Rice: a Savor the South cookbook

Michael Twitty. 2021. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 9781469660240

Three great things come together in the lovely little cookbook: amazing author and cook Michael Twitty, rice, and UUNC (Go Tar Heels!).

UNC press is doing a series of short cookbooks on ingredients or dishes that make Southern cooking what it is. I have several of them, and I like every one that I have. Rice is a stand-out volume in the series.

During COVID I did a lot of cooking and a lot of research about cooking. As a transplant to the South, I did not have the family knowledge of the region’s cooking. I just knew I liked it all. So I read tons of food histories, exploring the origins and evolution of Southern cooking.

Michael’s amazing book, The Cooking Gene, was one of the first I read, and it opened my eyes to just how African Southern cooking is. Not surprising once you start to think about it, bit this book helped to show how so many of the tastes and techniques of Southern food come straight from the African cooks who did all of the cooking in the past.

This cookbook is a great addition to Michael’s repertoire, and he shares a ton of knowledge about rice — the staple of Southern food, and Southern wealth, in the first three centuries of colonizing the Americas. South Carolina’s wealthiest families built their fortunes on the backs of enslaved West Africans, sought after because of their mastery of rice farming and cooking. And that deep knowledge of how to make rice sing is in this book.

If you like rice, get this book and explore the many traditional Southern recipes for making rice. And get you some Carolina Gold rice to cook — you will understand how fortunes could rest on the humble grain once you have tasted this glorious heirloom variety.