Then things became complicated. When “Thug Kitchen: Eat Like You Give a [expletive]” was published last September, an article about its creators, with their photographs, appeared on Epicurious, Condé Nast’s food site. Until that moment, Ms. Davis and Mr. Holloway had been anonymous. Unlike other blogs, there was no “About Me” section. Interviews with The Washington Post and Saveur had been conducted by email.

This reveal, as it were, created another sort of Internet frenzy. Ms. Davis and Mr. Holloway, who are white, were accused of cultural blackface. To some, the expletive-laden vernacular of Thug Kitchen sounded like language that might be deployed, as one reader noted, by “some white dude and his girl who played Wu Tang Clan ad nauseam” — or maybe your average American college student, white or black, eager to use the F-word as a modifier as often as possible. But others thought the slang was pointedly urban and African-American, and its use a cynical appropriation.

More problematic, critics said, was the “thug” title, which in this millennium is a loaded word that’s both an emblem of black power, thanks to the late rapper Tupac Shakur, as well as code for a racial slur.

Stung and blindsided by the furor that erupted online, in the comments sections of articles in The Root, Vice and blogs like Afroculinaria and their own social media pages, Ms. Davis and Mr. Holloway said that Thug Kitchen’s voice is an amped-up version of the way they speak — around friends, and maybe after a couple of drinks — not a calculated attempt to be anything except themselves.

Image “Party Grub,” the latest book.

“Where I grew up,” said Mr. Holloway, who is from Texas and the son of a city worker, “thug was a bad mother who looked out for No. 1.” In creating the blog, Ms. Davis added, the word was “shorthand for: ‘We’re not going to apologize for eating healthy. We’re not going to serve you shots of wheat grass.’ ”