Thug Kitchen: You eat vegetables with that mouth?

The aftermath was profound: The Tumblr blog had so many hits, its Google Analytics crashed. Saveur magazine gave Thug Kitchen its award for the best new food blog. It accrued millions of loyal readers and a book deal from Rodale.

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, Davis and 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. Davis and 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, Davis and 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.

“Where I grew up,” said 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, 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.'”

The language, they say, is about poking fun at the preciousness of veganism and claiming it for folks like themselves, which is to say people on a budget.

The controversy did spark productive debate. Today, when high school students are learning what it means to check their privilege, there’s a heightened awareness of the consequences, as author Alice Randall said recently, “of shopping the tropes of African-American aesthetics,” even if the shoppers don’t realize that’s what they’re doing.

And there was as much support for Davis and Holloway as there was criticism, although the criticism did become ugly. Davis and Holloway said they received death and rape threats, and a few West Coast bookstores canceled readings for the book.

Meanwhile, it shot to No. 1 on The New York Times best-seller list until Marie Kondo, the Japanese decluttering guru, knocked it from the top spot, but the book remained on the list for 48 weeks. To date, more than a half-million copies are in print, and it’s still one of Amazon’s 100 top-selling books (as of last week, it was selling more briskly than Harper Lee’s “Go Set a Watchman”).

“That’s the crazier story,” Holloway said. “That a vegan cookbook that swears all the time is a best-seller.”

On a recent Saturday, he and Davis were putting the finishing touches on their version of a Vietnamese sandwich, one of the recipes in their new book, “Thug Kitchen Party Grub: For Social Mother [expletive],” out this week from Rodale, while Phoenix, Holloway’s 11-year-old rescue dog, barked at squirrels through a window.

Davis and Holloway are hoping that lightning will strike twice, or at the very least, that they can continue to support themselves. “I just feel really lucky that I have a job where I can hang out with my dog all day,” Holloway said.

Like book No. 1, the “Party Grub” recipes are couched in language that defangs the cooking process. To make that Vietnamese sandwich, Roasted Cauliflower and Mushroom Banh Mi (Page 164), the authors write, “you’ll need about 1 small cauliflower. And florets are just little-ass trees,” while advising readers not to freak out. (It was quite tasty, if a bit heavy on the jalapeños.)

Thug Kitchen remains a handmade affair, despite its Rodale imprimatur. Holloway still takes all the photographs although he’s graduated to a tripod and better props. Phoenix is a regular model, as are their friends. (That’s Holloway on Page 134 of “Party Grub,” a terrifying plume of fire shooting from his mouth, a trick using Everclear that a buddy taught him.)

Davis and Holloway have rented half of a tiny, 1920s two-family house in a bland neighborhood sometimes called Mid City to use as their studio and office. The house next door is being torn down, so the rent is low. This work space, along with two new laptops and health insurance, are the most significant byproducts of Thug Kitchen’s success. “I still have my 16-year-old Honda Civic,” Davis said. “Actually, we both have Civics.”

They were once a couple until the stress of putting out a weekly blog and making a cookbook unraveled their relationship.

For a year and a half, they’ve been selling Thug Kitchen merchandise, too, like oversize coffee mugs, T-shirts and bags emblazoned with profane encouragements. Last spring, when they added to the line, they received 1,000 orders in 36 hours.

“We work all the time,” Holloway said. “There was only one thing to step back from, and that was the relationship.” They are still intimately entwined, however (and tend to finish each other’s sentences), and there’s no room for other relationships, they said. “When people say, hey, I’d like to start a blog with my boyfriend,” Davis said, “we say, ‘Don’t do it!'”

Davis, who grew up in the Bay Area in a family of meat eaters, has been a vegetarian since she was a teenager and a vegan since she was 18. “My family was hardly chill with that,” she said. “That’s how I learned to cook. I started with Pasta Roni, and I’d add broccoli to it.”

Like so many vegans, she drew from the Moosewood Cookbook, that hippie-era primer, and then turned to “Vegan With a Vengeance,” out in 2005, by Isa Chandra Moskowitz, creator of the Post Punk Kitchen, a community-access cable show and message board that was the new millennium’s answer to Moosewood. When they met, Holloway was drinking a lot of Red Bull and taking Zantac every day for his heartburn. When they moved in together and he began to eat Davis’ meals, his digestive problems cleared up.

Thug Kitchen inhabits a middle ground between the punk and post-punk vegans and the more glamorous vegan culture that’s sprouting on both coasts. If they have a philosophy, it’s that veganism shouldn’t be precious, difficult or expensive.

It’s a message that resonates with Thug Kitchen’s very passionate readers, who are in touch on Facebook and through emails. A truck driver wrote he takes their food with him on the road; a woman said that her husband is now cooking with her because TK’s prose makes him laugh.

A young woman in the Midwest with an eating disorder credits the blog with saving her life, while a lawyer from Australia hopes to better the health of her family. She wrote from her father’s bedside in a stroke ward in New Zealand, asking, in very salty language, for a signed copy of the book to give to her brother, who has high blood pressure.

“I have realistic goals for people,” Davis said. “Eat a bell pepper. You had two plant-based meals this week? That’s a win for me. For some reason, that’s not glamorous enough, or it’s too practical for people to get excited about. They want to have marigold dust or something.”

A little history: Before Bill Clinton and his post heart attack vegan diet, before Moby and Steve Wynn and Alicia Silverstone and celebrity-stuffed restaurants like Crossroads Kitchen in Los Angeles turned veganism into a more attractive dietary choice that would play well to even omnivores, veganism (cue the bulgur) had long been fuel for the counterculture.

That would be hippies back in the day, after which ‘80s-era straight-edge punks took it on (straight edge means no drugs, no alcohol) as part of an ethical stance against industrialized everything and part of a philosophy that included animal rights.

Today, veganism is a big and sometimes fractious tent, and tussles emerge about whose veganism is more authentic.

Bryant Terry is a food activist and vegan cookbook author (his most recent book: “Afro Vegan: Farm Fresh African, Caribbean, and Southern Flavors, Remixed”). He presented perhaps the most sophisticated criticism of TK’s shtick (and it does read as shtick, whether it makes you laugh or irritates you).

Last year, Terry wrote an article for CNN saying that, to his ear, the language of Thug Kitchen seemed specifically derived from African-American vernacular and hip-hop, not the writing room of “The Sopranos,” and that the humor embedded in Thug Kitchen was therefore predicated on the idea that a tough urban black man was preparing healthy, vegan meals — a conceit, he said, that promoted a negative stereotype of African-American eating habits.

That’s a stereotype he and others are working hard to debunk. “Whether or not the hipsters and health nuts charmed by Thug Kitchen realize this,” Terry wrote, “vegetarian, vegan and plant-strong culture in the black experience predates pernicious thug stereotypes.”

Like Terry, Alice Randall (the author most recently of “Soul Food Love,” a family history in recipes written with her daughter, Caroline Randall Williams) has been highlighting the vegetarian legacy of African-Americans.

Randall has just finished a book tour that included cooking from the community gardens of black churches and spoke of her own research into the vegetarianism of 19th-century black Seventh Day Adventists and Harlem Renaissance figures. “Thug Kitchen is a problem,” she said, “because it drowns out and distracts from authentic black voices who are speaking to communities they love with the wisdom of shared experience. I’ll critique it with an old school hip-hop phrase: perpetuating the fraud. It’s the idea of appearing to be something you’re not.”

The back story to this conversation, said Michael Jeffries, an associate professor of American studies at Wellesley College and the author of “Thug Life: Race, Gender and the Meaning of Hip-Hop,” is that “two young white folks playing around with black styles and black vernacular for the sake of humor can stop that performance whenever they wish, but for someone who is labeled a thug by the state or by elected officials because of his or her racial or ethnic background, the power to stop that performance doesn’t exist.”

Davis and Holloway will tell you — patiently, doggedly — that Thug Kitchen is not a performance. They have worked hard at it, and they are proud of it, proud of the difference they’ve made in their readers’ kitchens, proud that they’ve sent people into their kitchens in the first place. They are their own best advertisement.

“The best thing we could do was go out on the road and tell people who we are, and where we came from,” Holloway said. They are prepared to do so again.

As for the Internet scrum, he added: “I think it came from wanting to engage in conversation. But with many things on the Internet, it just turned toxic very quickly. It just gets away from people.”

But according to Holloway, “We’re not going to tell you how to feel. We’re just trying to get people to eat some damn vegetables.”

It would appear they are succeeding. On the day of its release last week, “Thug Kitchen Party Grub” was already an Amazon best-seller, No. 23 in all book sales.