"The Cooking Gene" and "The Potlikker Papers"

Two books I've read recently represent two fascinating ways to look at the history of the cuisine of the American South. Each one, in its own way, takes a new and highly imaginative orientation to southern food and the people who created it and continue to cook and eat it. There's amazingly little overlap between the two books because each author has found such an original way to approach the subject. The books are also somewhat connected: at some point, each of these authors quotes the other.

The Cooking Gene

Michael Twitty's book is a memoir, a search for his roots, and an effort to see American Black history clearly. He writes: "This book is about finding and honoring the soul of my people’s food by looking deep within my past and my family’s story." The Cooking Gene (p. 6).

His approach to finding his identity involves three things. First, he tries to learn everything he can about his ancestors -- both black and white. He employs every means available, including a professional genealogist, several DNA analyses, and many interviews with family members and with people who turned up in his research.

Second, he researches the entire history of black people in America and their ancestors in Africa, with very nuanced attention to the numerous regions, languages, and ethnic groups in that vast continent. He calls his travels in search of his people a "Southern Discomfort Tour."

Third, Twitty explores the foodways of his people and the incredibly intertwined influences of Africa on the African American foods. Obviously, the role of slavery and the post-Civil War efforts to deny freed black people civil rights or human rights play a large part in his search. His studies include agricultural practices (like the import of rice-growing techniques along with the slaves who brought them to the South); food preparation techniques and preferences brought from Africa; and food words derived from a variety of African languages.

Hands-on experience is also relevant: Twitty participates in re-enactments of kitchen activities at Colonial Williamsburg. He summarizes his feelings thus: "whenever I walk into the space of a plantation kitchen I am confronted with the dual legacy of the Southern food heritage— these were not neutral spaces; these were places of power against the enslaved in the most dehumanizing ways possible." The Cooking Gene (p. 107).

The Cooking Gene is a complex, long, and very involved narrative. Twitty's research into historic sources about American history in the South is extensive and very enlightening. He includes many quotes about the meals people ate at various times in the past, meals usually cooked and served by black slaves or later black hired help. He also includes a number of poignant quotes that show the incredible brutality of slavery. Some of the first-hand descriptions of how slaves were sold and their families broken up were so powerful that I couldn't bear to read them in their entirety.

A few paragraphs that I think capture the book's spirit:

"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. Each one has its favorite foods." The Cooking Gene (p. 59).

Benne wafers remain a popular treat:
I noticed these at Trader Joe's!

"No African American language in the United States preserved more vocabulary from West and central African tongues than Gullah-Geechee, spoken on the subtropical coast of South Carolina and Georgia. When they spoke of a hog (gulu) or of wine (mavalu) or okra (kingumbo) or of the types of edible rodents (gone) they hunted at the edge of the rice marsh, they used words from Kikongo and Kimbundu. When they spoke of rice (malo), sesame (benne), and hunted heron, po’ Joe (podzo), and fished for catfish (wa maut), they were using words from Manding, Wolof, Vai, and Mende. They had Akan day names and their English equivalents, and the names of Yoruba gods, and when they grieved they sang mourning songs nearly word for word carried in the hull of the slave ship." The Cooking Gene (p. 182).

"The domestic slave trade was the largest forced migration in American history, and during the antebellum period enslaved African Americans could expect to be sold or transferred as property two or three times during their lifetimes. The black body was the single most valuable commodity in the American marketplace between the years 1790 and 1860." The Cooking Gene (p. 321). 

"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." The Cooking Gene (pp. 403-404). 

The Potlikker Papers 

John Edge's book The Potlikker Papers is a more straightforward history of southern food including the foodways of many races and ethnic groups. European and African people, obviously. Native Americans, obviously. But also many recent immigrants from Mexico, South America, and several countries in Asia.

Edge begins his book with the 1960s and the connection of food to the struggle for civil rights for the incredibly abused black population. He considers why sit-ins at diners were particularly apt, covering the history of extreme segregation of the races by looking at the stories of a number of individual activists. It's wonderful history, and I was quite surprised to find this highly political start to a book that I expected to be just another food book!

I enjoyed the political history, and I also appreciated Edge's broad view of what southern food is -- much broader than most writers. He talks about the romantic view of southern food, and he criticizes writers who are unrealistic -- "fabulists," he calls them. He points out how things like pit barbecue and the like are constantly "rediscovered." The following paragraphs capture the way he does this:

"Citizens have been alternately claiming, dismissing, and reclaiming American culinary identities since the early days of the republic." -- The Potlikker Papers (p. 282).

"Every ten years, America discovered some facet of Southern cuisine, held it at arm’s length to admire, and showered praise on its makers before moving on. A 1960s love affair with soul food was, at its core, a fascination with the foods of rural Southerners who moved to the urban South and the industrial North. A grits and peanuts fad coincided with the 1976 election of Jimmy Carter. In the 1980s, when chefs like Paul Prudhomme interpreted the region and its larder, they had it both ways. ... The burst of creativity that began in the 1990s proved the longest, as chefs revived the crops, livestock, techniques, and traditions that previous generations had left to wither on the vine." The Potlikker Papers (pp. 288-289). 

"A new kind of hybridized South emerged in the twenty-first century. Chinese groceries in Jackson, Mississippi, stocked Louisiana-grown rice, marketed to Asian shoppers under the Jazzmen label, an elision of the term jasmine rice. Plastered with images of Louis Armstrong, the bags depicted the jazz great smiling broadly and blowing his horn. At strip mall charcuterie shops in Houston, Vietnamese artisans perfumed lunch meats with fish sauce and steamed bologna rolls in banana leaves. In Atlanta, Viet Cajun restaurants boiled crawfish in lemongrass broth and pressed sugarcane juice to order through wall-mounted rollers." The Potlikker Papers (p. 338). 

I find this paragraph by Twitty to be an interesting comparison to some of the material in Edge's book:

"Highly spicing meats; the roasting of whole goats; the use of peppery sauces or pepper vinegar; parboiling in some cases; the use of the wooden grill framework; the long and slow cooking process; sauces that utilized tomatoes, onions, peppers, and the like; and the social context of barbecue— as a tool to promote social conviviality and community— hearken back to the culture’s African roots. Even as barbecue certainly has roots among Native Americans and Europeans, it was enslaved Africans and their descendants who became heir to multiple traditions and, in turn, incorporated those traditions into a standard repertoire known as Southern barbecue." The Cooking Gene (p. 311). 

Writer of this review: Mae at maefood dot blogspot dot com. 

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