Soul Food vs Southern Food

[aikoaiko]

26. I've been learning a lot from Michael Twitty's Afroculinaria

http://afroculinaria.com/

About Twitty:

(Haaretz) —
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Twitty, 37, grew up in Washington, D.C. A cook and culinary historian, he is African-American, openly gay and a skullcap-wearing Jew. At present he is in Israel where he will be giving a master class in cooking on Sunday as part of the annual Jewish Film Festival at the Jerusalem Cinematheque (one of its themes this year is culinary theater).

Twitty is currently at work on a book he has titled “The Cooking Gene,” a historical survey of the cuisine of the American South. He’s been teaching in Hebrew schools for 12 years, preparing boys and girls for their bar or bat mitzvah in Orthodox, Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist synagogues. (He switches skullcaps to meet the head-covering style of each stream of Judaism.) Twitty also takes part as an actor in historical reenactments at Southern plantations, dressed in slaves’ clothing and cooking like his ancestors did.

Confused about his identity? He will do little to put you at ease, because this is who he is; if you can’t handle it, you don’t interest him. “Recently, when I was in the process of selling my book – HarperCollins bought it – another publisher, who shall remain nameless, they loved the idea of me talking about food and cultural roots and introducing my family tree and culinary justice,” Twitty tells the City College students. (In the college’s Jewish studies program there are many Arabs, blacks and Latinos – in fact, 95 percent of the students are not Jewish.)

“But the editor who made the final decision on whether the book will be published or not – she basically said, ‘Okay, what about this Jewish part? Can we just get rid of that?’ And she basically told my agent: We will give him a fabulous book deal if he just won’t wear his kippah in public, or talk about it in any radio interviews. And I said, I hope you told them to … And she said: Yes, I told them you won’t go for that. I said you’re damn right.”
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Read more: http://forward.com/culture/211347/michael-twitty-black-jewish-foodie-talks-culinary/#ixzz44OLlXiff