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Many people have a narrow view of “soul food,” Carla Hall says. The term conjures up images of “smothered pork chops, barbecue and fried chicken,” iconic Southern dishes now frowned upon by many as unhealthy.
But that’s only part of the story.
The celebrity chef’s latest cookbook, Carla Hall’s Soul Food: Everyday and Celebration, aims to refine soul food’s image. It re-evaluates tropes about the cuisine and offers a fresh interpretation.
Jerome Grant, inaugural executive chef of the Sweet Home Café at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, is on a similar mission. He and his team expand people’s understanding of soul food by showcasing black cooks’ contributions to America’s regional cuisines.
“We want people to be able to come into our café and smell the smells that they grew up with, see the spice that they can identify and really feel like they’re walking into their home kitchens,” says Grant, who helped lead the café to a James Beard Award nomination for best new restaurant in 2017.
African foods such as okra, field peas, sweet potatoes and greens, and techniques such as stewing, deep frying and barbecuing, are the backbone of African-American cuisine, says culinary historian Jessica B. Harris, author of the classic The Welcome Table: African-American Heritage Cooking.
Harris helped shape the concept for Sweet Home — four regional stations: the Antebellum South, Creole Coast, Western Range and the Northern States. Along with Grant and café supervisory chef Albert Lucas, Harris also co-wrote the museum’s Sweet Home Café Cookbook: A Celebration of African American Cooking, published last fall.
The term “soul food,” likely coined between the 1940s and 1960s, has been applied to all African-American cooking traditions, says soul food scholar Adrian Miller. But the term really refers only to the cuisine developed in the landlocked areas of the rural South, he says.
It’s an “immigrant” cuisine — America’s first “fusion” cuisine — that combines cooking traditions from West Africa, Europe and the Americas, says Miller, whose Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time won a James Beard Award for reference and scholarship in 2014.
“Soul food” as a term “grew out of the civil rights movement and the Black Panther movement, but it came together in the 1960s and 1970s,” Harris says. “I’m old enough to remember when it was called ‘dinner.’ ”
As blacks left the Jim Crow South during the Great Migration of the 20th century, soul food restaurants cropped up to satisfy the homesick masses.
“We took our (cooking) traditions, our techniques, and adapted them to the area that we were at,” Grant says. “I think that really goes to show how resilient we were and how we were able to stamp American culture.”
When black migrants left the South, many also left behind land on which to grow vegetables, woods in which to hunt game and streams in which to fish. What they often found was squalid housing — some unequipped for cooking — in segregated, urban neighborhoods.
In a sense, they’d left behind the farm-to-table lifestyle, Grant says.
“After emancipation, African Americans relied on the land and water for their daily meals,” Hall writes. “Collards in winter, peas through spring, tomatoes come summer. ... Chickens were for laying eggs, not frying. Fish and shrimp were abundant for coast and river folks.”
“We lost that connection (to the land) during the Great Migration and in the decades since as industrialized convenience food has made us unhealthy and sick,” she says.
That’s why Hall returns to ancestral ways of eating as a guidepost for balance. “Our celebration foods — smoked whole hogs, candied yams, caramel cake — became what we ate all the time,” Hall says. “We forgot about all the amazing daily meals we created from greens, beans and grains.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Soul food returns to black history roots as USA's first fusion cuisine
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