Mr. Twitty.

December 16, 2019

I first became a fan of this young man @thecookinggene at a lecture he was giving to an Annapolis garden club group a couple of years ago when his book came out. He actually TOLD the folks in the audience that he was not giving up all the beautiful recipes he had from enslaved women without telling the history of the horrors they endured (like rape) having to cook on plantations. Many of the woman in the audience were visibly upset—you could hear the murmurs rippling throughout the audience—but Twitty didn’t let their anger keep him from bearing witness to the atrocities our ancestors lived with.

This past weekend, Mr. Twitty graced us again in the DMV, this time at the National Museum of African American History. If you haven’t yet read his award winning book, ‘The Cooking Gene, a journey through African American history in the old South’, (a food memoir that makes the case that Southern cuisine has its roots in Africa), gift yourself and others for the holiday season.