One of my photographs from this week is of a menu card headed “Tonight’s Bites.” The menu card listed black-eyed pea hummus with soul seasoning spiced crackers, yam biscuits, yam latkes, yassa kneidlach (matzo balls), and West African spiced brisket with Koshersoul collards and jollof rice. Read that list slowly and you can hear two histories talking to each other across the same table. I’m Harry Hayman, and I spent the evening at Drexel University’s Philly Chef Conference listening to culinary historian Michael W. Twitty talk with Alison Kessler. GOOD LORD, what an evening. I have spent a good portion of my life in restaurants and hospitality, and more recently in food systems work here in Philadelphia, and I keep coming back to how much history is sitting on the plate in front of us. Who grew the food? Who cooked it? Where did the recipes come from, and whose contributions have we conveniently forgotten along the way? I came home with a lot to chew on. Let me tell you what I can, and then what I looked up afterward so I could say something more useful than “wow.”

The Evening at Drexel

Drexel’s Philly Chef Conference page says the conference is run by the university’s Food and Hospitality Management department, with a mission to engage students with industry leaders and connect members of the restaurant community through a day of education. For the 2026 to 2027 season it lists a monthly events series, and one of those entries is a Koshersoul evening with Michael Twitty, moderated by Alison Kessler, with a signed copy of the book included in the ticket price. I am going to leave the date and room to Drexel’s own page, because I only want to say what I saw and heard myself.

Twitty is no stranger to this conference. Drexel’s own 2018 news item noted he was scheduled to speak at the Philly Chef Conference that February about The Cooking Gene. So some of Philadelphia’s food community has been learning from him for years, and I am a little late to the party.

I did not record the conversation, so I won’t put words in anyone’s mouth. What I can tell you is that it covered an awful lot of ground, that Michael is a storyteller of the first order, and that I could have listened for another couple of hours. I kept finding that what we are trying to build in Philadelphia’s food economy is tied to the very things he was discussing.

The Students Cooked His Recipes

Here is the detail I can’t stop smiling about. The students from Drexel’s culinary program prepared their own interpretations of Mr. Twitty’s recipes, and they served them to the room. Think about what that is. A scholar spends years digging through records, kitchens and family trees, and then a roomful of young cooks takes that work and turns it into something you can eat. There is something pretty special about watching the next generation of culinary professionals engage with history and then bring it to life through food.

I want to thank Dr. Jonathan Deutsch, Professor Paul O’Neill, and the entire Culinary Arts & Food Science and Hospitality Management team for putting the program together. Drexel’s faculty directory lists Jonathan Deutsch as Professor and Director of the Drexel Food Lab, a lab that works on sustainability, health promotion and access, and Paul O’Neill as an Associate Clinical Professor of Hospitality Management. Deutsch is a friend, so I’ll admit I’m biased, but a program that hands a historian’s recipes to students and lets them cook is doing something I’d like to see more of.

And whoever came up with the Manischewitz spritzer, HOLY COW. That was all that. A Manischewitz spritzer in my hand and this menu in front of me. I would not have thought of that pairing on my own, which is exactly why I go to rooms like this.

What Twitty’s Books Actually Show

If you don’t know Michael W. Twitty, here is the short, sourced version. His book The Cooking Gene won two James Beard Foundation awards in 2018, Book of the Year and Writing. NPR’s coverage of the Book of the Year prize described it as a history of Southern cooking. The University of Washington’s alumni magazine says the book traces his African American ancestry through food, from Africa to America, and takes on the debates over where soul food, barbecue and Southern cooking come from. He has been writing about these questions for years on his site, Afroculinaria, which describes itself as exploring the culinary traditions of Africa, African America and the African diaspora.

His 2021 book Rice shows how much one grain can carry. According to UNC Press’s post on the launch of Rice, Twitty describes rice being grown and processed in West Africa for almost four millennia, often by women, before the transatlantic slave trade expanded. People who knew rice brought African rice varieties into the Black diaspora, and in the Americas Black cooks and chefs were central to the rice kitchen of the South. I have eaten rice in restaurants for decades. I had never once asked who taught the kitchen how to make it.

Then there is Koshersoul, published by HarperCollins in 2022 with the subtitle The Faith and Food Journey of an African American Jew. Its own site describes it as the meeting of African Atlantic and global Jewish diaspora cuisines, and it argues that Jews of Color are significant cultural creators in both Black and Jewish civilizations. Billy Penn covered his 2022 book signing at the Weitzman Museum of American Jewish History here in Philadelphia and reported that he wants food to help people understand their existence and build empathy for their neighbors.

Now go back to that menu card. In an interview with The Nosher, Twitty named matzah meal fried chicken, black-eyed pea hummus and turkey gumbo as examples of the link between African American soul food and American Judaism. He also noted that many Southern Jewish families had Black cooks prepare their Passover meals, stories that may never have been recorded. Black-eyed pea hummus was on the menu card. So were yam latkes and yassa kneidlach, matzo balls, right there on the same card. None of it was a gimmick. It was a menu making an argument with a fork.

That is what I mean by history on the plate. A dish like that tells you that two communities cooked, ate, argued and borrowed from each other long before anyone wrote it down, and that some of the cooks never got their names recorded at all.

Who Participates, Who Owns, Who Benefits

This is the part where I climb onto the soapbox, briefly. You can’t really talk about the future of food without understanding the people and communities who helped create its past. And you certainly can’t talk about economic opportunity without talking about who gets to participate in it, who owns what, and who actually benefits.

So here is the question I brought home. If the cook behind a great dish was historically uncredited, what does credit look like in Philadelphia’s food economy now? I don’t have the whole answer. I have a few starting points I’d like to test. When a conference, a restaurant or a school builds a menu from a living scholar’s recipes, the scholar and the cooks should be named, and paid for the work. When students graduate with a skill for interpreting a tradition, the city should help them find a path to owning something, not only working in it. And when we talk about the food economy, the people growing, cooking and serving should be at the same table as the people funding it. That evening, for a few hours, they were.

We’ve got an INCREDIBLE culinary community in this city: chefs, farmers, restaurateurs, students, entrepreneurs, educators. I’d love to see us do a better job connecting all of them and creating more opportunities to build something sustainable. That is a big part of what gets me out of bed in the morning these days, and it is why Feed Philly Coalition is the hashtag at the bottom of my post.

A Table by the Door

There was a table from Binding Agents, selling Twitty’s books. Binding Agents is the cookbook shop that opened in the Italian Market on Christian Street, and Inquirer readers will know it from the coverage of its opening. I like seeing a small, independent shop at an event like this. A book is a very cheap way to carry a whole kitchen’s history home.

I took a photo of the table, one of the students’ plates, and the menu card, and I keep going back to the card. It lists the bites, but not the people behind them. I wonder what it would look like if the next card in this city did.

Michael W. Twitty at Drexel's Philly Chef Conference

The Evening at Drexel

The Students Cooked His Recipes

What Twitty’s Books Actually Show

Why the Menu Card Made Sense

Who Participates, Who Owns, Who Benefits

A Table by the Door

Sources and references