Camp for Jews of color gets a visit from suddenly famous culinary star

Some people have an exact date or event when their lives were forever changed. Culinary historian Michael Twitty is one of those people.

Twitty, who lives in Rockville, Md., is an independent scholar studying the foodways of African American slaves in the South. He was a scholar-in-residence at a three-day Be’chol Lashon Family Camp — a retreat for Jews of color — held last month in Petaluma.

For years, Twitty, 36, who is a black convert to Judaism with some Jewish ancestry on his mother’s side, was working in relative obscurity as a scholar, supplementing his income by teaching Hebrew school.

Last year, a June 25 post on Afroculinaria.com, his personal blog, changed all that.

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Black historian of southern cooking brings side of Jewish identity to S.F.

One might not expect to find a chapter titled “Mishpocheh” in Michael Twitty’s memoir chronicling his “journey through African-American culinary history in the Old South.”

But then, Twitty is an unusual guy. Gay, black and a Modern Orthodox Jew, he is a chef, food blogger, culinary historian, Jewish educator and Colonial Williamsburg’s first Revolutionary-in-Residence.

And now he is the author of “The Cooking Gene,” which follows his very personal quest to “document the connection between food history and family history from Africa to America, from slavery to freedom.”

“Someone once called me a polyman,” Twitty said in a recent phone interview from his home in Silver Spring, Maryland. “I thought that [description] was very good.”

The creator of the food blog Afroculinaria — who goes by the Twitter handle @koshersoul — will be in San Francisco on Aug. 29 for an event with the Museum of the African Diaspora titled “Diaspora Dinner.” Twitty, who designed the dinner menu with MoAD chef-in-residence Bryant Terry, is the keynote speaker.

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