During slavery, besides the "leftover" meat cuts, slaves on American plantations only had vegetables they could grown for themselves in small gardens. After emancipation, most newly free African Americans, being poor, could only afford “off-cuts” of meat, along with offal. Farming, hunting and fishing provided fresh vegetables, fish and wild game, such as possum, rabbit, squirrel and sometimes waterfowl. The intersectionality of African food preparations preserved by being passed on from generation to generation, Jim Crow laws that prevented equal access, and an innate innovative survival culture, all shaped the development of soul food. Africans living in America at the time (and since) more than made do with the food choices they had to work with.
When enslaved people reached North America (5% of Africans who were enslaved in the transatlantic trade were sent to non-Caribbean North America), rations were often used as a powerful form of control on many plantations. By supervising food, slave-owners could regularly establish their authority over enslaved people, while also attempting to prove their “generosity” toward their slaves. Slaves’ diets were frequently a primary point of debate between abolitionists and slaveholders, with pro-slavery supporters using rations to “prove” the good quality of life African Americans had under slavery. James Madison defended slavery by arguing that slaves have better diets than the lower classes in Europe:
“They are better fed, better clad, better lodged, and better treated in every respect…With respect to the great article of food particularly it is a common remark among those who have visited Europe, that it [slave diet] includes a much greater proportion of the animal ingredient, than is attainable by the free labourers even in that quarter of the Globe.” ((“From James Madison to Robert Walsh Jr., 2 March 1819,” Founders Online, National Archives (http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/04-01-02-0378, ver. 2014-05-09). Source: The Papers of James Madison, Retirement Series, vol. 1, 4 March 1817 – 31 January 1820, ed. David B. Mattern, J. C. A. Stagg, Mary Parke Johnson, and Anne Mandeville Colony. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009, pp. 427–432.))
The labor on plantations was excruciating. Slaves had to tend to their gardening or other food procurement on their own time at night, after working on the plantation for a full day. Though slave-owners demanded these skills be used first and foremost on the plantation fields, slaves also cared for their own personal gardens and pass down practices and preferences to their families. Gardening gave slaves an avenue to make their own choices about their diets.
Coming from diverse regions and communities, Africans adapted their cultures to the influences, resources and severe restrictions they experienced in slavery. Though rations took away the power of choice, slaves could supplement their meals by hunting, fishing and gardening. By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, West African agriculture had already incorporated many of the same crops as the South, such as rice. ((Robert L. Hall, “Africa and the American South: Culinary Connections,” Southern Quarterly 44.2(2007), 20-21.))
One fact many people find surprising is that rice (a staple of many soul food dishes) is not indigenous to the Americas. In fact, many crops that are key ingredients in soul food cooking were nowhere to be found in the Western Hemisphere prior to the slave trade.
During the Middle Passage, slave traders intentionally took several crops native to Africa and made limited portions of these foods available on the slave ships in order to keep the enslaved alive. Once in the Americas, the enslaved Africans grew these crops on the plantations as food sources that would keep their energy up during the long days of hard labor.
The transport of the African variety of rice in particular through the slave trade arguably set the foundation for the most notable southern American culinary traditions. Since rice is a staple in many African dishes, enslaved Africans adapted their cooking in the Americas with the food items that were most accessible, creating some of the most renowned soul food staples.
Today, we can still see clear similarities between one-pot rice recipes like jambalaya, and Jollof, a wildly popular traditional dish in many West African countries. Other dishes, like Hoppin’ John, bear resemblance to Ghana’s waakye, and Senegal’s thiebou niebe.
Whether it’s stewed, fried or baked, okra has grown to become a cornerstone of southern American cooking despite its African roots. The slimy green vegetable has a deep history, likely originating from Ethiopia. Over the centuries the vegetable made its way through the Middle East, North Africa, and even South Asia. It wasn’t until the 18th century when Okra made its way to the Americas through the slave ships. Historically, okra has been used as a soup thickener, a coffee substitute, and even as a material for rope.
Okra is still used today in a variety of African soups, stews, and rice dishes, and the recipes vary widely from country to country. While it is usually served fried in the Deep South, many are most familiar with okra as an ingredient in gumbo, a rich and savory stew usually consisting of some sort of meat or seafood, vegetables, and served with rice. Strangely enough, the word “gumbo” is derived from “ki ngombo”, the Bantu word for Okra.
Dishes or ingredients commonly found in soul food include:
- Biscuits (a shortbread similar to scones, commonly served with butter, jam, jelly, sorghum or cane syrup, or gravy; used to wipe up, or "sop," liquids from a dish).
- Black-eyed peas (cooked separately or with rice, as hoppin' john).
- Butter beans (immature lima beans, usually cooked in butter).
- Catfish (dredged in seasoned cornbread and fried). Chicken (often fried with cornmeal breading or seasoned flour).
- Chicken livers.
- Chitterlings or chitlins: (the cleaned and prepared intestines of hogs, slow-cooked and often eaten with vinegar and hot sauce; sometimes parboiled, then battered and fried).
- Chow-chow (a spicy, homemade pickle relish sometimes made with okra, corn, cabbage, green tomatoes and other vegetables; commonly used to top black-eyed peas and otherwise as a condiment and side dish).
- Collard greens (usually cooked with ham hocks, often combined with other greens).
- Cornbread (short bread often baked in an iron skillet, sometimes seasoned with bacon fat). Chicken fried steak (beef deep fried in flour or batter, usually served with gravy).
- Cracklins: (commonly known as pork rinds and sometimes added to cornbread batter).
- Fatback (fatty, cured, salted pork used to season meats and vegetables).
- Fried fish: (any of several varieties of fish whiting, catfish, porgies, bluegills dredged in seasoned cornmeal and deep fried).
- Fried ice cream: (Ice cream deep frozen and coated with cookies and fried).
- Grits, often served with fish.
- Ham hocks (smoked, used to flavor vegetables and legumes).
- Hog maws (or hog jowls, sliced and usually cooked with chitterlings).
- Hoghead cheese.
- Hot sauce (a condiment of cayenne peppers, vinegar, salt, garlic and other spices often used on chitterlings, fried chicken and fish not the same as "Tabasco sauce", which has heat, but little flavor).
- Lima beans (see butter beans).
- Macaroni and cheese.
- Mashed potatoes (usually with butter and condensed milk). Meatloaf (typically with brown gravy).
- Milk and bread (a "po' folks' dessert-in-a-glass" of slightly crumbled cornbread, buttermilk and sugar). Mustard greens (usually cooked with ham hocks, often combined with other greens).
- Neckbones (beef neck bones seasoned and slow cooked). Okra: (African vegetable eaten fried in cornmeal or stewed, often with tomatoes, corn, onions and hot peppers).
- Pigs' feet: (slow-cooked like chitterlings, sometimes pickled and, like chitterlings, often eaten with vinegar and hot sauce).
- Red beans.
- Ribs (usually pork, but can also be beef ribs).
- Rice (usually served with red beans).
- Sorghum syrup (from sorghum, or "Guinea corn," a sweet grain indigenous to Africa introduced into the U.S. by African slaves in the early 17th century; see biscuits). Succotash (originally, a Native American dish of yellow corn and butter beans, usually cooked in butter).
- Sweet potatoes (often parboiled, sliced and then baked, using sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg and butter or margarine, commonly called "candied yams"; also boiled, then pureed and baked into pies).
- Turnip greens (usually cooked with ham hocks, often combined with other greens).
- Yams: (not actually yams, but sweet potatoes).
Though soul food originated in the South, soul food restaurants — from fried chicken and fish "shacks" to upscale dining establishments-are in every African-American community in the nation, especially in cities with large black populations, such as Chicago, New York, New Orleans, Los Angeles and Washington, DC.
Over centuries, soul food has been cooked and seasoned with pork products, and fried dishes are usually cooked with hydrogenated vegetable oil ("shortening" or "Crisco"), which is a trans fat. Unfortunately, regular consumption of these ingredients without significant exercise or activity to work the calories off often contributes to disproportionately high occurrences of obesity, hypertension, cardiac/circulatory problems and/or diabetes. It has also been a factor in African-Americans often having a shortened lifespan. More modern methods of cooking soul food include using more healthful alternatives for frying (liquid vegetable oil or canola oil) and cooking/stewing using smoked turkey instead of pork.
Mention "soul food" and you will hear scores of health and medical professionals claim that it is the downfall of the health and well-being of African Americans. It is true that African Americans have some of the highest rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and some cancers of any group in this country. But soul food should stop being help as the victim and being held partially responsible for this. The majority of people imagine the traditional soul food diet as unsophisticated and unhealthy fare comprised of high-calorie, low-nutrient dishes replete with, salt, sugar, and bad fats. Rather than vilifying traditional soul food, let's focus on the real culprit, what I like to call instant soul food.
In reality, soul food is good for you. In order to understand why, you have to understand grits. As seen with instant grits, mass production and distribution has diminished the product's superb quality and has obscured the distinctive characteristics that make down-home hominy so darn desirable in the first place. The taste of instant grits boxed up in a factory can never compare to the complex nutty flavor of grits stone-ground in a Mississippi mill (which I experience courtesy of my sister’s husband). So it's understandable that those who have only had that watered-down stuff scoff at the mention of grits.
Similar to instant grits, instant soul food is a dishonest representation of African American cuisine. To be clear, when I refer to instant soul food, I'm not just describing the processing, packaging, and mass marketing of African American cuisine in the late 1980s. I'm also alluding to the oversimplified version of the cuisine that was constructed in the popular imagination in the late 1960s.
The term "soul food" first emerged during the black (power) liberation movement as African Americans named and reclaimed their diverse traditional foods. Clearly, the term was meant to celebrate and distinguish African American cooking from general Southern cooking, and not ghettoize it. But in the late 1960s, soul food was "discovered" by the popular media and constructed as the newest exotic cuisine for adventurous white consumers to devour. Rather than portray the complexity of this cuisine and its changes throughout the late 19th and 20th century, many writers played up its more exotic aspects (e.g., animal entrails) and simply framed the cuisine as a remnant of poverty-driven antebellum survival food.
But like any traditional food developed to feed hard working people performing manual labor, there are a number of sources redeveloping soul food to be more healthy for modern more sedentary lifestyles. Soul Food Makeover, BlackDoctor.org, and SoulFoodandSouthernCooking all shows ways to cook traditional recipes in a more healthy fashion. Although soul food derives much of its appeal from fats like butter, lard, bacon and cream. many modern recipes simply substitute low- and non-fat ingredients, as in Bananas Foster, in which butter and ice cream are replaced by reduced-fat margarine and fat-free, sugar-free rum ice cream, for a total fat content of just three grams. The butter used to create a traditional roux for gumbo gets replaced by canola oil and okra, and smoked turkey takes the place of bacon in collard greens.
Soul food is an important contribution made by African-Americans to the American cuisine. Nothing says celebration like food, and few foods are as welcoming as soul food. Enjoy the long weekend and happy Friday.
Harris and Walz paid a visit to Liberty County High School in Hinesville, listening to the marching band perform its school fight song and delivering brief remarks to students and faculty on the first day of their Georgia swing, which will culminate in a rally in Savannah on Thursday night.
“We’re so proud of you and we’re counting on you,” Harris told the students, some shrieking with excitement at the sight of the vice president. “Your generation … is what is going to propel our country into the next era of what we can do and what we can be.”
Harris told the students that she, too, played in the band — an aide said the vice president had played the French horn, xylophone and kettle drums.
Among all voters in 13 key states, the voter registration rate for Black women is up more than 175% compared to the same period in 2020, data firm Target Smart found in its analysis. That’s nearly triple what it was four years ago.
