this book, by the way:

Some stories just need to be passed on. In 1865, my great-great-great-grandmother Rosetta Merritt, enslaved on the Chadwick plantation in Russell County, Alabama, got into a fight with the former overseer who thought he had it in him to overpower Rose and rape and beat her. According to oral history he pulled her into the cellar of the Big House where they wrestled until she got the best of him and dunked his head in a barrel of cane syrup made on the place. Because he was known to be often intoxicated, nobody questioned her when he was found drowned up past the neck. I told you that story just to honor my mother, who told me to retell the story in order to tell the world that her people fought back.

Twitty retold this story just like his mother wanted him to, and I figure I should pass it along as well)