The recipes have African, Native American, and European roots as the author integrates his Jewish faith into African-American cooking. The Cooking Gene includes personal narratives, history, recipes, and folk songs.

The Cooking Gene is about the influence that the enslavement of Africans by European settlers has had on foodways and history of the Old South. Twitty adds discussions surrounding Soul Food, African American foodways, and Southern Cuisine. In the book, topics such as genealogy, chattel slavery, sexuality, gender, and spirituality are discussed in addition to foodways. The book takes a look at the social ecology surrounding the cuisine traditionally done by African Americans in the southern US. Twitty is a Jew by choice and notes within The Cooking Gene that the documentation and history found within Jewish cuisine inspired him to write it. The book was the recipient of the 2018 James Beard Foundation Book Award for Writing and Book of the Year. The author combines intensive genealogical and historical research as well as personal accounts to support the argument that the origin of southern cuisine is heavily based in the continent of Africa. It was published in 2017 and is a food memoir. The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South is an American non-fiction book written by Michael W. Twitty The Cooking Gene: A Journey through African American Culinary History in the Old South

The cooking gene twitty