SOUTHERN American food's most famous ambassador is Harland Sanders, the white-coated, goateed marketing genius whose recipe for pressure-fried chicken became Kentucky Fried Chicken. Sanders hated the chain's food, calling its heavily breaded birds a "damn fried doughball put on top of some chicken". What he loved was the chicken of his youth, which had almost certainly been prepared by black hands. Southern food, explained Edna Lewis, America's most lyrical cookery writer, is "mostly black, because blacks-black women and black men-did most of the cooking in private homes, hotels and on the railroads."Michael Twitty runs with this thesis in "The Cooking Gene", a sprawling blend of culinary history, memoir, travel writing and personal narrative. Mr Twitty contains multitudes: he is a gay, African-American convert to Judaism who taught Hebrew to white children from suburban Washington, DC. He is a prolific blogger and tweeter, and he stages historical cooking demonstrations, dressing in "transformative historical drag" and using 18th- and 19th-century recipes and cooking methods.
展开▼
