Dishes could vary from region to region and family to family. Two soul food cooks made famous during the late 1900’s include Sylvia Wood and Ms. Peaches. They both started restaurants and went on to comfort and inspire many with their cooking and their strong wills.
Sylvia WoodSylvia, from South Carolina, became known as the “Queen of Soul Food” after starting a successful restaurant in 1962 and eventually publishing a cookbook (Kamp). On the original menu in her Harlem restaurant, one of the dishes was called the "poor man's plate" and featured rice, lima beans and pig tails (Shapiro).
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Ms. PeachesMs. Peaches started a restaurant in Missippi and served protesters and movement leaders during the Civil Rights Era (Soul Food Junkies).
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Cookbooks directly reflected the transcendence of meals and techniques alongside personal histories associated with the dishes. Rafia Zafar and other scholars are now recognizing cookbooks as a worthy genre of study with unique characteristics, telling stories, recalling the past, honoring tradition, acknowledging the present, and sometimes pushing towards the future with innovation (Zafar). One of the cookbooks mentioned in this journal, Edna Lewis’s The Taste of Country Cooking (1976), links food to an African American community in Virginia of former slaves and their descendants. Cookbooks effectively told stories of culinary transcendence of soul food from Reconstruction up until modern day. Each family has their own traditions that have been passed down, making it difficult to pinpoint exact dishes to represent this southern cuisine, but trends can be recognized.
“A Recipe for Remembrance: Memory and Identity in African-American Women’s Cookbooks” |
A major push existed towards the end of the century to show cultural pride for many aspects of life, including food. People wanted to “resist dominant cultural memory" and preserve the uniqueness of their dishes. Three cookbooks were produced by the National Council of Negro Women in the 1990s with the purpose to, in part, "memorialize both individual and community” with “active remembrance." Associations with after-church family meals and “expressions of love” existed in anecdotes within the texts, exemplifying soul food aspects and traditions.
After WWII, more cookbooks were published to align with the Black Power and Civil Rights movements. Some contained strictly recipes and others included “political commentary, personal narrative and culinary instruction." Others stressed the importance of transcendence to future generations of cooks. Celebrating Our Mother's Kitchens contained a section, "Recipes for Kids", dedicated to recipes to teach traditions to kids for the future (Eve). Examples included The Black Family Reunion Cookbook: Recipes and Food Memories (shown above, 1991) and The Black Family Dinner Quilt Cookbook: Health Conscious Recipes and Food Memories (1993). The author of the second cookbook was also known to be a dedicated educator (Eve). |
Popular Dishes
Some dishes that kept reappearing in cookbooks throughout the century included gumbo, hoppin' John, thick soups, rice and other one-pot dishes, and various meats such as ribs, chitterlings, wild game, and chicken. "Geneva's Quick Gumbo" is named after a female figure in the life of the author of The Black Family Reunion Cookbook and includes traditional ingredients such as tomatoes, okra, rice and hot pepper sauce (Eve). Meat pieces used originally because the plantation owners refused to consume them included hog feet, snout, jowls, neck or scrapple, linings of the mouth, stomach and throat and skin. A tradition closely associated with meat is barbecues. Barbecuing for feasts was practiced in Africa. Louis Hughes, a former Virginia slave, said that roasting hogs and sheep began in early times of slavery in America to commemorate Independence Day, allowed by "the Boss". Even though the meaning of the celebration was ironic for the slaves, they made it a celebration of surviving and being able to come together with loved ones and friends (Opie). Other traditional staples, to name a few, are fufu, grits, corn bread, hushpuppies and candied yams. The technique for fufu practiced in Africa evolved into hot cakes and the start of cornbread in America (Holloway). Hushpuppies are deep-fried in vegetable oil, a West African practice, traditionally with a base of rice or cornmeal and originally plain or flavored with a variety of vegetables, fruit, and even fish. This "convenience food" was made by both enslaved and free women, later "sold by market women in South Carolina well into the twentieth century," (Carney). Hushpuppies are still popular today. Common side dishes included cole slaw, pickled beets, black-eyed peas and collard greens. "Hot and Spicy Cabbage Medley" was a recipe featured in The Black Family Reunion Cookbook (Eve). And of course there were many desserts associated with gatherings as well, such as peach cobbler, banana pudding, teacakes and sweet potato pie. One special dessert traditionally served by French-influenced in New Orleans is cala, which spread in the South; this dessert is referred to as saraka in Georgia (Holloway). Originally it was a sweetened rice cake made by cooking rice, letting it sit and mashing it, sweetening it with sugar and honey. It could also be served deep-fried, and was often paired with cafe au lait. Cobblers and pies, including peach cobbler and sweet potato, come from the English technique of stewing or baking fruit and using them in pies or tartes. This technique was implemented because the English used to believe that raw fruit should not be consumed because it was unhealthy and could cause fevers. The tradition quickly found its way into southern cooking, including slaves' cooking. Pudding was also adopted from the English (Opie).