Soul food
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Soul food is an American cuisine, a selection of foods typically associated with African Americans of the Southern United States. In the mid-1960s, when the Civil Rights Movement was just beginning, "soul" was a common adjective used to describe African American culture, and thus the name "soul food" was derived.
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[edit] Origins
The term soul food became popular in the 1960s, when the word soul became used in connection with most things African American. The origins of soul food, however, are much older and can be traced back to Africa. 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 slave trading 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 surprisingly some of the indigenous crops of Africa began showing up in the slaves' new home in the Americas. Tall tales of seeds from watermelons, okras and sesame being transported in the slave's ears, hair or clothing could be true. Some traditional African foods became commercially raised crops in America.
As slaves, African Americans would "make do" with the ingredients at hand. The fresh vegetables found in Africa were replaced by the throwaway foods from the plantation house. Their vegetables were the tops of turnips and beets and dandelions. Soon they were cooking with new types of greens: collards, kale, cress, mustard and pokeweed. African American slaves also developed recipes which used discarded meat from the plantation, such as pig’s feet, beef tongue or tail, 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. Many African Americans depended on catching their own meat, and wild game such as raccoon, possum, turtle and rabbit was, until the 1950s, very popular fare on the African American table.
The slave diet began to evolve when slaves entered the plantation houses as cooks. Suddenly southern cooking took on new meaning. Fried chicken began to appear on the tables, sweet potatoes sat next to the boiled white potato. Regional foods like apples, peaches and berries, nuts and grains, soon became puddings and pies.
Nothing was ever wasted in the African American kitchen. Leftover fish became croquettes (by adding an egg, cornmeal or flour, seasonings and breaded then deep-fried). Stale bread became bread pudding, and each part of the pig had its own special dish. Even the liquid from the boiled vegetables was turned into "pot likker" which was used as a type of gravy or as a drink in and of itself.
Soon the slave's cuisine became knows as "good times" food. After long hours working in the fields or up at the house, the evening meal was a time for families to get together. The big pots became a meal for both body and soul. The tradition of communal living with shared meals was the perfect environment for conversation and the reciting of oral history and storytelling.
After slavery in the United States came to an end, many African Americans, being poor, 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 possum, rabbit, squirrel, and sometimes waterfowl.
While soul food originated in the South, soul food restaurants—from fried chicken and fish "shacks" to upscale dining establishments—exist in virtually every African American community in the USA, especially in cities with large African American populations, such as Charleston, Atlanta, Chicago, Indianapolis, Houston, Detroit, New York, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Miami, Baltimore, Sacramento, St. Louis and Washington, D.C.
Poor whites and blacks in the South ate many of the same dishes, but styles of preparation sometimes varied. African American soul food generally tends to be more intensely spiced than European American cuisine.
[edit] Cookbooks
Since it was illegal in many states for African slaves to learn to read or write, soul food recipes and cooking techniques tended to be passed along orally. 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 into her recipes for "real Southern food".
Another organization, the Chicago-based Real Men Charities, in existence since the 1980s, sponsors food-based charitable and educational programs and activities around the nation. As its primary annual, celebrity-studded fundraiser, Real Men Charities sponsors "Real Men Cook" events and programs in fifteen cities nationwide, where African American men gather to present their best recipes—some original, others handed down for generations—for charity. The event is timed to coincide roughly with Juneteenth and Father's Day and is promoted with the slogan "Every day is Family Day When Real Men Cook." In 2004, Real Men rolled out its Sweet Potato Pound Cake Mix in select food retail establishments in several cities, and published a cookbook in 2005 titled Real Men Cook: Rites, Rituals and Recipes for Living. Proceeds from these events and from the cookbook help fund the organization's varied operations and activities.
[edit] Soul food and health
Soul food was developed by African slaves who lived in difficult, impoverished conditions, of grinding physical labor and much more. It is humble, hearty fare, traditionally cooked and seasoned with pork products.Fried dishes were usually cooked with either lard or hydrogenated vegetable oil, which is high in trans fats. Some older cookbooks encouraged readers to add a stick of butter to their lard to give their fried chicken extra flavor.
Frequent consumption of these ingredients without significant exercise or activity can contribute to disproportionately high occurrences of obesity, hypertension, cardiac/circulatory problems and/or diabetes, often resulting in a shortened lifespan. Additionally, trans fat consumption is a known contributor to cardiovascular disease.
As a result, some African Americans use methods of cooking soul food different from those employed by their grandparents, including using more healthful alternatives for frying (liquid vegetable oil or canola oil) and cooking and stewing using smoked turkey instead of pork. Critics have argued that the attempt to make soul food healthier has the undesirable effect of robbing American blacks of their culture.[1]
Certain staples of a soul food diet have pronounced health benefits. Collard greens are known to be an excellent source of vitamins and minerals, including vitamin A, B6 and C; manganese; iron; omega 3 fatty acids; calcium; folic acid; and fiber. They also contain a number of phytonutrients which are thought to play a role in the prevention of ovarian and breast cancer.[2] Peas, rice and legumes are excellent, inexpensive sources of protein, with important vitamins, minerals and fiber. Sweet potatoes are an excellent source of beta carotene and trace minerals as well, and have come to be classified as an "anti-diabetic" food. Recent animal studies have shown that sweet potatoes can stabilize blood sugar levels and lower insulin resistance.[3]
[edit] Dishes and ingredients
Soul food uses a great variety of dishes and ingredients, some unique and some shared with other cuisines.
[edit] Meats
- Chicken gizzards, batter-fried
- Chicken livers, batter-fried
- Chitterlings ("chitlins") (the cleaned and prepared intestines of hogs, slow cooked and often eaten with vinegar and hot sauce; sometimes parboiled, then battered and fried)
- Country fried steak, also known as "chicken fried steak" (beef deep-fried with a crisp flour or batter coating, usually served with white 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 chicken (often fried with cornmeal breading or seasoned flour)
- Fried fish (any of several varieties of fish—especially catfish, but also whiting, porgies, bluegills—dredged in seasoned cornmeal and deep fried)
- Ham hocks (smoked, used to flavor vegetables and legumes)
- Hoghead cheese (made primarily from pig snouts, lips, and ears, and frequently referred to as "souse meat" or simply "souse")
- Hog maws (hog jowls, sliced and usually cooked with chitterlings)
- Meatloaf (typically with a brown gravy)
- Neckbones (beef neck bones seasoned and slow cooked)
- Oxtail soup (a soup or stew made from beef tails)
- Pigs feet (slow cooked like chitterlings, sometimes pickled and, like chitterlings, often eaten with vinegar and hot sauce)
- Ribs (usually pork, but can also be beef ribs)
- Shrimp
[edit] Vegetables
- Black-eyed peas (cooked separately, or with rice as Hoppin' John)
- Cabbage, usually boiled and seasoned with vinegar, salt and ham hocks or fatback. More recently, smoked poultry (turkey or chicken) is also used as a seasoning.
- Greens (usually cooked with ham hocks; especially collard greens, mustard greens, turnip greens, or a combination thereof)
- Lima beans (see also butter beans)
- Butter beans (immature lima beans, usually cooked in butter)
- Green beans (often seasoned with tomatoes and pork)
- Mashed potatoes (usually with butter and condensed milk)
- Okra (African vegetable eaten fried in cornmeal or stewed, often with tomatoes, corn, onions and hot peppers; the Bantu word for okra is ngombo, from which the Creole/soul food dish gumbo derives its name)
- Red beans
- Succotash (originally a Native American dish of yellow corn, tomatoes, 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, seasoned and baked into pies—similar in taste and texture to pumpkin pie)
[edit] Breads
- 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)
- Cornbread (a shortbread often baked in a skillet, commonly seasoned with bacon fat)
- Hoecakes (a type of cornbread made of cornmeal, salt and water, which is very thin in texture, and fried in cooking oil in a skillet. It became known as "hoecake" because field hands often cooked it on a shovel or hoe held to an open flame)
- "Hot water (wata)" cornbread (cornmeal mixed with hot water and fried)
- Hushpuppies (balls of cornmeal deep-fried with salt and diced onions)
- Johnny cakes (fried cornmeal pancakes, usually salted and buttered)
- Milk and bread (a "po' folks' dessert-in-a-glass" of slightly crumbled cornbread, buttermilk and sugar)
- Sweetbread
[edit] Other items
- Chow-chow (a spicy, homemade pickle relish sometimes made with okra, corn, cabbage, hot peppers, green tomatoes and other vegetables; commonly used to top black-eyed peas and otherwise as a condiment and side dish)
- Grits (or "hominy grits", made from processed, dried, ground corn kernels and usually eaten as a breakfast food the consistency of porridge; also served with fish and meat at dinnertime, similar to polenta)
- Hot sauce (a condiment of cayenne peppers, vinegar, salt, garlic and other spices often used on chitterlings, fried chicken and fish)
- Macaroni and cheese
- Rice pudding, with rice and corn-based vanilla pudding
- Rice (usually served with red beans and/or black-eyed peas)
- 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); frequently referred to as "sorghum molasses"
- Sweet tea, inexpensive orange pekoe (black tea, often Lipton, Tetley, or Luzianne brands) boiled, sweetened with cane sugar, and chilled, served with lemon. The tea is sometimes steeped in the sun instead of boiled; this is referred to as "sun tea."
[edit] Soul food in popular culture
Soul food is a recurring target for parody in American popular culture, due to its perception as unhealthful. In the Boondocks episode The Itis, soul food is equated with narcotics, causing a destructive impact on a community it enters, leading Huey Freeman to insist, "You can't serve this to people; it'll cause ... death." On Family Guy the leader of the Quahog African American Society states, "So it's agreed; we'll continue pretending to like pigs' feet simply to confound the white man." In contrast, films made by African Americans for a mainly African American audience may refer to the nostalgic and/or cultural importance of eating soul food on holidays and other culturally resonant occasions.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- The David Walker Lupton African American Cookbook Collection
- Glory Foods
- Real Men Charities, Inc., website
- Smokey Robinson Foods
- Soul Food Online
- Soul Food Historical 1960s "soul food" citations from word researcher Barry Popik.
http://www.blackvegetarians.org/aboutus/index.htm http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6521564
[edit] Footnotes
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This article or section is missing citations and/or footnotes.
This article or section may use words or ideas of other works in its text without citing sources. Using citations to support claims outside the realm of elementary knowledge helps guard against copyright violations and factual inaccuracies. Please improve the article or discuss this issue on the talk page. Help on using footnotes is available. This article has been tagged since December 2006. |
- ^ Jonsson, Patrick (February 6, 2006). Backstory: Southern discomfort food. The Christian Science Monitor. The Christian Science Publishing Society. Retrieved on 2006-11-09.
- ^ http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=foodspice&dbid=138
- ^ http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=foodspice&dbid=64
[edit] References
- Huges, Marvalene H. Soul, Black Women, and Food. Ed. Carole Counihan and Penny van Esterik. New York: Routledge, 1997.
- Bowser, Pearl and Jean Eckstein, A Pinch of Soul, Avon, New York, 1970
- Counihan, Carol and Penny Van Esterik editors, Food and Culture, A Reader, Routledge, New York, 1997
- Harris, Jessica, The Welcome Table – African American Heritage Cooking, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1996
- Root, Waverley and Richard de Rochemont, Eating in America, A History, William Morrow, New York, 1976
- Glenn, Gwendolyn, "American Visions," Southern Secrets From Edna Lewis, February-March, 1997
- Puckett, Susan, "Restaurant and Institutions", Soul Food Revival, February 1, 1997
