Lee, who loved his black cook's fried chicken, once said that all he wanted was 'a Virginia farm - no end of cream and fresh butter - and fried chicken.

'Our influence across the South,' he writes, 'conquered more territory than any Confederate army ever managed.'Ī ringing statement, for which unwitting support can be found from no less than the beau ideal of the Confederacy.

Twitty's prose movingly captures this momentous and profoundly personal moment and provides a glimpse of the scope and tone of his deeply researched, sometimes rambling, but altogether fascinating book that braids personal memoir, genealogy and culinary excavation to tell the story of a whole people through the lineage of their food. Their slaveholder, Blake Mitchell, immediately declared them free - even as they still held his horse in place, waiting for whatever was to come next.' 'At that moment, as the Confederacy's 150-year mourning period began,' writes Twitty in his new book, The Cooking Gene, 'my great-great grandfather and his brother counted themselves among the first black people to find out that the long nightmare of American slavery - nearly three centuries in the making - was over. He was one of the first slaves to know that the war was over. Lee emerge from McLean House in Appomattox, Va., after surrendering to General Ulysses S. When he was 15, Elijah Mitchell, Twitty's great-great-grandfather, saw General Robert E.

Katherine by anya seton 1954