KOSHERSOUL

A searching sequel to The Cooking Gene that explores the intersections of “food and identity.”

Black, Jewish, gay, earthy, intellectual: Twitty is a man of parts, all of which come together in the kitchen. The first two ingredients are perhaps the most important, where the bitter herbs of exile manifest in a dish of collard greens. “Blacks and Jews and their Venn diagram have seen considerable turmoil and pain,” he writes, and the cuisine of diaspora is one expression of it. “Being Black and being Jewish is not an anomaly or a rare thing,” writes the author, enumerating, among others, ancient Ethiopian and Eritrean Jewish communities and the actor Yaphet Kotto, “whose Panamanian mother kept strict kosher and whose Cameroonian father reminded him of their deep Jewish roots as African royals”—just one African family among many to whom Judaism had arrived long ago. Then there are the converts, sometimes uncomfortable participants in a social dance by which one is placed within the “networking system of American Jewish identity.” White Jews are more accepting of Blacks than “the rest of self-identified white America,” and in that context, Twitty lauds the “world’s nicest white lady,” who unquestioningly accepted him into the Jewish community without prerequisites. The author chronicles his discussions with a range of Jewish foodies and chefs of many ethnicities to limn what “koshersoul” cuisine might encompass: chicken bone instead of lamb shank bone at seder; hoecakes as “the closest analog to matzoh, the flatbread of slavery”; diaspora gardens teeming with za’atar, yellow onions, eggplant, garlic, field peas, and hundreds of other delicious plants. He follows with recipes both gathered from his research and invented, from those maror-like collard greens to all-healing chicken soup made soulful with the addition of Senegalese ingredients and yam latkes. He also includes a helpful glossary.

A thoughtful, inspiring book that will have readers pondering their own ancestors and their presence in the kitchen.