Recipes from the American South with Michael Twitty

This week on Chefs Without Restaurants, Chris Spear talks with culinary historian and James Beard Award-winning author Michael Twitty about his new book, 'Recipes from the American South.' With over 250 recipes, the book is a deep dive into the rich, diverse traditions of Southern food. Chris and Michael explore everything from grits and cornbread, to scrapple and possum.
 
They also discuss what defines the South, how Michael pulled together such a monumental collection, and why food memory and identity matter now more than ever. This is a heartfelt, thoughtful and delicious episode that food lovers won’t want to miss.
 
 Topics discussed:
 - What defines Southern food and identity
 - Why certain recipes made the cut
 - The cultural storytelling behind Southern dishes
 - Forgotten and misunderstood foods
 - The research process behind the cookbook
 

MICHAEL TWITTY
Michael's Instagram
Michael's website and Afroculinaria

Michael on the Chefs Without Restaurants podcast in 2021

Buy the book Recipes From the American South

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Transcript

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Chris Spear: [00:00:00] This is Chris Spear and you're listening to Chefs Without Restaurants, the show where I speak with culinary entrepreneurs and people working in the food and beverage industry outside of a traditional restaurant setting. This week I'm talking to my friend Michael Twitty. He's a James Beard award-winning culinary historian, and the author of The Cooking Gene and Kosher Soul.

His work explores the deep intersections of food, identity, culture, and history. I first had him on the show four years ago. Today he's back on the show to talk about his newest book, recipes from the American South, which is out now. This is a massive sweeping collection of over 250 recipes that dives into the layered traditions of southern cooking from classics like fried chicken and cornbread to lesser known dishes like Mississippi, Chinese collards, and possum and sweet potatoes.

In our conversation, we talk about what it means to be Southern, how he approached writing a book this expansive. The challenges and joys are [00:01:00] preserving food culture and a time when so much is at risk. We also get into the personal stories, cookbook fatigue, and yes, some of my favorite items, both grits and scrapple.

If you love food with a story, especially Southern Food, you're gonna want this book on your shelf. As always, thanks so much for listening and have a great week. Hey Michael, welcome back to the show. Thanks so much for coming on. Well, 

Michael Twitty: thank you so much. 

Chris Spear: I got an advance on your cookbook and this is the kind of food that I love to cook.

So, um, I want to talk all about this new cookbook you have coming out. Absolutely. So we've talked before, many of our listeners maybe have heard that and we talked a lot about Jewish food, your background there, but clearly obviously southern food, cooking, storytelling, heritage and all that. But why this book, this book that is exclusively about southern food and cooking, like when did you start thinking about this being something you really wanted to take on?

Michael Twitty: Well, um, Emily Kutas, who is one of the managing editors of fighting, [00:02:00] uh, hit me up and said, well, do you know anybody who would be willing to do our Southern cookbook? And we're looking for, you know, this, this, that, and the other? And I really sincerely did look for other people. But you know, something, uh, it's not easy to get people on board on a big project like this unless there's some huge amount of money and they have so many resources.

And so eventually I said, well, she said, well, I'm looking at somebody who can do this, and that's you. And the reason, part of the reason why even said, okay, I'll do it. It does have a box. It does have walls and boundaries. Sometimes we think that we have absolute complete, I wouldn't say freedom, but leeway, then it's gonna be great.

Right? No, you, and if you have little boundaries and it's easier to like not go over board, it's easier to be within a certain paradigm. And to be honest [00:03:00] with you, you know, my relationship to Southern food and the southern food world has been inherently political just because I asked the questions, right?

Questions like, where do we position this story in light of all of our cultural sociopolitical elements? Where do we position this story in light of our tortured history with race? What do we position this story in, in the light of, you know, we still have groups within the family of Southern Food who still have not obtained, you know, self-actualization, you know, uh, if everybody's going, what is he talking about?

Thinking about the Gullah Geechee community, thinking about, you know, celebrated culture and cuisine, but land loss. Climate change, gentrification, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? And it's often not us. It's often not black authors who are doing big Southern cookbooks. Now somebody's gonna say, oh, well that's not true.

I [00:04:00] said, I understand. Matthew Rafford has Bress and Yam. Ashley Shanti has our South. Those cookbooks are great. Fantastic. Princess Pamela of late had her book The Simile. Megan had her book, and I'm not denigrating them at all. But these are often books that focus on the author's personal experience and their locality and their search of their journey.

This is a sweeping volume for southern food. Okay? And there are not a lot of to that I could name. Black office, black American art period, who have done this. And that's not a pat on my back. It's just a challenge to me. It was a serious challenge to me to work with a big publisher like this on a cookbook.

I work with Harper on food memoir and writing. Um, it's a challenge to me to like how, you know, how many, how many copy edits go into cookbook like this? A ton, right? So I want it to be challenged. I wanted to learn and I want it to grow. And [00:05:00] I also wanted to leave a legacy, you know, well, not right now, but sorry, building up my legacy.

Please don't go. No, no, I ain't going nowhere. Um, but building up my legacy through a new level of talking about food. You know, cookbooks are technical, cookbooks are also informative. Cookbooks are also entertaining and aesthetically pleasing and fighting and certainly knows how to do that. And so I really wanted to have put my foot in the door with all those different elements.

Chris Spear: And I guess finding the balance of information history and head notes with it being a recipe heavy cookbook, because you have books that are clearly books that you read. There might be a recipe, you know. Mm-hmm. In there or two. But this is really like a cookbook. This is, is this your first cookbook that's like this with this many recipes?

It is, isn't it? 

Michael Twitty: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I did rice with, for University of North Carolina Press, but Rice, of course, is a part of a, um, almost encyclopedic connect collection of [00:06:00] recipes. And again, you know, right. There are only, I think two or three, maybe two, and I'm one of them black authors who contributed to that collection.

And if you look at that collection, it's a who's who of who's been doing food writing in the past, in the south in the past 20 years. So again, it's like little breadcrumbs leading up to whatever, you know. 

Chris Spear: So what's the south? I live in Frederick, Maryland. I'm originally from Boston. You know, when I was coming down here, I never would've thought of this being the south.

And there's a lot of talk about is Maryland, the South dc? Is that at the south? You know, we have a lot of Absolutely. Of southern type restaurants and you do touch on it in some of your recipes, like with crab cakes and such. But what do you consider the south? Or where does it start, I guess? 

Michael Twitty: Well, you know, there's a one of those old timey southern cookbooks from like the 1890s.

And the person is, the person writing a cookbook, was living in Washington DC and every single meal they have actually, it's gorgeous. 'cause at [00:07:00] the back of the cookbook there is a meal for every single day of the year. That's pretty intense. Yeah. And it's seasonal and it's like, it's like breakfast. Is this lunch?

Is this dinner? Is this, I need people to understand something. You know, Paul Farba, who owns Big Jones Chicago, he is a southerner. He is from Indiana, but he's a southern. In the sense of his, like his German Catholic ancestors settled into Southern Indiana, which much like Southern Ohio and southern Illinois is part of the southern cultural realm.

I need people to understand something. The Confederacy is not the south, the south is not the Confederacy. And even where you live, um, I think it's mono. They have a big Confederate cemetery over there so people don't understand. There's these lines that people create are completely arbitrary and nonsense.

You cannot talk terrapin [00:08:00] and fried chicken the way that Merlin just did it, have done it in many different ways. Cream, gravy on the side, cream gravy on the chicken bay in Nevada. I mean all, all that stuff that is Southern. The fact that we have, I mean, God, Montgomery County Merlin was called 1940s, the fried Chicken Capital of America.

Okay. I didn't know that the country ham, that, you know, Kentuckians and Tennessean and other people law all the way over to Missouri, who do you think brought that people from Maryland who ran outta land 'cause of tobacco, who went west and that's where they ended up? You look, if you look at these, uh, family history people from Kentucky, uh, parts of Tennessee and definitely the southern Midwest into Missouri, it's us, it's Marylanders.

And some people might say, well, you say, why does you say that? Because I don't wanna say Maryland because if you from Maryland, you ain't from Maryland. So there you go. Um, but I guess what I'm trying to say is I even had [00:09:00] people from the deep South go on social media and be like, Virginia is not the South.

Where the hell was the capital of the Confederacy? Which state had more enslaved people than any other state? The Commonwealth of Virginia. Which state started the institution and started that Patricia Elite legacy that ha, that carries all the way to Texas. So I mean, it's just like, but I think people's understanding of Southern is also kind of also racialized.

Mm-hmm. And I think that's why I kind of brought up that topic of who's writing this book, because black southerners are often cut out of the, the fullness of being southern, even though we invented this itch. And that's what gets me every single time we have to be a little bit more fluid, understand my, the importance of migration and movement.

Um, so for example, some Texans are virulently against calling Texas the South, and some [00:10:00] Texans absolutely affirm it. And what used to be a very kind of almost quaint cultural joning session. Has now become like real, you know, kind of dangerous cultural politics, right? Somebody living, say for example, in Northern Ireland, came over on a boat, ended up in Philadelphia, and then they were like, let's get on the Great Wagon Road.

And they went down to South Appalachians and then that person's descendants said, Hey, you know what? I wanna get away from it all. I'm gonna go to the Ozarks, or I'm gonna go to Tennessee and then I'm gonna end up from Tennessee and make my way down to Texas. And that was because the land was being opened up 'cause of the expansion, Westwood expansion, vis-a-vis Native American displacement.

And that's the real history. It's not, you know, being from Florida doesn't necessarily make you a southern. It's, it's the, it's the culture, it's the, it's the [00:11:00] ecosystems, it's the agriculture, it's the, it's all of the pieces that's the settlement. All the pieces that are, that are there above. And being southern does not mean, just mean being salt and pepper, black and white.

You know, we have, via Cajun cuisine, we have Kurdish cuisine in Nashville, Tennessee, we have people who have, you know, mixed Caribbean and Afro lain and Latin and southern cultures. In Florida, we have, um, Mankins in Florida, we have all the different cultures. We have German and Orangeburg, South Carolina and Salem and North Carolina.

And also the fact that we have these ethnic lines. So I give, I'll give you one more piece. The ethnic lines are kind of important. I think people say a Mason Dixon line and then they don't believe it or they say, well, the south begins at the Potomac, which is stupid because the same exact e economy and social factors that were going on across the Potomac and Virginia were happening the same point in time in Maryland.

There's no, there's no difference. I'm sorry. You're not gonna pop over the border and farm the north. [00:12:00] Yeah, it doesn't, it, that's not how it works. That's not how it works. And of course people forget that in the past, people married across regions for economic, you know, so a lot of New England married into the south.

Chris Spear: Oh, I did. We joke about that all the time. My wife's from Virginia and her dad always gives me a hard time. Right. Jokingly, but yes. 

Michael Twitty: But like, but like in the past, like you did, that's why there's a natch as Mississippi for example, the union did not burn it down because guess what? Over half the money that was there was time to their families in the northeast and other places.

Mm-hmm. Also ethnic lines. Uh, a lot of times people talk about, um, and y'all don't be stealing this, I'm saying it official, on this trademark podcast, people don't understand that German and Irish immigration were, were really important to this, this narrative. I often say that Baltimore, which is very German and Irish.

Among other things is south by Mid-Atlantic. I often [00:13:00] say the Louisville, which is very German, and Irish is south by Midwest, and so is St. Louis, um, don't forget the French part there. And then you go down to Austin, very German, very Czech or other stuff, is very south by Southwest. So these fluid ethnic boundaries are important because the hearth culture of the South, and it determined of its hierarchies and systems of patriarchy, et cetera, as very English.

And those groups had to make a decision. When the Germans and Irish went to Louisiana, for example, they actually melded in really good, really well because it wasn't quite the same as the English system. And by the way, the I, the early Irish and early Germans who went to Louisiana became Creoles. They changed their names or changed the way the sound, their names, so they could fit into that side.

But, but it was that English plantation owner thing. [00:14:00] Um, that also had some Caribbean elements as well in it, in its historical origin that either if you didn't want to get into it, then you remain separate. And those, it's those areas of the south, especially urban areas, especially towards the, the push towards the civil war where we find a difference in the culture.

A last, last note. Culinary. This makes the difference. This is why there is a brisket in Austin. This is why there is a hot brown other stuff in Kentucky. This is why there is a little bit difference in the food in St. Louis. This is why there is a little bit difference in food in Baltimore. You know, there's a, there's definitely a lot of Southern, but there's some other angles as well.

It's not northern. It's German and Irish. And then of course after the German and Irish came, lots of Ashkenazi Jews came. Lots of poles and lots of other people from Eastern Europe. But essentially these people would raise children who would be raised in essentially segregated societies, built on racial hierarchies from, from [00:15:00] slavery and with, you know, go to school separate use, separate bathrooms, other things, but also develop them, those mentalities separate from that original landing.

That's why I think it's so important people really understand the history because the sort of like the little surface cues of what Southernness is is very different from the deep. Enduring elements of what Southernness is. Oh shucks. We gonna get a Bucky's. That means we're Southern. Okay. Whatever. Oh, shucks.

You can get grits here. That's Southern. I remember a woman, uh, it was, it was, I was in the, what I call the ghetto Ellis Island, the, uh, rich, the Richmond Greyhound station. And this woman got off the, got off the bus at five o'clock in the morning and she said something was very quaint. She was from New York and she said, you know, she was at the Godawful Cafe they have there.

And she goes, she says, oh, I, I, that's why I, I love coming back [00:16:00] south. I can get grits like, baby, you can get grits in Harlem just fine. It is like, great migration happened a long time ago. Yeah. So that's, I mean, that's a longwinded answer to your question, but it's an existential question. What is Southern?

Are you southern? Are we in the south? 

Chris Spear: No, that's great. I mean, it's obviously the most in-depth answer I've ever heard to that question, and it, um, yes, I appreciate that. And clearly you have spent a lot of time learning about this and talking about this, so I figured you're the guy to ask. So I guess we're, you know, I, I still don't know what I am having only lived here 17 years.

I don't think I would say I was southern at all, but, um, it's starting to rub off on me. 

Michael Twitty: Well, I mean, you, you also live in an area where it's the, what was the, what was the folklore term? It's a cultural hinge. Hmm. I would say that the Northern Maryland border is the most southern part of Pennsylvania, [00:17:00] and at the same point in time, it's the most northern part of the south.

And, you know, all those different pieces, you know, we, we, those of us who know. The old line state, understand that when you're in Garrett County and Washington County and whatnot, you're in Appalachia. There's no no difference. That's a good way to put that. Yeah. There's no difference. I haven't heard that, but Right.

And then Eastern Shore is like a whole different state compared to the Western shore. And, and you know, it's not even the same place. And, you know, uh, Baltimore and Washington are really strange, the strangest of cities in terms of the culture. 'cause we're also international. We've always been international.

And it also changes things and it changes the way the food looks and smells. But dear brother, I have to say this, anyone who, who says I'm from the South, I'm from Atlanta, can just sit the hell down [00:18:00] because there's uh, uh, Atlantans. I love you. I love Georgia. I love the Atlanta history cinemas especially, but I'm gonna be real with you.

Atlanta, if y'all don't shut up with this lamb chops, salmon, hookah, nonsense, and Hennessy on this and that, and blah, blah, blah. I, I, I, we gotta talk. Y'all, y'all have, y'all are like the literal capital of the south and the food that, mm. I'm not trying to get in trouble, but I'm also just trying to say that the signature, as we move around a lot, as we have a lot of businesses that are chains, it's getting harder and harder to sort of like get the southern kind of southern food.

I don't mean authenticity. I mean the energy, the vibe that I document in this cookbook. 

Chris Spear: How do you approach authenticity? Because that's something I wanted to talk about. I think it's a word that people don't like to use, or, you know, it's a loaded word. Like what is [00:19:00] authentic? 

Michael Twitty: Uh, authentic is what is real to you.

Um, I know that's like a sound of one hand clapping kind of answer, but you know, someone says authentic southern food or, you know, something, what's, what's what? It works like this. You go to the common section, someone demonstrating a recipe, and inevitably someone will say, that's not how you do, that's not, that's not that good.

Every time, every single time. And the worst offenders are louisianans. Of course, I'm sitting there going, well, there's this many variations, and then I wanna hear that. Or, so if I remember one time we had a, um, I did a episode with Hannah Hart on YouTube. Big YouTube personality, and we, she made these historic recipes and she flew me out to California to do this jambalaya.

It was actually called Julee, a Creole dish. It was not the jambalaya that Louisianians knew. In fact, it was much closer to a chicken perew. 

Chris Spear: [00:20:00] Mm-hmm. 

Michael Twitty: It author was everybody from South Carolina, Abby Fisher, but it was more like Perloo. But she obviously saw the parallels between Perloo and Jamaya, which is, you know, they're both rice and there's some, some, there might be some grand there, some tomatoes, onion, blah, blah, blah.

And what's really cool about this recipe, y'all, is that the recipe had no water. Mm-hmm. It relied on the juices of the chicken and the tomato. And I gotta tell you, we need to cook more like that. That was great. Point being is that a lot of people from Louisiana were like, that ain't no damn jamaya. That ain't, I said, and we said, no, it it, I even said in the interview, it's, this is, if you're looking for.

Some k paul slash prude home slash Justin Wilson slash giacomo's jambalaya. You ain't gonna find it here. This isn't, this was an example of people understanding those parallels. Before we had digital media, before we had, you know, print media, most people could read. And so I get PI get [00:21:00] people's want and desire for authenticity.

What they really want is nostalgia. They want a perfected nostalgia. 'cause obviously as we move ahead in time and in, in, into, you know, and we move ahead as, as human beings in our life journey, that first thing becomes canonized as the thing. If I asked you what pizza was, that's a loaded question because it's gonna be the, if you like those, most Americans like pizza.

Let's get this. Be honest. Mm-hmm. But we also know that we only, for us pizza has to be X, Y, and Z. And I think that oftentimes people, they want authenticity. They really want nostalgia. 

Chris Spear: Yeah, like pizza, they're gonna think like that. Probably New York style. We're not gonna go into Detroit now. And there's the whole debate about is Chicago even pizza?

Because it doesn't resemble like a traditional New York style slice. 

Michael Twitty: For most of us, we had that thin slice pizza, New York ish style, and that was that. And I [00:22:00] mean that's, it's, it goes for any other food in the world. I mean, I have a recipe in the fighting book for Chinese, Mississippi, Chinese collard greens, and it's obviously based on bok choy with the oyster sauce and other elements.

And I'm just like, this is totally authentic. Because they were in the Mississippi Delta. They were no longer in China, but they weren't fully with two feet in America either. Not only because of the culture, but because of segregation. So if you understand all those pieces, authenticity is where you're 

Chris Spear: at.

So how do you even start pulling together recipes? I don't wanna call them the definitive, but if you are going to do a shrimp and grits or hush puppies, how did you for this book decide on what those recipes looked like that you were gonna select? 

Michael Twitty: I'm glad you said shrimp and grits, because there's a couple different ways to do shrimp and grits.

One is like the really sort of like gritty way where it's like, once [00:23:00] again we got the red and the yellow and the brown and mine is very white in the cookbook. And I, I said maybe I should have done a variation on this recipe because um, I do have a lot of variations in some recipes in the book. But you know, at some point you get cookbook fatigue writing a cookbook because you know everything that you write, you're gonna have to back up.

Chris Spear: Not 

Michael Twitty: in terms of, and especially in terms of the steps and the technique and the, the amount, and you're just like, okay, you know what? I'm done moving on. Next thing. And if I could go back, I really would throw in a variation on that recipe. Now, for all the recipes actually are based on several different recipes kind of pushed together.

Like what did I think was the elements that someone needed to know. Remember this cookbook is not just for North Americans, it's for Europeans too, who you know, are English speak or English readers. And so there's that. And so people from all over Europe, people from all over North America, Australia, will have this book in their hands [00:24:00] and attempt to do their version of southern food.

And sometimes some of the ingredients, some of the things just aren't able to be found there. And I'm okay with that. The point that, you know, you, you and I both know, there's cookbooks where we encounter things we, we can't get our hands on easily, but we go, okay, you know, one day I'm gonna do that. 

Chris Spear: Which is interesting 'cause I think this might be the first, or one of the first Fain books I can cook from because I have, you know, like the NOMA books or like a book from Spain or somewhere, you know, I've got the DOM book.

They put out all these books from other countries where you're like, where am I gonna get crickets or reindeer penis, or whatever it is. So I was finally excited to have one of their books where I'm like, I can literally make every single thing in this book. I love it. I love it. And I love them. I love them.

They put out great books for sure. But they definitely also deal in the high end kind of like upper echelon Michelin type restaurants where the recipes are crazy and I'm just reading 'em and I'm not making anything from 'em. Right. 

Michael Twitty: It's a, it's a rec, it's a record. It's a record of it's, it's, it's culinary graffiti in, anyway, I was hear we were here [00:25:00] was, I mean WUZ was, so some of the recipes are obviously classics.

You gotta have fried chicken, black eye peas, corn breads of different types, biscuits, different types, collard greens, blah, blah, blah. Okay, great. And then there are recipes that are just like historic, like ash cakes. Yeah, you kind of gotta know. I want you to know that this is part of our story, and ladies and gentlemen, you know, skillet, cornbread as, as wonderful as it is to some people, you know, I'll be real with you.

I, I, to this day, I will put some dag on Jiffy Mix in a cast iron skillet, because that to me is the cornbread of the great migration industrialization. And yes, I'll eat your cornbread if it's the real deal, but up, up in my house, this is what we gonna do, only because that is my nostalgia, my authenticity.

But ash cakes remind you that there was a time [00:26:00] when people ate hotcakes ash cakes. That was the predominant cornbread. It wasn't necessarily tasty. Uh, beaten biscuits are in there. People think they're gonna get this big, fluffy, homemade version of a grands biscuit and they're not, they're gonna get something.

That was basically the, the quick fire heart attack that made you feel full and that you could easily take a piece of, uh, uh, ham, for example, country ham and cut a slice, put it between the, the two pieces of, of dough and shovel it in your mouth and know that you ate something and that kind of thing.

Possum and sweet potatoes. I actually find possums to be extremely cute and fun and interesting and I've, I've, I more than once have, I has, has a dog of mine found a possum playing dead in the backyard and I take the dog away and I pour a little possum, I give it put up in the tree and it says, Hey, okay, thank you very much.

I'm out. Um, but I put that in there [00:27:00] because for a generation of Southerners game, I think there's this, there's this myth going around that. Southerners only ate game and, and certain types of fish. 'cause they had to, that's not true. They ate them because they wanted to. Um, my, one of my favorite stories, but it was one of those ninth century um, uh, architects.

And he walks by the James River and he sees an elderly black man fishing. This is before freedom. And he is the racial term uncle. He says, uncle, what are you catching? Shad? And he is very self assured that he was right. And the elderly black man says, oh no sir, I wouldn't feed Shad to a whore's dog. Well, that tells you right then and there that not everybody.

Loved, um, everything or just got by? No, no, no, no, no. We're not that kind of people. You know, I think both of us probably have seen those [00:28:00] beautiful or have those beautiful Time Life Foods of the world books. Yes. I have a few extraordinary, by the way, if you want more than a few, you want the whole set.

There's a free bookstore in Baltimore that always has them. Oh, you could just put 'em in your bag and go. Yeah, it's a free bookstore. It's 'cause they take the antique books and sell them, and that supports the rest of the store bitch being a, a a a a dumping ground for National Geographics and time length books.

But I'm telling you, I saw them and Peter Friedman does a beautiful Creole and Acadian cookbook. I've given them away to people because they'll find extra copy somewhere. It's so gorgeous and it's so pretty. And of course that in a Southern style, Eugene Walter, I mean, those two books shaped a a lot of what I know.

Um, addition to like watching Nelly Dupree as a child, may she rest in peace. I was, you know, it still messes me up that I've stayed in this woman's house eating her cooking Wild, [00:29:00] wild as an adult. Yeah. You know. Um, but I guess what I'm trying to say is there was like this recipe for like, these crab chops for lint and although I, I think if I had been in the photography room, uh, when they were doing all these lovely pictures of my book, my recipes from my book, I would call 'em, don't forget the claw.

I really want the claw because in the picture in the time Life book, the crab chop instead of a bone has a crab claw. Attached to it. And then there was a recipe for re Deon, which is a pig's ears. It's not really pig's ears. It's like a, that's a quick fried pastry where you dump a bunch of cane syrup point and then, uh, you throw, immediately throw in pecans.

I can't even eat pecans, but it sounds delicious, right? Yeah. And so I wanted recipes like that, that were a little bit, that were not just nostalgia, but reminded people. Fritters are southern chops and smothered and good, you know, you know, stuff for certain religious seasons are southern. And so there's this [00:30:00] mythology that Creole and Cajun cooking is actually not the same.

And I'm sorry, but it totally is. It's in the same framework because there is no French influence cuisine on the planet. Like what's coming out of Louisiana and for obvious reasons. Um, and last but not least, we have recipes that show, like I talked about, the, the collard greens from Mississippi, from the Chinese community.

Um, Sandra Gutierrez let me, um, adapt two or three recipes like with Collard Green and pinatas and the, um, chorizo dirty race to show that the South is not just the Sephardic pink rice in there. It's not just the recipes that we think we know. And I wish I had been able to do it via Cajun recipe in there.

I mentioned them community several times in the book, but I wasn't able to get to everything. I really, ideally I wanted to have West African Cuban, Puerto Rican via Cajun, middle Eastern Kurdish. [00:31:00] But honestly, it, like, again, you get cookbook fatigue. 

Chris Spear: Yeah. It would be a 500 page book. 

Michael Twitty: Yes. And you're just like.

I think I'm done now, or at least, or, or I, I'm not so confident that this has all the pieces and I'm gonna have to do weeks worth of research to make sure these recipes go in this book and aren't caused for disrespect or argument. I mean, I can handle a controversy. What I can't handle is disrespecting somebody's culture.

Chris Spear: Yeah. But it, I'm sure this will still open up, uh, comments about specific recipes and go going back and forth, so I wanna know. Your shrimp and going back to the shrimp and grits recipe, it's water, salt, and pepper. What are your thoughts on cooking grits? Because there's all manner of stock. Milk, cream, butter.

I, I've never put sugar in my grits. I know that's a thing I've never even considered it, but like is for you personally, is it always water or do you have, are there [00:32:00] different reasons like in how you're gonna serve it, what you're using for your liquid? 

Michael Twitty: To be honest with you, the only time I have done grits, I'm not a I growing up I was, I was not.

I, I saw them on the table all the time and, but it was a certain generation. It was my grandmother's generation from Alabama. My Virginia grandmother did not have grits. There was either ho, which ladies and gentlemen, how many grits and hominy are two completely different foods and what we call hony grits are ceremonial grits.

They're not the real deal ho grits from back in the day where the hominy was dried and broken down, all different ballgame. So, no, my grandfather from South Carolina, definitely grits, so there's a lower south, deep south quality here. I think people understand that Virginians had corn mush. They had beaten biscuits, they had hot cakes, they had ho and [00:33:00] fried apples and herring.

Okay. That was not, that's, that's very, Merlin is very similar. 

Chris Spear: Very similar. I'm, I'm laughing because my in-laws live with us and my father-in-law, who's 84, that's like all of their food. Like, he's like a rice black eye piece. Do tomatoes for dinner. He eats all of the mm-hmm. Tinned fish. He loves the little bony fish.

We have like stewed apples as like a side dish to go with dinner, which is weird. I'm like, I, I'm not having like meatloaf, but then we just have like a bowl of like sweet cinnamon apples on the table. That's right. Um, so I have a lot of this, um, you know, and that he doesn't cook as much anymore, so my wife has taken over doing that.

So we have a lot of these types of dishes. So many of them unfamiliar to me. The first time that we just had rice, black eye peas and tomatoes for dinner, I was like, this, this is dinner. Like, like there's no, there wasn't even any meat in the beans. I'm just like beans over rice with tomatoes. Mm-hmm. I like, I was like 30 the first time I had that.

Michael Twitty: Wow. And, and, and you brought up a very good point in a sense of [00:34:00] the black eyed P See people understand Black eyed peas, a definitely a old part of Virginia food and also black eyed pea cakes, all that. I'm not sure I got to that in the cookbook because it's, it's not as easy as it's black. First of all, ARA from West Africa aren't easy to make unless you're skilled at it.

They gotta remove the hole from each P, but then sounds 

Chris Spear: tedious. 

Michael Twitty: Yes. But then black eyed pea cakes can be a real mess. Real quick, if you don't know what you're doing over here. I don't wanna put out a recipe for anything that I can't conceivably make. And that to me, I can make them, but I can't tell you, you know what I'm saying?

Yeah. I can't tell you how to do it, but to your question, like from, yeah. Grits to me is with like bors and cheese or something like that. It's not even cheesy and yellow. It's like the, the goat, you know, the garlic cheese or something like that. And then you have that with something I don't make, make grits at all.

I don't even have grits in my house, to be honest with you. I may have them in the back of the pantry, [00:35:00] but, um, that's another thing the to, to realize. 

Chris Spear: You're being outed here, man. 'cause I would've totally expected you to have gr have grits on the table. But I'm just like, but I'm just, it's like, it's not like my, I'm my favorite thing.

My mom went to boarding school in Massachusetts Oh. Years ago. Oh wow. And I guess, you know, that's where we're from. They had grits every day. But she talked about how grits, and she even had this, like, Diddy, it was like grits. Grits, how many grits?

Like, I don't know if that was a marketing campaign. Mm. But she said she hated them so much. I was not allowed, like we never had grits in the house. But I think it wasn't like the traditional corn grits, she didn't like, I think it was the hoy. So I just grew up never having hominy and never having grits until again, like I met my wife when I was in my twenties,

But , that's what I love is traveling around this country, getting to try all these different, um, foods and things I've never had.

Now you notice there's no 

Michael Twitty: scrapple in this book? Mm. Are you a fan? I hate it. Oh, I, I literally, I, I can't stand it. And, and I, it's not like, no offense to anybody else, but I [00:36:00] really have to say that I didn't grow up eating funky food. 

Chris Spear: Now what if you, what if you had it without the organs in it? Because there are recipes where it's just like a braised pork shoulder.

Is that something that would be interesting to you if you took it? No. The pork part. Oh, yeah. I guess you could like, uh, there's probably like a Turkey variation or a beef one maybe, but I'm sure, I guess I'm sure there's like, I mean 

Michael Twitty: there's, there's halal haggas, so there has to be something like that.

Chris Spear: That sounds so weird. 

Michael Twitty: Yeah. I didn't grow, I didn't grow up eating, uh, the, the, the funkier elements of southern food or even the more homely like butter beans, like my grandmother ate that. It really was a generational thing. And I have to say that I'm really no different from other people. I know southern people who won't touch a rabbit.

Chris Spear: Mm-hmm. Because they had it so much growing up. Well, I think a lot of those things that were maybe like considered poor foods. I mean, we had friends at home growing up who ground beef was really inexpensive at the time, and he just said as an [00:37:00] adult who was never going to eat ground beef. Right. Just because like that's what they had all the time.

So the idea of having a hamburger or like a meat lasagna, he's just like, no, I'm not eating hamburger. 

Michael Twitty: I, I don't, I don't blame him. Once you've had something too much, you just don't desire it anymore. But, you know, something is, there's a lot of southern foods that on masse I'll, some, some weird stuff. So for example, their fruits, o Geechee, limes and other things that are, that are.

They're not easy to source. , The land has been denuded of some of these wild trees, , or plucked out. 'cause they're not a, you know, fruit trees in particular are just, it's just damning because the trees, often the animals and the wind spread them all over. It's a mess on the ground. People don't know how to respect the fact that, that's part of nature.

And so a lot of beautiful persimmon trees get mowed down wild pers trees. There was one in, um, not far from one of the synagogues I taught at [00:38:00] in, in Maryland that was so the biggest beautiful tree. And it had these huge persimmon, wild persimmons never get that big. And they cut , the tree down, you know, and all of it.

It's like, damn, I can't go there anymore and get the fruit. What do you think about Paw paws? Oh, I wish nobody said a word about paw paws. 'cause now everybody, as soon as you see a paw paw tree, you bet you believe that somebody's already got that eye on that fruit ripening before you can come back and get it.

They've already got it. 

Chris Spear: I have my spot. There's a spot actually in Frederick, uh, along the Mono River. And if you know where to go, I can pull easily, like 50 pounds if the day is right. 

Michael Twitty: Oh, wow. I mean, that's, that's a thing, right? I, it's just like there are a lot of foods that people used to eat or things people used to eat.

Somebody obviously loved at some point. Congo Eel, which is not a eel, nor does it come from the Congo. It's actually, , um, what do they call it? Lesser siren. It's anthea, it's a salamander. Oh. People [00:39:00] used to eat that, just like people used to eat a ena, which is not really southern, but I means it's, it's it's point being, you know what Ena is?

Uh, no, it's not as gay as it sounds. Listen, I say that as a proud gay man. It's a 17th century English drink that somebody near south probably. It's basically chicken broth with, with liquor. 

Chris Spear: Oh, that's weird. And that's called s 

Michael Twitty: Oh, yes. No, 

Chris Spear: I don't know anything about that. 

Michael Twitty: Yeah. Samuel Peeps would go to his, his favorite pub and meet his buddy, and he'd have cocke.

He took a boiled rooster and you mixed the broth, the strained broth with, with different kinds of alcohol and fruit and things and drink that. 

Chris Spear: Yeah. You must be hard up for a food and drink. 'cause I don't know. 

Michael Twitty: I mean, you're in London, you have all the food in the world, even at that time that you would want.

But I, I guess what I'm trying to say in all of this is that from forage food to wild foods to certain types of fish and aquatic life, to [00:40:00] heritage breed livestock , to things in combinations, who eats black eyed pea cakes anymore? Right. And they were being eaten and celebrated in the WPA interviews about Virginia.

Oh my God. Think about it this way, in five years, 1930 will be a hundred years ago. 1930 was, you know, we still saw coins in our houses from 1930. We still saw movies and all of that, you know, so it's wild to think about that in terms of culture. But think about it in terms of food. Yeah, that's a hundred years from ago.

That's 'cause you and I are getting old. It's, that's true. I mean, I, I, I, I've, I'd rather be here than the other side at the moment. But I mean, the other part of it is just like, it, it comes as a great shock to the human being, especially the American that time moves on and that, you know, [00:41:00] 1800 when I was a little boy was not quite as far away as it is now.

I'm gonna go back a little bit 'cause this popped in my head and I have to tell you this, like right now. 'cause you know, A DHD works that way and it's a story from Montgomery County. Me. I did the, this whole thing on Montgomery County historical food, um, a long time ago. And it's a, it was a woman and she was on the southern side, and these union soldiers came through Montgomery County.

And, you know, something, the woman obliges them. She didn't like them, but she obliges them. And she says to the, those union soldiers, you know, I think you, I think you all need some of our good southern cornbread. So her identity was very much in that space. And I mean, if you ask somebody now living in Rockville or Potomac.

You know, they underst got a [00:42:00] kind of vibe that they probably say no. Doesn't change the fact that in that time that was the prevailing culture. 

Chris Spear: Yeah. When you're living in a $3 million house in Potomac, you're probably not identifying that way. 

Michael Twitty: Correct. 

Chris Spear: Um, I have a couple, before it slips my mind, I had a couple very specific food questions.

'cause again, like not being from here, I've spent a lot of time trying to get. To the bottom of some of these recipes. And one of the things that really struck me was Marilyn Crab soup, because I've always seen it with basically like the bagged frozen veg mix that has like corn, carrots. Mm-hmm. Uh, big, big, huge ass green beans sometimes like hanging out of the bowl.

Yours has none of that. And it has okra, which I've never seen in it, and I've never made it remotely close to the way you do it. So is that something that you consider to be closer towards the more traditional way and have I just been seeing it? Absolutely. And I've just been seeing it this way for [00:43:00] the past 18 years that I've lived down here.

Michael Twitty: It's all over the historic cookbooks. Um, even when, um, James mentioned of the famous historical novelist of late, uh, wrote Chesapeake, he actually does a couple of food scenes in the book, and one is where he talks about black ladies on the eastern shore of Merlin making okra soup. So okra soup. Crab, that's, yeah.

It's a handy combination and it's, it's documented and it's there and it's present and it's all over these, like Merlin and Virginia cookbooks, 50 years of the Merlin Kitchen. You know, Elizabeth Ellicott Lee doesn't have crab, but she has chicken in hers or beef. Of course, she wasn't living anywhere near the Bay, but I mean, yeah, it's present.

It's a real, it's a real deal and it's not, you know, people came up with a cheaper, weirder version. But, um, it's definitely a, a soup. That's from the season, right? 

Chris Spear: Yeah, 

Michael Twitty: it's, it's definitely an August, [00:44:00] July, August soup. And that's another thing I, I can't stress enough, is that seasonality is really important.

Here I am with every Southern cook who says I'm not doing a peach cobbler in the winter. I don't care if it come, if I can use the canned stuff or frozen peaches or jarred peaches. No. Peach cobbler is for July, August, September, and then October, November, December, January. It's Apple. Yeah. And then, you know, get, you get what I'm saying?

It's just like, but then 

Chris Spear: what? What gets really hard is even within that, the way that, I don't know if it's the weather or whatever, you don't even know when those are gonna hit. And I feel like you have such a small window. Like to my point, I work as a personal chef and I propose menus to people sometimes months in advance.

Yeah. And they're like having a dinner the third week of July. Like I don't know if I can even propose a peach cobbler because like what are peaches gonna be like if it's February? I don't know. So unless they're really [00:45:00] open to me saying it'll be some kind of fruit cobbler and we'll see what's good. But it's really hard for me to say, so a lot of my menu items now are kind of like stone fruit, like a salad with stone fruit.

And I know I'll have something, but I can't guarantee that it's gonna be peaches. 'cause I like seasonal cooking. But on this kind of end of catering personal chef things, you're getting people who are specking out. They wanna see a menu like months to maybe even a year in advance. And it's really hard to target super seasonal cooking when you're doing that.

Michael Twitty: Never in my life did my late mother blessed memory ever, ever, ever, ever consider using canned peaches for anything, requiring peaches ever. And I don't, and not even buying peaches from somebody else, they had to be made by us, processed by us. 

Chris Spear: So she wouldn't even like put them up like can and jar them and then use them and make a peach cobbler in December, even if they were fresh in season peaches that you guys put up?

Michael Twitty: For the most part, no. Um, there were examples. I mean, we'd also use the peaches every other conceivable way, but there were, I mean, my mom [00:46:00] definitely would say, for example, somebody really wanted to have something like that. She might make that later on the year. But for the most part, we made a ton of peach cobbling, a ton of peach crisp.

I love crisp, but by the way, I I for that, for that reason, my mom took out the oats, you know, made it too healthy for me. I guess that, that's one of my favorite things. A good peach Cris, oh my god. Peach cob I love too, but not as much as Peach Crisp. I mean, the driskel copping and just put it in it for with good fresh southern peaches in August.

Oh my Lord. And it can't be no white peaches neither. They gotta be the, the yellow little one, the blush on the really 

Chris Spear: drippy ones, right? 

Michael Twitty: Yes. The really drippy ones that I, that you can, the juice comes outta me. You already know, 

Chris Spear: man. I wish I had one of those, like in the skillet right now waiting for me when I get off this conversation.

But I, but I don't, unfortunately. Uh, well, listen, I feel like we could talk about the book a whole lot, but before we get outta here today, I wanna leave a little time for, is there anything that [00:47:00] you wanna talk about besides this? Because right now. There's a lot of weird stuff going on. A lot of talk about food and kitchens and Yeah.

Culture and identity and politics and all that. But like, where are you at with things right now? I know you're very vocal online. Yes. Especially on social media. Um, so what's on your mind these days? 

Michael Twitty: Um, I just want people to understand something that it's not, you don't feel it right now, but there are costs to enforced amnesia.

There are costs to us simply not having all the pieces and the keys and parts of the story, their code words being used, you know, woke, DEI, critical race theory, et cetera. And these are, you know, something or I remember back in the day it was, um, the talking about, uh, Obama's former pastor [00:48:00] and, you know.

Liberation theology. I'm like, did you know about this as liberation theology, critical race theory and uh, intersectionality, all these other terms are actually almost as old as us. They're not brand new. And they're being also used to sort of frame how people think about other parts of our culture. So, you know, if you go down to a national park service run site in, say for example, Charleston, which is dripping of the history of enslavement and resistance, and they don't wanna sell books about enslavement, what does that do for the cooking gene?

Chris Spear: Mm-hmm. 

Michael Twitty: I didn't write the cooking gene to make white people feel guilty. I wrote the cooking gene to give us back our roots and also to, if every American considered that serious blood was sheds, they could enjoy the life that they live, especially food. But what happens to me and other people like me when our books are ripped out, God forbid, from these gift shops.

Is that [00:49:00] happening? Like, 

Chris Spear: are your, are your books being taken out of places like that? I, 

Michael Twitty: God, 

Chris Spear: I hope not. 

Michael Twitty: Yeah, I really hope not. And I don't wanna, but I, that means I've gotta advocate and people, you know, it's funny. People don't always like people like me to advocate for our stuff. It's supposed to be like, if you, if you do, they, then you're accused of being manipulative or whatever.

But I don't see other people who are, uh, selling their whatever. They're not ashamed of their grift. There's, it's, there's, people get paid a lot of money in this country to call me the n word. They get paid a lot of money. But when we start saying, this is important, this is valuable 'cause of representation, we call woke.

Mm-hmm. Meanwhile, rush Limbaugh went to his grave, a melting millionaire because he couldn't stop ke ke he couldn't keep the names of black people out his mouth. When it comes to the food world and food work, I noticed that the SFA just just recently had [00:50:00] a, um, uh, uh, put out their conference, um, symposium for October, and there were no black people on the schedule.

How's that even happen? Uh, you know, well, you know, uh, I I, you have to ask yeah, these folks and ask them, you know, but also, just like when I said the words that there were, you know, maybe 10, 20 of us and crowds of hundreds, even though, you know, Adrian Miller and Tony Triton, Martin other and Jessica Harris have been involved in, you know, leadership and planning and other, those elements of these organizations that, you know, it's not transferring the next couple generations.

And that's, that's, um, you know, uh, I, now that I see people going, woke is out, I'm like, you damn well know that. The sort of like urge to include and have representation and show intersectionality [00:51:00] et cetera, is not brand new. It's not even civil rights. It's our entire history as Americans and we're impossible.

I want people to understand this. We are an impossible people without our diversity. There's no such thing as I can do this without, without you or you, without me. The creative fire and imagination and cultural and culinary possibility that is here is not, cannot be done artificially. You cannot remove people who are the stewards of a 10,000 year old cuisine and call you and, and then go back to Taco Bell and Chipotle and think you doing something.

You know what I'm saying? So, um. It's across 

Chris Spear: the board. Yeah. How do you, how do you love the food and the culture and all the things without the people, right? That's right. That's the bottom thing's question. It's like you, like, you like rap music, but you don't [00:52:00] like black people. You like going to Mexican restaurants, but you don't want Mexican immigrants here.

All that stuff. Like, you can't have one without the people. 

Michael Twitty: No. And, and you can't. And you, and you can't, um, you know, teach your children how to appreciate other people. On a last note, you know, we have this little v, this village of, uh, uh, all whites only village. They're trying to develop, you know, some, I'll let, I'll, you know, you can go ahead and do that.

Do what you want. But if I see one single black eyed pea. I seen one single bit of rice and collard and one single watermelon in that piece. So what's the food, what are they gonna eat at this? Whites only, um, place, I guess, I guess mayonnaise. Um, I, I, I, I guess that they're highly limited oatmeal, I guess. I don't know.

But I, I mean, I have to, I have to say stop, you know, if you really wanna do this, do baby do it. Go back to an English that has no Latin roots, and then go on from there. Any borrowed [00:53:00] words with the, with the language that borrows the most words. For other languages on the planet. 

Chris Spear: Yeah, I um, I joked about this online last week 'cause I have, when my customers reach out to me, they, I asked them what they like and I recently had someone tell me they didn't like, and I'm using air quotes here, ethnic food.

Like what does that, what does that even mean? So I asked people on threads what you would serve them. And the responses were just off the wall. Ridiculous. Because, like, seriously, what does that mean? I don't like ethnic food. I think that means they want like Eurocentric Italian, French type things, but they don't want to see like a Vietnamese or something.

I, I don't know, forget the fact that for 

Michael Twitty: generations, Italian was extremely ethnic Correct. To wasp Americans. And they, that's, and okay, so that's the answer to your question. That's what I'm worried about. I mean, first of all, I didn't get to almost 50 for this nonsense. Second of all. If we mess this up, and I [00:54:00] don't even wanna use the word mess, you know the word I wanna use.

Mm-hmm. We will be forfeiting all the wisdom of 400 years. It'll go out the window and with that wisdom goes knowledge. And with that knowledge goes experience and for us to reinvent the wheel at this stage in our story, as we become basically the equivalent in terms of history of barely leaving college, it would be such a tremendous disaster for know, just for our food, but for our national intellect.

Inte. Mm-hmm. Inte. And I'm doing everything I can with food to make sure that they don't win. 

Chris Spear: Thank you so much for your work. Like, it's so important. Thank you. I, I mean, I really. Truly appreciate it. I think it's so [00:55:00] thoughtful. You clearly know what you're talking about. I can tell you've spent essentially your whole life kind of digging into this and it really shows and I think it's important, you know, and I, I do think there are intelligent people out there who want to learn.

I think having collections of books and people who they can look to like you is really important. I mean, unfortunately in a world of like snippet videos on social media, more people are going to that than really diving into history and stuff. But I do think there's a lot of people who are still really interested in this and see how important it is.

And hopefully your works are gonna be a lasting legacy. Again, don't wanna see you gone, you're not even 50 yet. But I do think these are books that are gonna last or, you know, hopefully the test of time. 

Michael Twitty: It takes a lot. You know, the legacy question is something that is, is a tough one because it's, it's, it's, it's like it's takes a long, longer time than one thinks.

What I really mean is this. Okay. So let's be honest with each other. What I really mean is [00:56:00] this legacy while I can see it, you know? Mm-hmm. I remember handing my grandfather the cooking gene and the immense pride at 90 some years old, and my grandfather said, that's it, boy, you got one for the twits. And he clapped his hand and he smiled.

He was so, I'm, I'm so happy that I got to see one of my, um, forebearers look at that book and also see himself in the pages of that book and go, wow. When I say that my granddaddy picked cotton, I mean it when I say that my grandfather, you know, was one of the founding members of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives.

When I say that, you know, he brought my father and many other children into this world with a pride and the lamb and a [00:57:00] pride in who we come, where we come from and who we are. And I know my granddaddy's pecan trees, his Pete's trees, his field, his land where he's, where he's buried, his father's buried and his daddy's daddy's buried.

And I did the work so I could trace my ancestry back to a man who was enslaved, who was brought from Ghana to Charleston, South Carolina. And um, I hope people appreciate the providence of the book being in the hands of someone like me. But I guess the last words here are that, you know, you're looking at somebody who's 48 years old.

Who, this is not easy, y'all. This is not easy. And we talk about being marginalized. It really ain't easy. If it was easy, everybody would do it. And I've been to England a number of times and also I've been to Scotland, I've been to Ireland, I've been outside of London, Kent, Somerset, Cambridge, Oxford, Yorkshire, [00:58:00] Liverpool.

I've been to Ireland, I've been to Scandinavia, I've been to Italy, I've been to all over France and I've been to Africa eight, nine times now, and I've traveled the entire south. I think the only state I haven't been to is Oklahoma. Some of you're like, how am I knock us out? Yeah. Sort of is. Um, but everywhere else I've been and I've, you know, something discomfort to you, you remember that just crossing the entire south.

I have done the damn work. That's the, the first and last word in this book and everything else I do. I did the damn work without any money. Southern Discomfort Tour. I only asked for $8,000 and I should have asked for 10 

Chris Spear: hmm, 

Michael Twitty: 8,000 to travel the entire 

Chris Spear: south and do the work. Michael, I can get $2,000 to go do a dinner one night for some people.

Come on. 

Michael Twitty: Well, look, you know what? If I gotta come up to Frederick and we gotta make this work, Hey, you know what? We'll, we'll split that boo. [00:59:00] Yeah, and I'll, I'll build it up because I'm telling you, we are just, um, we have to support each other. That's the last word. We have to support each other. Those of us who are doing very similar record in similar fields, this is not, we are not competitors.

We are family. And that is the whole purpose of what we put on our tables to bring people together. 

Chris Spear: It's an amazing book. It's a truly amazing book. I haven't cooked anything from it yet, but I am really gonna crack into it and start cooking from it probably in the next week or so. I've just fantastic.

I've been trying to read through it for research purposes and I haven't had the opportunity to start cooking from it yet, but I look forward to doing that really soon. 

Michael Twitty: Awesome. Awesome, awesome. 

Chris Spear: Well, thanks again for coming on the show for a second time. I really loved having you here. 

Michael Twitty: Thank you. 

Chris Spear: Uh, and to all of our listeners, this is Chris with Chefs Without Restaurants.

Thanks so much and have a great week.