Welcome to Litsy!

My review of this book can be found on my YouTube Vlog at:

https://youtu.be/1tE5SCN8DYM

Enjoy!

I thought I‘d read this for the #readharder23 prompt “read a cookbook” - but it is so much more than that! Twisty traces food origins as a way to investigate his own background as an AfAm, and shows just how complicated both are. (+ Really great discussion of the place of genetic genealogy for those looking at “where they came from”)

*photo has nothing to do with the wonderful food mentioned in book, is only food pic on phone 😅

First book for #12challenge read! 🎉 Thank you @CoffeeK8 – what a great book to kick-off this challenge.

This is a soft pick for me. Bottom line, I recommend it. But be prepared, this is a book that takes time to read and will involve the frequent use the google.

My full review: https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/a2c5d249-90c3-47be-9d34-290c1a2c3b9c

Just picked up my January #12Challenge read from the library. As soon as I finish Da Vinci‘s Ghost, I‘ll dive into it!

This was recommended by @CoffeeK8 😀

I haven't read a lot of food memoirs, but this one was really interesting. Twitty explores the origins of soul food and finds its roots in West Africa.

Finished this examination of race, history, geography and food on #audio while walking this morning and then running errands. It was fascinating narrative non-fiction, well researched and full of heart. It was long and maybe a bit repetitive but I think the context of uncovering the story made that inevitable. Great read! #integrateyourshelf #ownvoices #BookspinBingo #MountTBR @TheAromaofBooks #20in4 @Andrew65

#currentlisten

My April #BookspinBingo is looking good! Excited for both the #Bookspin and #Doublespin books!

For anyone who is interested, check out https://www.feastafrique.com/2021-reading-challenge/introduction/blog-post-title... (Challenge is being run on storygraph.)

#foodandlit

This one makes me sad. I was really excited to read this book, which purports to be a “Journey through African American Culinary History in the Old South.”

This book is severely in need of editing, and, quite frankly, I‘m mad that the publishers didn‘t do their job. It‘s such an important, interesting topic, and Twitty is clearly very knowledgeable, passionate, and compelling. Very disappointing.

I have tremendous respect for chef and food historian, Michael Twitty. The amount of research he did to write this book is remarkable. While I think the premise and material is fascinating it felt over seasoned and overcooked. Some serious editing was needed. I struggled to read the last 150 pages. Looking forward to discussing this one with my bookclub next week.

I‘m at a stalemate with our September bookclub choice. I flew through the first 150 pages completely charmed and smitten by food historian, Michael Twitty but now... I‘m struggling to stay engaged. While truly fascinating, the book has become redundant and it‘s a DEEP DEEP DIVE into the author‘s personal genealogical ancestry going back to the 1600‘s. No offense, but I don‘t really need to know ALL of his family history.

We walk 6 days a week (I‘m wearing red). After my walk I listened to The Cooking Gene on my way home. I enjoyed it because there were lessons (for me anyway) in the book. Knowledge intertwined with great recipes. I loved it.

What a great combo of food history and Black Lives Matter. Twitty is a southern food historian who has also traces his genealogy back to Africa as well as his white ancestors. It is a difficult history. Twitty also shares his own history and has a great sense of humor. Readers should also google his open letter to celebrity chef Paula Dean. And it was my #bookspin! @TheAromaofBooks

This is technically a book about food, but it's really more than that. It's a book that uses food as a lens through which to examine the legacy of slavery and what it means to be Black in America. It had me making a lot of mental connections, and I have to imagine it's a book that will reward rereading. It took me some time to get into the lyrical, nonlinear writing style, but it was worth the effort.

Hurray for #BookMail and it arrived in less than 10 days 🥳These are my September/ October IRL bookclub choices 💕I‘m looking forward to reading both books 😁

I won‘t make a nice Bingo card until this weekend but here is my #BookspinBingo card! In some squares I have two books—depends on either my library holds come in. Looking forward to this reading month. Tagged book is my #Bookspin book! @TheAromaofBooks

Glad that my #Bookspin is the tagged book which I started yesterday! Have both the print and audio from the library. And loving it so far—I wasn‘t expecting so much humor and the author is a good narrator. #Doublespin is Sundown Motel by Simone St. James if my hold comes in, Stephen Kong‘s On Writing if it doesn‘t. Will do my #BookspinBingo card tomorrow! @TheAromaofBooks

Looking forward to this one!

I'm really enjoying this book so far, but unfortunately the family tree is completely illegible in the Kindle edition. If I were reading it in print I would be flipping to the front frequently to see which of his ancestors he's talking about, but that's not an option here.

Hey Litsy friends. I saw this on the tagged author‘s instagram. A great way to support #BLM #blackpublishingpower #blackoutbestsellerlist #blackbooks. Also I highly recommend the tagged book if you‘re looking for a history of slavery through food.

#7books7days again a little late. This book floored me. I had never realized the extent food and the recipes of enslaved cooks are tied up in our idea of how we see ourselves as a country.

📚 The Cooking Gene
💻 Alyssa Cole
📽 Cinema Paradiso
🎼 Cake
🎧 Cannonball - Damian Rice
#manicmonday #letterC @JoScho

This was a tough challenge. #Top10oftheDecade #NonfictionEdition. I love seeing everyone else‘s choices.

I thought I was going to a cooking talk, but then I soon realized it was a talk about the intersectionality as seen through cooking, African American and Jewish histories entwined. All by a queer southern author. Afterwards I engaged him around his roots and queerness, because it is so important to see and be seen, and to acknowledge that when we can be in invited and respected spaces, whether lecture halls or in print.

With @kgriffith

This book has been recommended to me several times. I don‘t know what took me so long to read it. It‘s a cookbook, a memoir, a family history/drama/saga, a genealogy primer, a manifesto. I loved every word. #MountTBR

#TBRTuesday

Here‘s what‘s on deck for me this week. I have several of these in process, so I may actually finish this pile. 😂📚🙌🏼

I adored this book and am happily taking advantage of this deal for rereading and digital highlighting purposes. ❤️

Incredible book that I listened to via Hoopla even though I own the print book & have since it came out. I need to track down quotes that I tried to bookmark while the audio was going, but basically, it was just genius, start to finish. I had a lot of “Southern food” knowledge from one of my parents, who grew up in Texas, but I didn‘t know they were mostly from Africa. DUH!?!? Fantastic book. I only wanted MORE. Culinary #history FTW. 5⭐️

(2/2) “It was not just the spices, ingredients, and cooking methods that Africanized the diet; it was the spirit imbued in this preparation. Its vocabulary snuck into the language of the South; its flavors pushed the preferences of Britain and Germany to the rear. Its manners determined the flow, and its communalizing nature brought the West and Central African influence together ... “ ⬇️ #history #cooking #AmericanFood

(1/2): “The cooks on the Chesapeake plantations shifted between the worlds of the cramped, drafty cabin and ruling the kingdom of the big house kitchen. ... What took place in their hands was a dance of cultural blending and cultural resistance that was almost too civilized and graceful to notice. It was not just the spices, ingredients, and cooking methods that Africanized the diet; it was the spirit imbued in this preparation.“ ⬇️ #history

I am loving this book so much. Michael Twitty is a damn genius, as were so many cooks who were enslaved and made South Carolina, Virginia, and much of the rest of the South a culinary blend of West Africa, Europe, and the “new” world. I actually take a 15-minute-longer (two-lane hwy) road to and from work on days I commute so that I can hear another 30 minutes of the book. SO GOOD. (That‘s a backup spice rack in the photo.)

“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.”
DAMN, Michael Twitty. So real.

Finished listening to Isabel Wilkerson‘s The Warmth of Other Suns, and dove directly into this one, which I remember kickstarting years ago. Twitty‘s writing is just tremendous. #history #cooking #audiobook (I own this book, but I‘m listening to it right now on Hoopla Digital.)

This book followed Twitty‘s family, the history of food in the south, and a ton of info on slavery. It covered a ton of ground.

White privilege is an obscene thing. It takes everything, quietly, until there is only silence left. Then it takes that too and fills it with noise.

(quoted from Tunde Wey & John T. Edge, Oxford American) p 407

There are no heroes here, just varying levels of power and responsibility.

p 384, re. British, English and Irish history and oppression and how it relates to African-American history.

It took me weeks & some library renewals to work through this one for my virtual foodie book club-but I enjoyed it. Twitty makes his homage to the culinary history of his ancestors & tracing of the impact of African-American soul cooking on the food of the South both entertaining & informative. At times a sobering, discomforting look at US history, race & prejudice, at time humorous with stories of his relatives & life. Link to review/recipes👇🏻

I love that, in the afterword, the author acknowledges that this is a complete mishmash of genres, though he is apologetic about it, while I find it to be one of the book‘s greatest strengths. Few non-fiction titles can claim to be “something for everyone” and deliver. This book doesn‘t claim to, but delivers just the same.

“Rice has a long history with culinary justice.” #trafficjam #audiocommuting

Commuter house #audiocooking

“Cooking from a place of heritage, identity, and belonging is a powerful thing, fraught with class and cultural politics.” This book wrapped up in one sentence.

“Traditional African religions have a complex understanding of food in the service of faith. Food is often a necessary vehicle between one‘s ancestors or the spiritual forces that guide their destiny.”
(and my dinner)

“The kitchen table was also the place where
I came out to my mother at the age of
16. The kitchen table to us was a place of worry, argument, and resolution, and I had no idea where else we should have the conversation.”
I just found him on Instagram (@thecookinggene) and his obsession with purple tights (which he dyes himself!) makes me so happy.

“There is no chef without a homeland. To be a chef today is to center yourself in traditions of your roots, and use them to define your art, and speak to any human being about who you are. Your plate is your flag.”

and then there was music. It‘s not an exaggeration to say that art and creativity saves lives, or that it saves us when food can‘t, in ways that food can‘t quite.

A heartbreaking reflection on slavery and surviving the trip to America from the African continent:

Maybe smallpox was a mercy compared with what was to follow. There is no place else to go but down when you are already in hell.

All across the African diaspora in the Americas, there is a ritual of going to places where the sea meets the land. In these spaces homage is paid by the descendants of those who survived long enough to cross the water and make new lives — and create new life.

“There is a lot of beautiful and a lot of ugly mashed together” - Michael W. Twitty

I‘ve always wanted to go to Colonial Williamsburg. The author is a Revolutionary in Residence there and now I‘m even more determined to visit. He‘s a culinary historian and this book has tons of information as well as a touch of memoir and a few recipes. I pulled up a PBS newshour video featuring him on YouTube. I recommend both the book and video. 3⭐️s

Going to try a thing for Black History Month where I priorise authors with any African heritage or Indigenous Australian authors (Blak).
Been looking forward to reading this for ages and only reading for pleasure before bed :)