Chef Michael Twitty explores the culinary traditions of African slaves

This article first appeared in Indy Week. For information about the Sept. 7 event at Historic Stagville, call 919-620-0120 or email ernest.dollar@gmail.com.

Michael Twitty, a descandant
of North Carolina slaves, as he
appear swhen presenting
historic interpretations.

The Southeastern seaboard is where thousands of shackled, malnourished African slaves emerged from hellish journeys to find odd comfort in growing conditions reasonably similar to their homelands.

Historian and chef Michael Twitty has dedicated his life's work to the study of African slave foodways and how they spread from the Southeastern plantations and farms.Here, displaced Africans longing for a taste of home developed a sort of fusion fare by blending their native traditions with available resources.

Those lucky enough to be assigned work in hot kitchens understood that their job was to cover huge tables with elegantly presented foods and stay out of sight while their white mistresses became renowned hostesses. They were powerless when keepers claimed the recipes as their own, sometimes publishing popular cookbooks that now serve as roadmaps to culinary historians.

Twitty's efforts to reveal these much-discounted labors and to genetically connect contemporary citizens with their slave roots have been recognized by the Smithsonian Institution, Colonial Williamsburg and Monticello, among others. On Sept. 7, during a fundraising event he will lead at Historic Stagville in Durham, he intends to disclose findings of his own genetic testing.

Previous research confirmed Twitty's connection to Halifax County fields that once were the property of his great-great-great-grandfather, Richard Henry Bellamy. This in turn confirmed at least two direct links back to Africa.

Twitty was intentional about coming to Stagville, which comprises the remnants of one of the largest plantations of the pre-Civil War South, to learn more about his own story. In 1860, about 900 slaves worked its almost 30,000 acres of land.

"On the eve of the Civil War, a third of the population of North Carolina was enslaved. That's a critical fact," he says. "I am a descendant of enslaved North Carolina people and planters—both sides of the fence. I take it with me everywhere I go."

Twitty has traveled throughout the South on his crowd-funded research trips, including last summer's Southern Discomfort Tour, which launched in Chapel Hill with a presentation to Culinary Historians of Piedmont North Carolina. He has been invited to present on his work, including the Stagville event, at a culinary justice conference held in August in Denmark.

Given all this, it seems like poetic justice that his labors received an unexpected boost this summer from a most unlikely source: a woman, once celebrated for her deep-fried Southern excess, who got caught using the N-word in a legal deposition about harassment of a black employee. His eloquent treatise, "An Open Letter to Paula Deen," was posted quietly on his Afroculinaria website on June 25 but quickly went viral. Twitty not only dismantles Deen's romantic notions of slave life but also invites her to start making amends by volunteering to help at the Stagville fundraiser.

"I wanted her to see the remnants of that world and walk through those cabins, which is a very different place from the magnolia plantations some people prefer to think about," he says. "I haven't heard from anyone in her camp so I can't assume that she knows about it. If she was to show up, that would be cool. But it's not going to be the basis of my day. I want to have authentic food on the table and educate people."

Acclaimed Atlanta chef Hugh Acheson, author of A New Turn in the South, has volunteered his help and will speak at the event. "His pea soup is a recipe that really speaks to all of these roots in a modern context," says Twitty, who also has established partnerships with several Triangle and Piedmont providers, including farmers of color. "It's a beautiful message about collaboration and the continuum of history."

Daytime events at Stagville, which are free and open to the public, will include demonstrations of plantation life, including rustic cooking methods. The evening fundraiser features a $75 dinner in the former Horton Grove slave quarters.

"I want people to know that menu is not fancy. It represents the narratives of enslaved people," states Twitty, who spent months researching what was grown and consumed from slave gardens. "Almost everything on the menu is from the mouth of an enslaved person in North Carolina."

Options will include slow-smoked pork and chicken barbecue, roasted sweet potatoes, savory cornmeal kush and sweet peach cobbler.

"We want people to think about the everyday reality of their lives and how food shaped their culture," he says. "We want them to get into the heads, as well as the bellies, of enslaved people."

‘Foodsteps’ from slavery to the rise of Southern cuisine

This blog first appeared on Culinary Historians of Piedmont North Carolina.

There are those who say that talk of politics and equality have no place at the table. But for culinary historian Michael Twitty, that’s where the conversation begins.

Culinary historian Michael Twitty will present
"Them Old Slavery Foods: Liberating a Cuisine in
Chains in Antebellum North Carolina" at
6:30 p.m. Thursday at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill.

“The table definitely is the starting point to be more honest with each other and express how we feel about our location and our past,” said Twitty, who will launch his Southern Discomfort Tour with a free talk at 6:30 p.m. Thursday at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill. His topic, Them Old Slavery Foods: Liberating a Cuisine in Chains in Antebellum North Carolina, is co-presented by Culinary Historians of Piedmont North Carolina (CHOP NC) and the Southern Historical Collection at UNC Chapel Hill.

“Whether we like it or not, those of us who study African American foodways face a social-political landscape every day,” he said. “Food helps us define our identity and sense of direction. It preserves a shared timelessness. “

An outcome of slavery, he added, “is that Africans and African Americans, who were marginalized groups, made important and often overlooked contributions to Southern and American cuisine. These are important economic and cultural facts.”

Twitty will document his travels to places where his ancestors were enslaved, “as well as places of cultural memory related to slavery and the development and history of Southern cuisine,” on his blog, The Cooking Gene.  He also tweets at @koshersoul.

As stated on The Cooking Gene website: “We are attempting to dialogue with the white families who owned my family - some of whom I am related to by blood - using food as the medium of communication and discourse. We are looking at the development of African American foodways from Africa to America and from the colonial South to the antebellum and postbellum South using my family tree and family geography if you will as a guide. We’re calling that connection ‘foodsteps’ instead of footsteps to describe those edible connections to the landscape and time.”

Twitty will experience that landscape in a very personal way later this week when he ventures east to walk the Halifax County fields that once were the property of his great-great-great-grandfather Richard Henry Bellamy, a slave owner.

Twitty's great-great-great-grandfather,
Capt. Richard Henry Bellamy,
was born in 1829 in Halifax County.

Born in 1829 as the son of European immigrants, Bellamy was raised to enjoy privileges unfamiliar to the mixed-race offspring he and other well-to-do landowners sired and left behind to be raised, often malnourished, in surrounding communities. Here and in other places where the rambling roots of his family tree survive, Twitty believes he will find living blood relatives.

“I’ve reached out to people who say I can walk the land to see what he saw,” Twitty said. “He led a remarkable life, especially for the time. He was a decorated Confederate captain. He was a graduate of law school from the University of Georgia. He got to be a legislator in Texas.”

Bellamy’s biracial children, by contrast, never travelled further than they could walk. “They didn’t go to school. They weren’t special,” Twitty said. “It wasn’t until they had grandchildren that anyone thought to leave the blinding poverty of the South to go north. It’s a reality that’s part of so many stories.”

Twitty is eager to track kin and find clues to their lives through culinary records, but not all of his living relations and friends entirely understand his quest.

“Some people think this whole project is very strange,” he admitted with a laugh. “People expect me to go to the slave quarters and eat what they ate to learn who I am. By studying Southern-African foodways, my goal is to better understand where I come from. It brings a whole new meaning to ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner’.”

Twitty’s travels will take him on a circuitous route from his base in Washington, D.C., to big and small Southern towns that cousins many times removed once called home. To make that possible, a diverse group of sponsors from across the country, but especially in the South, united to support his online fundraising effort. It came down to the wire, but Twitty eventually surpassed his $8,000 goal.

“I am emotionally and spiritually moved by the fact that so many people who do not know me personally gave their money and their time to get the word out,” he said. “It was awkward for me to ask, but it’s all about goodwill and love and vision.”

While Twitty, a devout Jew, is not likely to indulge in all that Eastern North Carolina may heap on a dinner plate, he is eager to experience foods and traditions that with were known to his forebears or are common to his surviving relatives.

“One of my fantasies is to find as receipt book, a sort of recipe collection, from my great-great-great grandfather’s line – maybe a cousin who had a copy of The Virginia House-Wife,” he said, referring to the 1825 guide that became the most influential cookbook of its time. “It would be a sort of Who Do You Think You Are moment, a connection I do not have to any of my black ancestors.”

Twitty has discussed DNA testing with a few family contacts and hopes to broach the subject with others.

“It is a lot to ask, but with their help I hope to peel back the layers to reveal truth,” he said. “For a lot of African Americans, knowing if you came from West or Central Africa, or the Caribbean, is powerful. When they realize that we can help each other by doing this, and that so many supporters have donated money to make it happen, they see how important it is.”

Speaking just hours from the start of his great odyssey, Twitty expressed deep appreciation for his advocates and excitement about how the next few weeks will change his life.

“I have extreme roller coaster emotions,” he said. “There’s one thing in particular that comes to me. One of my grandmother’s brothers died when he was very young. The only thing I know about this young man is that his favorite breakfast was fried baloney, cinnamon toast and orange juice.

“I guarantee you I am the only person who ever thinks about this particular person, but that is part of his immortality,” he said. “By writing down what I learn about my family and our foodways, I hope to preserve it in my own small way.”