If cotton was the king of the antebellum South, rice was her queen for the three centuries of her engagement with slavery. With the revamp of Carolina Golden rice and other heirloom varieties and hybrids thereof, the narrative of rice in the South has been centred in the rebirth of one of its most important cash crops as a boutique ingredient.
M.W. Twitty, The cooking gene (2017), 241
Now you can get everything you want, but back them a gumbo meant something - it told you what time it was.
You don't just make a gumbo, you build one. I don't just throw everything in the pot at once after the roux - it's the stock I make and the order I put the crab or shrimp or chicken in. You know a good gumbo because it has layers. You can taste each level the chef has put into it. The rice is important too; each grain has to be separate.
Chef Henderson in Mobile, quoted in M.W. Twitty, The cooking gene (2017), 196
This is not a hobby. Look, for many white Americans, genealogy is a hobby, it gets them out of the house, gives them something to enjoy researching. With African American genealogy, it's more about social justice, regaining a heritage denied. Every African American living today is stolen African history embodied.
M.W. Twitty, The cooking gene (2017), 85
The American plantation wasn't the quaint village community that you saw depicted in your history textbook. It was a labor camp system for exiled prisoners of war and victims of kidnapping.
M.W. Twitty, The cooking gene (2017), 5
He follows this up with a hammer of a metaphor about his grandmother who left Alabama at the earliest opportunity she could: 'Once she left Alabama, she never went back to Alabama. The heart of Dixie was her Poland' (Ibid. 56)
