Soul food was born from scraps and turned into a badge of pride
The cuisine of Black Americans grew from what enslaved people were allowed to eat: cornmeal, a few pounds of pork, and the parts of the animal plantation owners discarded. Only in the 1960s did it acquire the name soul food, becoming a declaration of identity during the Black Power era.
Its roots reach across the Atlantic. Slave ships were stocked with African crops such as okra, millet, yams, rice and black-eyed peas because they kept well on the long crossing and grew happily in the American South once planted. Tradition holds that some enslaved women hid rice, okra and millet seeds in their braided hair. The guineafowl, an African bird, reached the Caribbean with the Spanish and the American South in the early 16th century, and enslaved cooks prepared it with rice as their West-Central African ancestors had.
Weekly rations were typically a peck of cornmeal and 3 to 4 pounds of pork, far short of what hard field labour demanded. Cooks made use of ham hocks, jowls, feet, ears and intestines, and the leftovers sent down from the big house were called juba, a word in several African languages suggesting little bits. Excavated slave cabins held more bowls than plates, pointing to stews and gumbo seasoned with homemade hot sauces, while planter households ate separate cuts from plates. Frederick Douglass described people on Maryland's Eastern Shore fishing for turtles and eels to stretch meagre allowances, and on the coast the Gullah kept West African fishing traditions alive.
The historian Adrian Miller says soul food shares techniques with wider Southern cooking but is more intensely seasoned, uses a broader range of meats and sweetens its cornbread, which some white Southerners joked turned it into cake. The author Bob Jeffries put it neatly: all soul food is Southern, but not all Southern food is soul.
For a long time the food was scorned as low-class, even by Black Northerners looking down on migrants from the South. The Great Migration changed that, as people in Chicago, Detroit and New York found in it a taste of the families they had left. One of the earliest printed uses of the term appears in The Autobiography of Malcolm X in 1965, and LeRoi Jones, later Amiri Baraka, championed it as part of Black identity. June is now celebrated as National Soul Food Month.
Source: Soul food
