In WAYR?, I note what I’m reading and comment...you note what you are reading and comment. Occasionally, I may add a section or a link related to books…
Permanent Reading List:
The Complete Essays by Michel de Montaigne- II.12- An apology for Raymond Sebond.
The Return of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle -The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter
I am finished reading:
The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South by Michael W. Twitty- The last sections of this book were paiinful as Twitty takes you through a tour of the slave auction block and closes with the attempted erasure of African Americans from American culinary history and the search of a “great white hope” that will bring African cooking into the mainstream. Thanks to Ellid for suggesting this, the finest book that I have read this year, to date.
One question that I did have...the advertisements for slave cooks and how they were saying that a “fellow” or a “wench” was trained in the French way of cooking or some nonsense like that. Which led me to wonder: how were all these slaves trained in the French way of cooking?…sure, there were some Formally trained slave cooks (James Hemings and George Washington’s Mount Vernon cook Hercules being two of them) but how many plantation cooks had formal training like that?
This Smithsonian article helped to answer a little bit of that question.
I am reading:
Nova by Samuel Delany