The History of Soul Food

When people ask me about soul food, I tell them that I have been cooking "soul" for over forty years ö only we did not call it that back home. We just called it real good cooking, southern style. However, if you want to be real technical on the subject, while all soul food is southern food, not all southern food is "soul"·Soul food cooking is an example of how really good southern Negro cooks cooked with what they had available to them, such as chickens from their own back yard and collard greens they grew themselves, as well as home cured ham, and baking powder biscuits, chitlins, and dubie. Culinary historian, Bob Jeffries

In 1880, Charles Gayarre wrote in Harper' Magazine: "The Negro is a born cook. He could neither read nor write, and therefore he could not learn from books. He was simply inspired, the god of spit and saucepan breathed into him; that was enough." Slaves lived off the leftovers and scraps of their slave owners. Cooking became an artistic ritual for slaves who stretched food to make use of what they had. For example, on occasion one chicken would have to serve a family of eight. Culinary historian Josephine Beoku-Betts wrote that slaves prepared specific food from various items they could scrounge up "such as salt from boiled down dirt obtained from smoke houses, coffee from ground okra seeds, and parched corn, and sugar from scraping the sides of old syrup barrels." Corn and pork provided the foundation for the slave diet supplemented with fresh vegetables grown from family garden plots which slaves worked at night or weekends. Most slave owners allotted a peck of corn and three pounds of bacon or salt pork a week. Ironically, pork became the meat of choice even though most African tribal beliefs prohibited the consumption of it.

In 1938, Mississippi: A Guide to the Magnolia State written by the Works Progress Administration stated that the diet of African Americans had not significantly changed since slavery. The "furnishing men" allotted African American tenant farmers: "a peck of corn meal, three pounds of salt meat, two pounds of sugar, one pound of coffee, one gallon molasses, and one plug of either "Red Coon," "Brown Mule," "Dixie Land," or "Wild Goose" chewing tobacco." The rationing was supposed to last him for a week. As migrants left for Chicago, their diet did not drastically change with the transition to the South Side, but adapted to the fast pace of the city like eating out at restaurants instead of preparing home cooked meals.