Soul food

• 1. Introduction

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  Soul food is the ethnic cuisine of African Americans, and one of its earliest appearances in print is in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, published in 1965. The phrase itself was young. It took hold in the mid-1960s, when the word soul was a common way to describe African-American culture. The cooking behind the name was far older. It grew in the American South among enslaved Africans brought across the Atlantic. For a long time it was belittled as low-class food. Some African Americans in the North even looked down on Black Southerners who loved it. Then, during the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the same food became a point of pride in cities such as New York City, Chicago and Detroit. How did a cuisine built from rations and leftovers earn that pride? Which ingredients crossed the ocean, and who carried them? And why did its restaurants become places where a movement made its plans?

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• 2. Seeds on the Ships

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  One enslaved African later remembered that yams were the only food served on the voyage from Africa to Charleston, South Carolina. Yams were not alone. Slave ships were stocked with African rice, millet, okra, black-eyed peas, kidney beans and lima beans, along with other vegetables, fruits and animals. These provisions fed people held in chains below the decks. Afterward they were planted in the Americas, and some became cash crops. Historians place this movement of African plants within what they call the Columbian exchange.

  Researchers at Mercer University Libraries argued that the choices were deliberate. These foods stay palatable long after harvest, which suited a slow voyage. They are also the edible parts of plants that thrive in the American South, so they flourished once planted in the garden plots enslaved people were given.

  Another account says the seeds crossed in the hair of enslaved women. They hid rice, okra and millet seeds in their braids as a precaution against an unknown future in a land where they would be forced to work.

  The guineafowl, a bird native to Africa, followed the same route. The Spanish brought it to the Caribbean, and it reached the South of what is now the United States in the early 16th century. Enslaved people ate its eggs and cooked its meat with rice, as their West-Central African forebears had. In time the bird became part of the subsistence culture of the whole region.

  Sesame reached South Carolina in 1730. Thomas Jefferson observed enslaved people preparing stews and breads, boiling greens with sesame seeds, and making sesame pudding. Sorghum also came from West Africa. Enslaved people on plantations cooked its juice into a sweet syrup, much like molasses.

  Seeds and birds could only add to a diet. The bulk of the food was handed out each week by the people who owned the land.

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• 3. Rations and Scraps

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  A peck of cornmeal and three to four pounds of pork made up the typical weekly ration for an enslaved person in the South. Frederick Douglass described a similar allowance on Maryland's Eastern Shore. He wrote: "The men and women slaves received, as their monthly allowance of food, eight pounds of pork, or its equivalent in fish, and one bushel of corn meal". Many of these people worked long days at hard physical labor, so they needed plenty of calories. Douglass said they fished for turtles, fish and eels to make up the shortfall.

  Ham hocks, hog jowls, pigs' feet, ears, skin and intestines were the cuts that plantation owners would not eat. These went to the enslaved. Cooks learned to turn such parts into seasoning and into whole meals. Pork and corn were staples for owners and enslaved people alike, but the owners kept the smoked ham and corn pudding.

  Leftovers from the plantation houses had their own name, juba. They were set out in troughs on Sundays. The word appears in many African languages, and folk memory says it once meant little bits of food.

  Archaeologists studying slave cabins in the Southern United States found bowls more often than flatware or plates. That suggests stews and gumbo, built from gathered ingredients, garden vegetables and animal scraps. White plantation families, by contrast, used plates and flatware for separate cuts of meat and vegetables.

  Booker T. Washington was born enslaved in Franklin County, Virginia in 1856. His mother was a plantation cook who prepared meals for white families. At home she cooked over an open fireplace in pots and skillets, and her children ate straight from those vessels. She made one-pot stews from local meats, vegetables, nuts and berries, a method still used in West Africa.

  Black-eyed peas, turnip greens and pork fat were often boiled together in one kettle. The peas supplied protein, and the greens supplied fiber and vitamins C and A. The green broth left behind is called pot liquor, and it carries vitamins A, C and K and iron. Plantation owners ate the greens and left the broth to the enslaved, apparently unaware of its value. Families later used pot liquor as a remedy for earaches and ingrown toenails.

  Gardens mattered just as much. Slaveholders allowed them because they saved money on food. Enslaved people grew corn, potatoes, peas, beans, herbs and melons, and some sold part of the harvest back to their enslavers.

  Chitterlings, or chitlins, are cleaned pig intestines, cooked in a pot and seasoned. Cleaning them took so long that they were saved for special occasions. Eating innards is common in many cultures, and the Hausa people of West Africa eat chicken intestines. Booker T. Washington wrote that enslaved people ate chitlins at Christmas, when those hired out to other plantations came home to visit. Long after the war, pigs' feet, hogs' ears, peas, cornbread and chitlins were served at the 87th birthday of his daughter, Portia Washington Pittman.

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• 4. Rivers and Kitchens

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  Amy Lynne Young's research compared enslaved people living inland with those near the Atlantic coast. Coastal families, especially on the barrier Sea Islands, had a wider range of land and sea animals. Inland, the choices narrowed to rabbit, squirrel, farm chickens, pigs and leftover scraps. Cooking in the South therefore varied by region, according to what the local land and water offered.

  In the Lowcountry of South Carolina and Georgia, Gullah people kept up a fishing culture that came from West Africa. Their canoes looked much like those of sub-Saharan Africa. Fish dishes that Gullah families developed from local ingredients are still part of Gullah culture.

  Slaveholders in Dorchester County, Maryland rarely fed the people they held. Enslaved residents fished the Choptank River and hunted on land for rabbit, turtle, duck, goose, turkey, pigeon, woodpecker, possum, raccoon, skunk, deer and muskrat. Researchers at the St. Mary's County Library recorded a muskrat recipe. The animal is soaked in salted or vinegar water for two hours, parboiled, dusted in seasoned flour and fried in hot fat until golden brown.

  Around Baltimore and the Chesapeake region, enslaved and free Africans grew fish peppers to add heat to seafood. By 1864, almost half of all watermen in Maryland were former slaves. They became skilled at netting shrimp, gathering oysters and fishing. Maryland later became known for its crabbing industry, and deep-fried crab cakes joined soul food.

  About 30,000 Igbo people were trafficked from Igboland to Virginia, according to Chambers's research. The Igbo ate yams, okra and poultry and fished for food. In Virginia they cooked okra, yams and black-eyed peas into one-pot stews. They also caught catfish, crayfish, perch, herring and turtles in nearby creeks, rivers and the Chesapeake Bay.

  At George Washington's Mount Vernon, enslaved cooks made cornmeal pancakes called hoe cakes for the Washington family. The enslaved people there mostly ate cornmeal and salted fish. One of those cooks was Hercules Posey. His dishes were so admired among elite white families that he gained a kind of quasi-freedom. He could leave the house alone and earn money by selling leftovers. He made veal, roast beef, duck, puddings and jellies, but with his own sauces and flavors. Posey was never granted freedom, and eventually he escaped.

  James Hemings, the brother of Sally Hemings, was born enslaved in colonial Virginia and became head chef for Thomas Jefferson. He blended African, French and Native American traditions. Hemings traveled with Jefferson to Paris and trained under French chefs, where he learned to make macaroni pie. He introduced and popularized macaroni and cheese in the United States, and it became a common side dish in soul food.

  In many plantation kitchens, enslaved African women were the main cooks, as women had been in African societies. White families preferred older women, who seemed skilled, knowledgeable and nonthreatening. Kitchen hours also let enslaved mothers teach their children about life, culture and food. The same role fed racist stereotypes that portrayed Black women as Mammys.

  Freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad foraged, fished and hunted, then cooked one-pot stews in the West African way. Enslaved and free Black people left food outside their doors for them. Thomas Downing was born enslaved in 1791 on Chincoteague Island, off Virginia's Eastern Shore. He learned to harvest clams, oysters and terrapin there, left Virginia during the War of 1812, and settled in free Black Philadelphia. After gaining his freedom in 1819 he moved to New York City. By 1825 he had opened Downing's Oyster House on Broadway, serving raw, fried and stewed oysters, oyster pie and poached turkey stuffed with oysters. In the basement, he and his eldest son George hid people escaping slavery. New Yorkers called him the Oyster King of New York.

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• 5. Fire and Freedom

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  The Hausa people of West Africa have a word for barbecue, babbake. It covers grilling, toasting, building a large fire, singeing hair or feathers, and cooking food for a long time over an extravagant blaze. West and Central Africans brought their own methods to the Americas and the West Indies. Indigenous peoples were the first to barbecue in North America, and the blending of the two traditions shaped barbecue culture in the United States.

  Food historian Adrian Miller explained why barbecue became linked with Black Americans. Old-school barbecue demanded huge labor. Someone had to clear the ground, chop and burn the wood, dig the pit, butcher and cook the animals, serve the guests and clean up. In the antebellum South, enslaved people were forced to do all of it. On Fourth of July celebrations, they prepared barbecue for white politicians and their enslavers.

  Sauce had African roots too. In 1748, the Swedish-Finnish botanist Peter Kalm noted that enslaved Africans in Philadelphia grew guinea peppers. The pods were pounded and mixed with salt, kept in a bottle, and poured over fish and meats. Wesley Jones, a former slave from South Carolina, gave a vinegar-based sauce recipe using black and red peppers. He said slaves stayed up all night slow-cooking meat and basting it with that sauce.

  Henry Bland, a former slave in Georgia, recalled that the enslaved had the 4th of July off. They used it to barbecue, play ball games, wrestle and make music. Barbecue was the food of special days and days off.

  The Battle of Port Royal on the 7th of November 1861 brought the Union Navy and Army to the barrier islands of South Carolina. Many plantation owners and white residents fled, and over 10,000 African Americans became free. Official freedom came with the Emancipation Proclamation. On the 1st of January 1863, Gullah people gathered at Camp Saxton in Beaufort to celebrate with food, song and dance. Charlotte Forten, the first Black teacher at the Penn School on St. Helena Island, recorded roasted oxen and barbecue in her journal. Susie King Taylor, born enslaved in Liberty County, Georgia, wrote of the same day: "It was a glorious day for us all, and we enjoyed every minute of it, and as a fitting close and crowning event of this occasion we had a grand barbecue".

  After the Civil War, 4 million African Americans were freed. In Galveston, Texas, slaveholders had withheld the news for two months after the war ended in April 1865. On the 19th of June 1865, Brigadier General Gordon Granger arrived with his troops and issued General Order No. 3, enforcing the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas. Black communities gathered in public parks and prepared red foods. Today the celebration is called Juneteenth, and it became a national holiday in 2021.

  Michael Twitty, a food historian, explains the red foods in two ways. They recall the blood shed during slavery. They also echo the cultural colors of the Yoruba and Bakongo peoples, for whom red stands for power, sacrifice and transformation. The menu includes watermelon, red lemonade and red velvet cake, along with barbecue and fried foods.

  Barbecue also traveled north. After the war, a Black pitmaster named Arthur Watts brought his family's sauce recipe and barbecuing methods to Kewanee, Illinois, where he became well known.

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• 6. Many Roots, One Pot

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  Hoppin' John, a Gullah dish of rice, black-eyed peas, onions and bacon, is traced by Jessica B. Harris to a Senegalese dish called chiebou niebe, made with rice and beef. Gullah families eat it on the 1st of January to bring luck, often with cornbread and collard greens, which are said to bring prosperity. Charleston red rice, made with tomato paste, comes from jollof rice, whose tomato base gives it a red color.

  Rice itself carries a long history. A species called Oryza glaberrima was domesticated in Africa. In the South Carolina Lowcountry, rice was a cash crop, and Europeans picked coastal West Africans who already knew how to grow it. Rice remains a staple in the Lowcountry and Louisiana, where it anchors jambalaya and red beans and rice.

  Harris traveled to Benin for her 2021 docuseries High on the Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America. There she watched women make a leafy sauce called feuille, prepared much as African Americans cook collard greens. Other parallels are easy to draw. Sweet potatoes in the United States echo yams in West Africa. Cornbread on African-American tables plays the role fufu plays in West Africa, soaking up sauces and stews. Heat comes from malagueta pepper and from cayenne, a pepper native to the Western Hemisphere.

  Native American cooking left deep marks as well. Corn, ground into meal or treated with an alkaline salt to make hominy, is one of the main staples of the Southern diet. That process is called nixtamalization. The Native dish sofkee lives on as grits, and Native boiled cornbread survives as corn meal dumplings and hush puppies. In Tuskegee, Alabama, Black Americans mixed molasses with leftover cooked grease, called sap, and poured it over cornbread and hoe cakes. Black Seminoles in Florida and Oklahoma blended Gullah rice and beans with Seminole foods such as fry bread, sofkee and grape dumplings. European colonists contributed apples and peaches, which enslaved people battered and fried as fritters or stewed.

  Adrian Miller says the difference between soul food and Southern food lies in seasoning. Soul food is intensely seasoned, uses a variety of meats for flavor, and adds spicy and savory sauces, a habit that echoes West African cooking. Black cooks also put sugar in cornbread, which white Southerners say turns it into cake. Bob Jeffries, author of the Soul Food Cookbook, put it this way: "While all soul food is Southern food, not all Southern food is soul. Soul food cooking is an example of how really good Southern African-American cooks cooked with what they had available to them." Poor white and Black Southerners cooked many of the same dishes, though their methods sometimes differed.

  Since the mid-20th century, Black Americans have seasoned meats and vegetables with Lawry's Seasoned Salt, which is cheap and packs many herbs and spices into one product. Hot sauce goes over fried chicken, fish and collard greens. Collard and turnip greens are still flavored with pig feet, bacon grease or turkey necks.

  Gustav Brunn, a German Jewish immigrant, arrived in Baltimore in the 1930s with his family, fleeing Adolf Hitler's rise to power. He created a seafood seasoning blend, Delicious Brand Shrimp and Crab, which later became Old Bay Seasoning. Twitty thinks enslaved West Africans were probably the first to put kitchen pepper on shellfish, and that centuries of doing so led to Chesapeake crab spice blends. As he put it: "It's not that African Americans necessarily invented it, but without us, the story is impossible."

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• 7. Tables of the Movement

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  Sylvia Woods was born in Hemingway, South Carolina in 1926 and moved to Harlem as a teenager. She worked in a Brooklyn factory, then took a job at Johnson's Luncheonette in central Harlem in 1954. Seven years later she and her husband bought the place, and in 1962 it reopened as Sylvia's Restaurant. Woods became known as the queen of soul food.

  Soul food reached Washington, D.C., Baltimore and Harlem during the Great Migration, as African Americans moved north looking for work. In unfamiliar cities, the food reminded migrants of the home and family they had left. Soul food restaurants were Black-owned businesses and neighborhood meeting places where people ate and talked together. LeRoi Jones, later known as Amiri Baraka, published an article called Soul Food and became a key voice in tying the food to Black American identity. Author Laretta Henderson wrote that in the 1960s, middle-class Black Americans used soul food to set themselves apart from the values of the white middle class and to align with poorer Black people.

  In Maryland, cooks fried chicken in shallow fat under a lid, which fried and steamed it at once, and served it with waffles. Chicken and waffles spread to Harlem. Musicians in the blues and jazz era stopped at Black-owned restaurants late at night for exactly that meal. Black nightclubs of the Jim Crow era were known as the Chitlin' Circuit, named by entertainers for the chitlins and soul food they served.

  Paschal's Restaurant on West Hunter Street in Atlanta became a meeting place for the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Martin Luther King Jr. received permission to bring his team members and guests there to eat, rest, plan and strategize. Andrew Young, John Lewis, Julian Bond, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Jesse Jackson also came, often staying late into the night. Jim Crow laws limited where African Americans could open businesses, which is why several soul food restaurants stood along that street.

  A few days before the March on Washington in 1963, King ate at the Florida Avenue Grill. Before he was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on the 4th of April 1968, he ate fried catfish and lemon icebox pie at the Four Way. After the assassination, riots broke out in Washington, D.C. Stokely Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee asked the owner of Ben's Chili Bowl to stay open, so food could reach police officers, student activists and firefighters.

  In Montgomery, Alabama, Georgia Gilmore opened Club from Nowhere in 1955. She fed civil rights leaders during the Montgomery bus boycott, and King was a fan of her cooking. Her fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, stuffed pork chops, stuffed peppers and coleslaw were recipes she learned from women in her family. Jereline and Larry James Bethune, owners of Brenda's BBQ, taught African Americans to register to vote and read a ballot, printed fliers and allowed secret meetings in the back. Frazier's Cafe Society in Atlanta, founded in 1936 by Evelyn Jones and her sister as the city's oldest Black-owned restaurant, was the first interracial restaurant on West Hunter Street.

  In 1936, Victor Hugo Green, a Black postal worker from Harlem, created The Green Book to help Black travelers find safe places in the South. Several soul food restaurants were listed, including Swett's, which opened in 1954. Black churches fed their communities as well, and a book by the pastor and historian Chris Carter, The Spirit of Soul Food, argues that soul food has always fought injustice around access to food. It was published in 2021.

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• 8. Pages and Plates

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  Abby Fisher's What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking, published in 1881, is credited as the first soul food cookbook. Before then, recipes moved by word of mouth, because many states made it illegal for slaves to learn to read or write. A pamphlet by Malinda Russell, A Domestic Cookbook, was self-published in 1866 and is the earliest African-American cookbook. Rufus Estes, a former slave who worked for the Pullman railway car service, published Good Things to Eat in 1911. Many other cookbooks by Black authors from this time were not widely distributed and are now lost.

  The National Council of Negro Women produced The Historical Cookbook of the American Negro in 1958, and revived the practice in 1993. Edna Lewis released a series of books between 1972 and 2003, including A Taste of Country Cooking, which weaves in her childhood in Freetown, Virginia. Vertamae Grosvenor's Vibration Cooking, or the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl appeared in 1970. It praised cooking by feel and making do with what was on hand, and it became a bestseller.

  The Special Collections at the University of Alabama hold over 450 African-American cookbooks. Librarian Kate Matheney found that some were written by white women, who learned recipes from the Black cooks in their kitchens. Some of those books put Mammy images on the cover to sell the recipes, while Black authors used other images and added family recipes.

  The global spread of soul food came during the two world wars. Thousands of Black Americans served as soldiers and nurses, and some stayed overseas rather than return to Jim Crow and lynchings. Adrian Miller notes that after World War II, discharged veterans opened restaurants in places such as France, Germany, Japan, Vietnam and Thailand. They first cooked for African-American service members, and found cheap ingredients because local people ate similar chicken, fish, greens, okra, pork and sweet potatoes. In France, jazz, African-American dance and cuisine were popular from the 1920s through the 1940s.

  Jessica B. Harris published High on the Hog in 2011, tracing African-American dishes to Sub-Saharan Africa. Michael Twitty published The Cooking Gene in 2018. Emily Meggett, born on Edisto Island, South Carolina in 1922, published a Gullah cookbook in 2022 at the age of 100. Benjamin Dennis IV, a Gullah Geechee chef from Charleston, teaches how this food grew from West African cooking.

  Mashama Bailey learned soul food from her mother, studied at the Institute of Culinary Education, then trained under French chefs in Burgundy. She now cooks at The Grey in Savannah, Georgia. Ashleigh Shanti runs Good Hot Fish in Asheville, North Carolina, focused on Black Appalachian cuisine. She says she fell for restaurants watching the women in her family serve simple, humble food that could change someone's mood. Carla Hall, whose ancestry includes Yoruba and Bubi forebears, wrote Carla Hall's Soul Food and serves as culinary ambassador to the Sweet Home Cafe at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. June is celebrated as National Soul Food Month.

  In 2024, Lakisha Harris became the first Black woman in the United States to present on soul food at the American Culinary Federation National Convention. Her talk was titled Culinary Freedom of the Soul.

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