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Soul food
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Soul food is an American cuisine, a selection of foods, and is the traditional cuisine of African-Americans of the Southern United States and of black communities beyond. In the mid-1960s, "soul" was a common adjective used to describe black culture (for example, soul music), and thus the name "soul food" was derived.
term soul food became popular in the 1960s, when the word soul became used in connection with African American culture.
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Encyclopedia
Soul food is an American cuisine, a selection of foods, and is the traditional cuisine of African-Americans of the Southern United States and of black communities beyond. In the mid-1960s, "soul" was a common adjective used to describe black culture (for example, soul music), and thus the name "soul food" was derived.
Origins
The term soul food became popular in the 1960s, when the word soul became used in connection with African American culture. The origins of soul food, however, are much older and can be traced back to Africa. Rice; sorghum, known by Europeans as "guinea corn"; okra; and peanuts -- all common elements in West African cuisine -- were introduced to the Americas as a result of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and became dietary staples among enslaved Africans. They also comprise an important part of American southern cooking. Many culinary historians believe that in the beginning of the 14th century, around the time of early African exploration, European explorers brought their own food supplies and introduced them into the African diet. Foods such as turnips from Morocco and cabbage from Spain would play an important part in the history of African American cuisine.
When the European slave trade began in the early 1400s, the diet of newly enslaved Africans changed on the long journeys from their homeland. It was during this time that some of the indigenous crops of Africa began showing up in the Americas.
Slave owners fed their chattel as cheaply as possible, often with throwaway foods from the plantation, forcing slaves to make do with the ingredients at hand. In slave households, vegetables were the tops of turnips and beets and dandelions. Soon, slaves were cooking with new types of greens: collards, kale, cress, mustard, and pokeweed. They also developed recipes which used lard; cornmeal; and offal, discarded cuts of meat such as pigs' feet, oxtail, ham hocks, chitterlings (pig small intestines), pig ears, hog jowls, tripe and skin. Cooks added onions, garlic, thyme, and bay leaf to enhance the flavors. Some slaves supplemented their meager diets by maintaining small plots made available to them to grow their own vegetables, and many engaged in subsistance fishing and hunting, which yielded wild game for the table. Foods such as such as raccoon, squirrel, opossum, turtle, and rabbit were, until the 1950s, very common fare among the still predominantly rural and southern African American population.
There was little waste in the traditional African American kitchen. Leftover fish became croquettes (by adding an egg, cornmeal or flour, seasonings which were breaded and deep-fried). Stale bread became bread pudding, and each part of the pig had its own special dish. Even the liquid from cooked greens, called potlikker, was consumed as a type of gravy, or drink.
After long hours of labor, the evening meal was a time for families to get together, and the tradition of communal meals was the perfect environment for conversation and the reciting of oral history and storytelling. Another tradition was the potluck dinner, with each family member bringing a different dish to the dinner. When it was their families' turn for a visit by the preacher, it was also common practice for African-American women to hold up Sunday lunches or dinners until he arrived. If the minister frequently graced one's family table, then that conferred upon the family a degree of prestige in the eyes of the congregation. The tradition of extended family, friends and neighbors gathering at one woman's household at Christmas and Thanksgiving because of her status as a cook also began with the preacher's approval.
After slavery in the United States came to an end, many poor African Americans could afford only the least expensive cuts of meat and offal. Subsistence farming yielded fresh vegetables, and fishing and hunting provided fish and wild game, such as opossum, rabbit, squirrel, and sometimes waterfowl.
While soul food originated in the South, soul food restaurants have appeared all around the United States—from fried chicken and fish "shacks" to upscale dining establishments, especially in cities with large African American populations, such as Charleston, Boston, Atlanta, Chicago, Kansas City, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, Florida, Houston, Dallas, Detroit, New York, Baltimore, San Antonio (due to the large military population), Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Cleveland, New Orleans, Memphis, Los Angeles, Oakland, Miami, Birmingham, Sacramento, St. Louis, Washington, D.C, and Atlantic City.
The mother of Southern cooking
Impoverished whites and blacks in the South prepared many of the same dishes stemming from the soul tradition, but styles of preparation sometimes varied. Certain techniques popular in soul and southern cuisine like frying meat and using all parts of the animal for consumption, have a long history of which evidence occurs in ancient cultures all over the world, including Rome, Egypt and China. Whichever way it was introduced to the American South, fried meat became a common staple. To this day it is popular among Southerners of all races.
Many people in the south debate over what the difference is between soul food and Southern cooking. Before the 1870s, the south was made up of a predominately Anglo and black population. During the 1870s, Irish, German and Czech immigrants started to come into the south bringing their own traditions coupled with soul food. Such as the creation of southern fried chicken, which is of Scottish origin from Scots-Irish immigrants to the south. The African-americans contributed some of the spices and this became a southern fusion dish. Many dishes were made by both Blacks and Whites of the south. Many Whites grew eating many of the items that are classified as Soul food, because many of the dishes in Soul food are part of White southern food as well.
It is also important to note the Native American influence on soul cooking at a time when intermarriage between Blacks and Native Americans was relatively common. Indigenous peoples had been cultivating beans, strawberries, maize, and chili peppers; and for years, they prepared hominy (also the source of hominy grits), hotwater cornbread and strawberry bread, which Europeans appropriated as strawberry shortcake.
Cookbooks
Since it was illegal in many states for enslaved Africans to learn to read or write, soul food recipes and cooking techniques tended to be passed along orally, until after slavery. The first soul food cookbook is attributed to Abby Fisher, entitled What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking and published in 1881. Good Things to Eat was published in 1911; the author, Rufus Estes, was a former slave who worked for the Pullman railway car service. Many other cookbooks were written by African Americans during that time, but as they were not widely distributed; most are now lost.
Since the mid-20th century, many cookbooks highlighting soul food and African American foodways compiled by African Americans have been published and well received. Vertamae Grosvenor's Vibration Cooking, or the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl, originally published in 1970, focused on South Carolina "Lowcountry", Geechee, or Gullah, cooking. Its focus on spontaneity in the kitchen—cooking by "vibration" rather than precisely measuring ingredients, as well as "making do" with ingredients on hand—captured the essence of traditional African American cooking techniques. The simple, healthful, basic ingredients of lowcountry cuisine, like shrimp, oysters, crab, fresh produce, rice and sweet potatoes, made it a bestseller.
At the center of African American food celebrations is the value of sharing. Likewise, African American cookbooks often have a common theme of family and family gatherings. Usher boards and Women's Day committees of various religious congregations large and small, and even public service and social welfare organizations such as the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) have produced cookbooks to fund their operations and for charitable enterprises. The NCNW produced its first cookbook, The Historical Cookbook of the American Negro, in 1958, and revived the practice in 1993, producing a popular series of cookbooks featuring recipes by well-known and celebrity African Americans, among them: The Black Family Reunion Cookbook (1993), Celebrating Our Mothers' Kitchens: Treasured Memories and Tested Recipes (1994), and Mother Africa's Table: A Chronicle of Celebration (1998). The NCNW also recently reissued The Historical Cookbook.
Celebrated traditional Southern chef and author Edna Lewis wrote a series of books between 1972 and 2003, including A Taste of Country Cooking (Alfred A. Knopf, 1976) where she weaves stories of her childhood in Freetown, Virginia |
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