“Some white people think I should spill the secrets of soul food, and there are black people who don’t want to see a black man dressed like ‘some damn slave.’” Twitty said.

One way is through reconnection with the culinary culture of the enslaved, our common ancestors, and restoring their names on the roots of the Southern tree and the table those roots support.” We are unwitting inheritors of a story with many sins that bears the fruit of the possibility of ten times the redemption. We are a dysfunctional family, but we are family. We are Middle Eastern and South Asian and East Asian and Latin American, now. “We are not merely Native, European, and African. “I dare to believe all Southerners are a family,” Twitty writes in his introduction. It is a compelling mix of autobiography, genealogy, history, race relations and food, written with honesty, humor and hope. For Twitty has managed not only to weave elements of those professions together as a food and cultural historian and founder of Afroculinaria, a blog “exploring culinary traditions of Africa, African American and the African Diaspora,” but also in his powerful and personal first book, “The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South” (Amistad, $28.99).

The cooking gene