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Michael Twitty uses Southern cuisine as a window into the early slave culture from which he is descended. One of his primary sources, George Bagby, the “Mark Twain of Virginia”, lists a huge variety of vegetables and fruits grown in both the master’s and enslaved people’s gardens. Many of these plants migrated from Africa along with the enslaved, eventually becoming staples of Southern Cuisine. Sweet potatoes were particularly precious and were often hidden in underground pits by the enslaved. Enslaved cooks, including Michael Twitty’s great-great-great grandmother Evertine, mixed the Aftican cuisine with European with such skill that those slave holders began to prefer the new foods over traditional English and German cooking; foods that still define Southern culture today.
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