The Cooking Gene
Michael W. Twitty is a cook and historian who set out to follow his family's path through American history by way of food. He tracks his ancestors from West Africa through the slave plantations of the South, cooking the dishes they would have made and digging into genealogy, DNA, and the brutal economy that shaped Southern kitchens. The book is part memoir, part history, and part argument that the food Americans think of as Southern owes an enormous, often unacknowledged debt to enslaved Africans and their descendants. It won the James Beard Award for Book of the Year. Questlove named it among his favorite books.
What you might want to know about The Cooking Gene
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A culinary historian traces his own family roots and the history of African American cooking from Africa through slavery to the modern South.
Yes. The Cooking Gene won the 2018 James Beard Award for Book of the Year, the first time a Black author had won the prize.
The Cooking Gene was written by Michael W. Twitty, published in 2017 by Amistad.
The Cooking Gene is 464 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Cooking Gene takes most readers 7 to 10 hours to finish.
The Cooking Gene is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.