What could have been a stately tour through the ancient and global roots of soul food is instead a madcap dash through history, a thrilling pursuit of usually enthralling and sometimes horrifying stories, and a heroic attempt to view an ambitiously large part of the African-American experience through the lens of food. This book isn't an archive dump – it's a vibrant, emotionally charged work that crackles with vitality and contemporary stories ... The threads are numerous and long, but when woven together into the book, they tell a story of a diaspora with a remarkably deep cultural memory that is enhanced by (and often comprised of) food ... There seems to be no topic that Twitty is unwilling to dig deeply into. The diaspora of Africans in the Americas is not a monolith – it's a mosaic of languages, cultures, and geographic points of origin that make the food folkways of the American South a virtual labyrinth ... For readers who have not reckoned seriously with the profound and continuing effect of slavery on American culture, this book would be a good place to start ... Twitty has accomplished something remarkable with The Cooking Gene. He has written a book that is deeply personal and at times profoundly emotional without losing sight of an ambitious goal: documenting one of America's foundational food cultures. This isn't a book to acquire, cook from, and discard when the next year's crop of beautifully illustrated recipe volumes hit the shelves. It's a book to save, reread, and share until everyone you know has a working understanding of the human stories and pain behind some of America's most foundational and historically significant foods.

A recipe can be the transmission of a tradition, and to cook from such a recipe is not to 'try this at home' but to enact a performance of that tradition, and thereby to participate in it in a mysterious and unrepeatable way. This is the way that recipes operate in Michael Twitty’s The Cooking Gene ... The Cooking Gene is not a cookbook. It contains recipes, but those recipes come freighted with the weight of American and Twitty’s own personal histories. They arrive in the context of a sprawling account of inveterate American racism, history, and the quasi-sacramental nature of food. The Cooking Gene is far more than a cookbook. It is a personal memoir, travel narrative, socio-culinary history, diatribe against the food industry, occasional gastronomic rhapsody, and quest narrative. Its moods are as varied as the fragments that compose it: it is by fairly swift turns witty and somber, indulgent and biting, ponderous and winsome ... The Cooking Gene is the sum of the surprising accretions of ancient history that rise to the top that reveal who its author is ... At the core of The Cooking Gene is a profoundly religious vision, a wonder at the beauty of this world of gifts, a kind of relentless hopefulness in the possibilities of human communion, and the fervent desire to give names back to those we have scratched out, to revivify the unforgotten.

Twitty leans hard on the past, yet much of his personality — which shines through these pages — is rooted in his homosexuality and in his conversion to Judaism. Things get extra fascinating when he marches out a brilliant idea for an 'African-American equivalent of both Passover and Yom Kippur, where we atone for our sins and remember our history' by eating 'gross' food from each cuisine. 'Like a Seder plate, we could have a slave plate.'

Should there ever be a competition to determine the most interesting man in the world, Michael W. Twitty would have to be considered a serious contender ... The Cooking Gene is part history of American slavery, part memoir and part personal detective story ... Far from presenting an idealized view of plantation lives, Twitty portrays the estate’s kitchens as the setting for countless rapes of enslaved women. But he also writes with passion about the wonders created in those spaces ... But Twitty isn’t interested in escape. He’s interested in discovery ... By showing the living what the dead went through, I live a scary and unsettling past, he writes. 'I feel like a doorway for all the spirits of the plantations I visit. I feel their souls passing through me as I cook.'

I want to sit down with Michael W. Twitty and talk food with him for about a million hours ... What Twitty does in this book – and it’s dense, there’s a LOT happening – is discuss the food history while exploring his own genealogy. It’s not a cookbook as much as it is a memoir and examination of personal and community history with a few recipes as well. He traces his personal history with food through his grandparents and parents, following the details of American chattel slavery and how all of that ties together in a big, messy package ... One of the things Twitty does is portray a slave cook in various plantations and living history re-enactments, and my god, that has to be a profound experience ... That’s the thing I liked the best: how Twitty admitted that his feelings were super complicated. These aren’t things that can be distilled down to one simple emotion or reaction ... That sounds really depressing and heavy, and it is, but here’s the thing about history. You can’t change it. You can ignore it, which is something this country has been trying for the past 175 years. That hasn’t been going so well. Or you can accept it, and learn from it, and recognize how those events all lead to here and now. We wouldn’t have American Southern cooking without the contributions of slaves. That’s just fact. What we do with that knowledge, that’s up to us.

...[a] tasty but overstuffed food odyssey ... On the peg of the tour [Twitty] hangs a surfeit of information, from history and agronomy to genealogical research, recipes, and boyhood reminiscences of his grandmother’s Sunday soul food feasts. Yet that information is not always well-digested: the author’s DNA testing results prompt lengthy disquisitions on the ethnogeography of West Africa, and some cultural-studies verbiage...could use trimming. For food lovers, his descriptions are rich ... Throughout, Twitty integrates historical details into the narrative, as in accounts of the backbreaking slave labor of tobacco and rice farming or the emotional anguish of slave auctions—and the results are fascinating.

Food historian Twitty, creator of the Afroculinaria blog, serves up a splendid hearth-based history, at once personal and universal, of the African-American experience ... Twitty’s book is not just about food, though it certainly covers the broad expanse of African-American cooking over the centuries and how it shaped the larger Southern American culinary tradition. The author delights in the “world of edible antiques” that his researches take him into, a world requiring him to think in terms of gills, drams, and pecks. Twitty also traces his own family history, beyond the eight or so generations that carry documents, to places all over the world ... On all these matters, the author writes with elegant urgency, moving swiftly from topic to topic ... Drawing on a wealth of documentary digging, personal interviews, and plenty of time in the kitchen, Twitty ably joins past and present, puzzling out culinary mysteries along the way ... An exemplary, inviting exploration and an inspiration for cooks and genealogists alike.