Koshersoul: The Faith and Food Journey of an African American Jew

The James Beard award-winning author of the acclaimed The Cooking Gene explores the cultural crossroads of Jewish and African diaspora cuisine and issues of memory, identity, and food.

In Koshersoul, Michael W. Twitty considers the marriage of two of the most distinctive culinary cultures in the world today: the foods and traditions of the African Atlantic and the global Jewish diaspora. To Twitty, the creation of African-Jewish cooking is a conversation of migrations and a dialogue of diasporas offering a rich background for inventive recipes and the people who create them.

The question that most intrigues him is not just who makes the food, but how the food makes the people. Jews of Color are not outliers, Twitty contends, but significant and meaningful cultural creators in both Black and Jewish civilizations. Koshersoul also explores how food has shaped the journeys of numerous cooks, including Twitty’s own passage to and within Judaism.

As intimate, thought-provoking, and profound as The Cooking Gene, this remarkable book teases the senses as it offers sustenance for the soul.

Koshersoul includes recipes.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

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Koshersoul: The Faith and Food Journey of an African American Jew

The James Beard award-winning author of the acclaimed The Cooking Gene explores the cultural crossroads of Jewish and African diaspora cuisine and issues of memory, identity, and food.

As intimate, thought-provoking, and profound as The Cooking Gene, this remarkable book teases the senses as it offers sustenance for the soul.

Koshersoul includes recipes.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

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Overview

The James Beard award-winning author of the acclaimed The Cooking Gene explores the cultural crossroads of Jewish and African diaspora cuisine and issues of memory, identity, and food.

As intimate, thought-provoking, and profound as The Cooking Gene, this remarkable book teases the senses as it offers sustenance for the soul.

Koshersoul includes recipes.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798200975112
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	08/09/2022
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Michael W. Twitty is a noted culinary and cultural historian and the creator of Afroculinaria, the first blog devoted to African American historic foodways and their legacies. He has been honored by FirstWeFeast.com as one of the twenty greatest food bloggers of all time, and named one of the “Fifty People Who Are Changing the South” by Southern Living and one of the “Five Cheftavists to Watch” by TakePart.com. Twitty has appeared throughout the media, including on NPR’s The Splendid Table, and has given more than 250 talks in the United States and abroad. His work has appeared in Ebony, the Guardian, and on NPR.org. He is also a Smith fellow with the Southern Foodways Alliance, a TED fellow and speaker, and the first Revolutionary in Residence at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Twitty lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Preface xiii

Part I Berachah

1 Family History 3

2 The Numbers Game, or "Where the Kinfolk At?" 12

3 The Bus Ride, or "For the Last Time, This iss Why I'm Jewish!" 20

Mayseh: A Blessing on Strange Creatures 26

4 Yichus: Why I Love Jewish Food-The Honey on the Slate 32

5 Sit at the Welcome Table and Eat and be Satisfied: Black Food 38

Black Food as Jewish Food 38

Mayseh: The Exchange 49

Mayseh: The Bris, or "I Think I Have the Wrong House!" 54

Mayseh: "What Even are Those Things?" 57

Mayseh: "It's Chicken!" 61

Part II The Tablecloth

6 My Heart is in the East 69

Mayseh: "Shalom, Brother!" 73

Mayseh: "You have been Misinformed" 78

7 To Sir, with Ahavah 82

Mayseh: Katie-"I Feel Like Me" 86

Mayseh: Elliott's Tefillin 90

Mayseh: Sweet Potatoes 94

Mayseh; Truth, Reconciliation, and Repair 102

8 Kippa'ed While Black: Being a Black Jewish Man 106

Mayseh: "Get In!" 127

Mayseh: The World's Nicest White Lady 128

Part III Neshamah: A Soul Suite

9 Learning 133

Part IV Eruvim

10 People of the Land 143

Mayseh: Gardens-Landscapes of the Thriving Survivors 149

11 Keshet 158

Mayseh: Purple Velvet 160

Mayseh: Letter I Always Wanted to Write 166

Mayseh: Quadruple Queerness 171

Part V The Prepared Table

Mayseh: Chava's Query 183

Mayseh: My Afro-Ashkefardi Kitchen 190

12 Adon Olam to the Tune of Dixie: Southern Jewish Food 199

Mayseh: Driving Miss Daisy 216

13 The Griot from Blytheville: Dr. Marcie Cohen Ferris 220

Mayseh: The Other (White) Jews-The Koshersoul of Southern White Jews-by-Choice 227

Mayseh: A Southern Guide to Tashlich 234

Mayseh: Halal Soul Chef Shambra 236

14 The Cuisine of the Chocolate Chosen: Cooking Black and Jewish, a Kitchen Table Kibbitz 242

Epilogue: If I Were a Cookbook 258

Recipes 263

Menus and Other Koshersoul Ideas 331

More Koshersoul Ideas 347

Author's Note 351

Acknowledgments 355

Glossary 357

Bibliography 363

From the B&N Reads Blog

Page 1 of

Editorial Reviews

07/11/2022
Twitty stuffs his follow-up to James Beard Award winner The Cooking Gene with wide-ranging ideas as generously as he fills kreplach with collards. “You don’t have to be Black, gay, or Jewish,” Twitty writes at the book’s outset, “but if you are, we have a little something to kibbitz about before we nosh.” What follows is a rich call-and-response between the academic and the personal as Twitty explores the shared customs and cuisines of his African and Jewish roots. In conversations with everyone from teenagers he teaches at a Hebrew school to scholars like T.J. Tallie, author of Queering Colonial Natal, he meditates on Black queerness, the tradition of gathering in both Jewish and Black culture, their continued “gestures toward true inclusion” in American society, and the Black Jewish community’s “resistan to engaging in the flashpoints and crises of identity that other people have against us.” Evocative descriptions of food provide a rich through line: A rundown of an African American seder plate suggests a chicken bone in place of a lamb shank bone, while Southern selections are given for tashlich, the tradition of sprinkling crumbs into the water to symbolize doing away with sins before Yom Kippur (with peach cobbler to atone for gossiping). Serving up a hefty helping of heart and wit, Twitty’s narrative is thrilling in its originality. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

In this fascinating book — which includes recipes — Twitty explores, as he puts it, “the intersections between food and identity.”
— Washington Post
“Twitty makes the case that Blackness and Judaism coexist in beautiful harmony, and this is manifested in the foods and traditions from both cultures that Black Jews incorporate into their daily lives…Twitty wishes to start a conversation where people celebrate their differences and embrace commonalities. By drawing on personal narratives, his own and others’, and exploring different cultures, Twitty’s book offers important insight into the journeys of Black Jews.”
— Library Journal
“…a fascinating, cross-cultural smorgasbord grounded in the deep emotional role food plays in two influential American communities.”
— Booklist
“Serving up a hefty helping of heart and wit, Twitty’s narrative is thrilling in its originality.”
— Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

08/01/2022
Twitty's new book is the second in a kind of trilogy about African American cuisine (following his James Beard-awarded The Cooking Gene). Here Twitty focuses on the intersections between food and identity—specifically, how food, identity, and memory define people and cultures. He does this by reflecting on the Jewish and African diasporas and his own experience as a Black Jew. Divided into five sections, this is part memoir and part exploration into African-Jewish histories and identities, Black and Jewish relations, racism, and other topics. The volume also includes interviews with other Black Jews and chefs. Throughout the text, Twitty makes the case that Blackness and Judaism coexist in beautiful harmony, and this is manifested in the foods and traditions from both cultures that Black Jews incorporate into their daily lives. VERDICT Twitty wishes to start a conversation where people celebrate their differences and embrace commonalities. By drawing on personal narratives, his own and others', and exploring different cultures, Twitty's book offers important insight into the journeys of Black Jews.—Jacqueline Parascandola

Library Journal

Chef Michael Twitty’s candid and warm style allows his intimate memoir to excel as an audiobook. Far more than an autobiography, KOSHERSOUL is a revealing account of Twitty’s lifelong journeys—as a Black man, as a Jew, and as a gay man—and how those worlds have united and clashed. Twitty’s style is engaging, and he narrates in a tone that embraces listeners and invites them into his world, not to offer judgment, but to recognize the differences and challenges Twitty and others face. But there is also a deeper message, one that Twitty intermingles with his love of food and reveals itself in the vignettes and cooking tips that he supplies, all showing situations to which all listeners can relate. D.J.S. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

SEPTEMBER 2022 - AudioFile

Chef Michael Twitty’s candid and warm style allows his intimate memoir to excel as an audiobook. Far more than an autobiography, KOSHERSOUL is a revealing account of Twitty’s lifelong journeys—as a Black man, as a Jew, and as a gay man—and how those worlds have united and clashed. Twitty’s style is engaging, and he narrates in a tone that embraces listeners and invites them into his world, not to offer judgment, but to recognize the differences and challenges Twitty and others face. But there is also a deeper message, one that Twitty intermingles with his love of food and reveals itself in the vignettes and cooking tips that he supplies, all showing situations to which all listeners can relate. D.J.S. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

SEPTEMBER 2022 - AudioFile

★ 2022-05-10
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.

Kirkus Reviews

Koshersoul: The Faith and Food Journey of an African American Jew

Koshersoul: The Faith and Food Journey of an African American Jew

Audio MP3 on CD(MP3 on CD)

Audio MP3 on CD(MP3 on CD)

Related collections and offers

Overview

Product Details

About the Author

Table of Contents

Customer Reviews

Related collections and offers

Overview

Product Details

About the Author

Table of Contents

Related Subjects

Customer Reviews