James Beard Award-winning culinary historian Michael W. Twitty has spent his career doing what most food writers won’t: telling the full, complicated, beautiful truth about Southern cuisine. His new book, Recipes from the American South, is 400+ pages of that work—more than 100 recipes paired with headnotes that trace where the food actually comes from, who actually made it, and why these stories are so important.
Michael is reclaiming the stories of the people who built Southern cuisine despite their traumas and hardships. He’s showing that the South isn’t a fixed thing, but thousands of years old with a story very much still being written.
We gathered his thoughts on memory, recipes, and why the people who built the South deserve to be remembered.
Grab your copy of Recipes from the American South by Michael W. Twitty here.
Q: Modern South exists to help people understand the real South, and your work does exactly that with food. Why is this work so important right now?
A: I once saw an exhibit that had a section about who gets remembered. How few people got an artist doing their portrait or later taking their photograph. That’s a lot of lost stories. Recipes help us trace the steps of people whose gold was their folk culture but often were unable to leave much else. Taste is one of the most incredibly intimate of senses. There’s something very special about passing down the things that taste good to you, but not just that, but the other ways in which we experience food holistically.
The people who are often forgotten are my people. Rural Southerners who were here since the 17th century who built Southern cuisine not from scraps but from skills, wisdom and love despite their traumas and hardships.
That love is always the secret ingredient.
Q: How have immigrants shaped traditional “Southern” food?
A: Southern food is an immigrant food story from start to present. Indigenous people migrated into different corners of the Southeast, brought new crops, pushed into new ecosystems, created new forms of cookery as non-natives moved in or through trade with other native peoples. Africans came from at least 80 different ethnic groups or more from a 3,500-mile coast. Europeans certainly brought distinct traditions from across Western Europe with hyper-regional distinctions.
Asian Southerners’ history goes back 300 years. Southerners with origins in Latin America have been here since the start. So, you have Muslims from Africa too. For the majority of Southern history, you have immigrant populations very quickly I might mention, bringing together disparate elements that ultimately connected to one another. Rice traditions bonded, tamales mixed cultures in the Delta, and newcomers created collard green empanadas and adobo became a staple in many Southern kitchens.
Q: What was the most powerful thing you learned while working on this book?
A: That Southern is more flexible than people think. The 20th century saw key lime pie, pimento cheese and other foods sneak in, then get claimed as emblematic of the South. Use, meaning, action are more important to Southerness than place. The South is more verb than noun or adjective that we have recognized.
Q: What does the “Modern South” mean to you?
A: The modern South acknowledges its past, its roots, confronts its troubles, but builds on the richness of what the South has to offer. It’s a place of equity, empathy, and mutual respect.
Q: What’s next for you?
A: More books. I have so much to write and get out into the world. The South is thousands of years old, so I have a story to tell.
To learn more about Southern food history and traditions, click here.
