THE LADY OF SHALLOTS

 CW: enslavement/trauma Cross-posted at Reb's Reading Rants and Raves The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South by Michael W. Twitty My rating: 5 of 5 stars A "journey" is an apropos description for this book. I won't even attempt to quantify the percentages of history, memoir, documentary, and food writing. Twitty manages to intertwine his personal story with a history of foodways and people that inextricably connects ancestry, personhood, and food in ways that left me contemplating my own complicated feelings about food and culture. As an adoptee, with two parents who have died, I've not cared to search too much into my own genealogy--I suspect in fear that somehow the cultures and stories into which I was adopted will become "less than." If fear is in the mix, I am even more humbled because this book is at times gritty reckoning with both Twitty's own ancestral history, and this country's foundat...

Cross-posted at Rebecca's Reading Rants and Raves   Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking: A Cookbook by Toni Tipton-Martin My rating: 5 of 5 stars To categorize this solely as a cookbook would not even come close to capturing this work of art. It is an exquisitely-written history that intertwines a wealth of research, nostalgia (in the best way), and a "larger vision of African American culinary history" (311) that both embraces and expands beyond soul food and the standard narrative. Toni Tipton-Martin says: And I have tried to end dependency on the labels "Southern" and "soul," and on the assumptions that limit my ancestors' contributions to mindlessly working the fields where the food was grown, stirring the pot where the food was cooked, and passively serving food in the homes of the master class. (13) There is no clichéd history here. Instead, Tipton-Martin crafts a story of urban enclaves in Los Angeles, Lo...