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… I was engrossed in one book for the past week...and it was based on a recommendation in the comment section of last week’s WAYR installment.
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
I am reading:
The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South by Michael W. Twitty- I downloaded this based on Ellid’s recommendation in last week’s comment section...and the book is everything that she says it is...I do have one caveat to add.
Only a really good writer and, I suspect, a really good editor could pull off Twitty’s blend of antebellum cooking (complete with Dutch ovens), black history, and geneology without sounding too overly (and very uncomfortably) sentimental.
I also recommend eating this on a full stomach...because this is some serious literary food porn!
I enjoyed learning a lot more about Sally Hemings’s brother, James Hemings...for the macaroni and cheese thing alone he should be considered the father of American cooking...also...I never had exactly the black-eyed pea hummus that Twitty has a recipe for in the book...but my cousin does make a black-eyed pea dip that’s pretty close to that dish...and it is delicious (and I’m not that big of a fan of black-eyed peas!)
She could not simply forget the fears and indignities visied on her and her kin, and the mean and cruel people that did them. My grandmother, nevertheless owned being Southern on her own terms, and like so many black grandmothers from beneath the Mason-Dixon line saw it as her personal respinsibility to produce in me a true “Southern gentleman.”
Selected Poems by e.e. cummings (edited by Richard S. Kennedy)
Nova by Samuel Delany