The six of us have given our undivided attention to Auntie Mabel, owner of the eponymous Mabel’s Chop Bar in Ho, Ghana. Here the kitchen is an outdoor building, a complex of covered shelters where peeling, washing, and butchering happen. Large cast-iron pots sit atop fires built on three stones. The chop bar is a place where you eat whatever is made from day to day, and today Mabel’s table is laden with ginger, garlic, suya spices (a West African version of garam masala), crushed Maggi cubes, tomatoes, and shitor, a hot pepper sauce made from bird’s eye chiles and powdered crayfish, tenderly simmered and stirred until it achieves the consistency of gravy-meets-preserves.

As she prepares stock for the meat (more on that in a moment), Auntie Mabel looks every bit the African American or Afro-Caribbean grandma we know from home, right down to tasting the resultant sauce off the back of her left hand. We are in the country of the Ewe people in eastern Ghana, and Mabel’s courtyard is very still with the end-of-season dry heat, nearly 100 degrees. The covered space we sit in is a welcome shelter, and the whole scene, right down to the corrugated iron, reminds me of my first trips to the Deep South.

From left, chefs Kenyatta Ashford, Josmine Evans, Kezia Curtis, and Harold Caldwell outside of Mabel’s Chop Bar. Photo courtesty of Michael W. Twitty

Auntie Mabel does not have time for our smartphone photos. She works with absolute disregard for our purpose, worrying instead about getting us fed before the afternoon rush. We are African American chefs who have come to Ghana to learn about the cooking of our ancestors. Our leader is fellow culinarian Ada Anagho Brown, the president of Roots to Glory Tours, a group specifically charged with bringing African Americans linked by DNA to their ancestral homelands. Four of us have never set foot in Africa, and I have never been to Ghana. Of those who have tested to get a sense of our genetic roots, all of us trace back to this country. For me, it’s a staggering 32 percent of my DNA.

I am an African American, gay, Jewish culinary historian whose life has been shaped by a search for my roots and an exploration of the ways food shapes identity. Food has played a deep and active role in empowering my people to overcome oppression, and how we do so is our greatest form of cultural capital. For most African Americans, slavery forcibly cut our immediate ties to the motherland. Needing to know more about our roots has become one of the central issues in our identity. That’s why we’re here in Ghana. We need to know that this is really home.