Hog and Hominy: Soul Food From Africa to America

by Frederick Douglass

  It was during the civil rights and black power movements of the 1960s that the survival food of black southerners became the revolutionary high cuisine of bourgeoisie African Americans. Writing in 1968, Eldridge Cleaver said “ghetto blacks” ate soul food out of necessity while the black bourgeoisie ate chitlins and such as a “counter-revolutionary” act that mocked white definitions of fine dining.42 For example, in 1969 a writer for the Chicago Defender, a black newspaper, described soul food as high cuisine, a “blend of the best traditional cookery of Africa, Spain, France, and the American colonies to which Negroes added their knowledge of culinary herbs.”43 Cleaver scoffed at the glorification of soul food. Black folks in the ghetto “want steaks. Beef steaks.”44

  BLACK INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS

  The black power movement and the glorification of distinctively black culture inspired the emergence of the black arts movement of the 1960s. One of the leading figures in the black arts movement, Amiri Baraka, formerly LeRoi Jones, wrote about soul food in 1966 in his book Home: Social Essays. In an essay on soul food, he presented a rebuttal to critics who argued that African Americans had no language or characteristic cuisine. He insisted that hog maws, chitlins, sweet potato pie, pork sausage and gravy, fried chicken or chicken in the basket, barbecued ribs, hopping John, hush puppies, fried fish, hoe cakes, biscuits, salt pork, dumplings, and gumbo all came directly out of the black belt region of the South and represented the best of African American cookery. “No characteristic food? Oh, man, come on. . . . Maws are things ofays [whites] seldom get to peck [eat], nor are you likely ever to hear about Charlie eating a chitterling. Sweet potato pies, a good friend of mine asked recently, ‘Do they taste anything like pumpkin?’ Negative. They taste more like memory, if you’re not uptown.”45

  In response to the black power and black arts movements, the first soul food cookbooks began to appear in progressive bookstores in the 1960s. Before then, largely white southerners had published cookbooks with instructions on how to make “southern dishes” like those Baraka described. These southern cookbooks, however, angered black chefs such as Verta Mae Grosvenor. An African American cook and writer originally from South Carolina, Grosvenor used her considerable cooking talents to raise money for organizations like SNCC. After she migrated to New York, she made a name for herself as a Harlem caterer and author during the black power movement.46

  What bothered Grosvenor were white women like Henrietta Stanley Dull (home economics editor of the Atlanta Journal) who called themselves in their cookbooks “experts of southern cuisine.” The back cover of Dull’s Southern Cooking describes her as the “first lady of Georgia and the outstanding culinary expert in the South.” In response to the claim, Grosvenor argues that Dull’s book “ain’t nothing but a soul food cookbook with the exception that Mrs. Dull is a white lady and it is a $5.95 hardbook by a big publishing house.” Grosvenor was angry because white authors and publishers were profiting from an African American invention without compensating or acknowledging African Americans. “Cookbooks ain’t nothing but a racist hustle.” She adds, “It’s all about some money, honey, and if that ain’t so, how come it ain’t Carver Chunky Peanut Butter?” Grosvenor goes on to say, “We cooked our way to freedom, and outside of a few soul food cookbooks there has been no reference to our participation in, and contribution to, the culinary arts.”47

  A few of the earliest contributions to the literature of soul food cookery provide insights into the black power roots of soul food. In the introductions to their cookbooks, several black culinary artists carefully describe, in distinctly black nationalist terms, what soul food is and what it most definitely is not, apparently in an attempt to patent and protect their intellectual property rights from the likes of the Dulls of the world. In his 1969 soul food cookbook, for example, southern-born African American Bob Jeffries emphasizes that soul food is not southern food in general. “When people ask me about soul food, I tell them that I have been cooking ‘soul’ for over forty years—only we did not call it that back home. We just called it real good cooking, southern style. However. . . not all southern food is ‘soul.’” He goes on to explain, “Soul food cooking is an example of how really good southern Negro cooks cooked with what they had available to them”; it’s about knowing how to season food to perfection. Jeffries argues that southern African American cooks “have always had an understanding and knowledge of herbs, spices, and seasonings and have known how to use them.”48

  Returning to the theme of black invention and property rights, he goes on to say that “what makes soul food unique—and more indigenous to this country than any other so-called American cooking style—is that it was created and evolved almost without European influence.”49 In earlier chapters in this book, I argue against Jeffries’s black nationalist interpretation of soul food. Instead I argue that soul food is distinctively African American but was influenced by Europeans, who introduced corn to African foodways and then provided cornmeal, meat, fish, and other ingredients as rations to the first enslaved Africans in southern North America. In 1971 culinary writer Helen Mendes seconded Jeffries’s Afrocentric view of soul food in her book The African Heritage Cookbook. Soul food unites black Americans “with each other, and provides an unbroken link to their African past.” She adds, “At the heart of Soul cooking lay many elements of African cooking.”50

  In A Pinch of Soul in Book Form, published in 1969, Pearl Bowser uses the words “our” and “us” throughout her description of soul food. I interpret this choice as signifying her belief that soul food is the intellectual invention and property of southern-born African Americans. It’s about how we somehow transformed “such things as animal fodder into rich peanut soup or wild plants into some of our favorite and tastiest vegetables dishes,” and it “represents a legacy of good eating bequeathed to us by our parents and grandparents,” who as slaves and later as sharecroppers “broke their backs but not their spirits.”51

  According to Bowser, “Soul food is also food rich in taste. What is bland becomes exciting by the addition of our spices—garlic, pepper, bay leaf—and the other condiments which are always on the table along with the salt and pepper—hot pepper sauce, either from the West Indies or Louisiana, and vinegar to go on many meats and vegetables.” In another section of her book, she writes, “Our main meat source is still pork—fried, barbecued, roasted, smoked, pickled, spicy and hot.”52

  RESTAURANTS AND SOUL FOOD IN THE LATE 1960S

  Bowser and others writing in the late 1960s and early 1970s observed that the black power movement made soul food both fashionable and popular in urban restaurants. Bowser argues that it was the black power movement that gave black people a sense of pride about their food. In addition, the message of black power inspired people like her to write soul food cookbooks: “There was a time when soul food could be had only at home or when provided by the church sisters. It certainly never appeared in print and was seldom referred to with pride, however much it was enjoyed. Its emerging popularity is due not only to its significance as a remembrance of things past but also as an affirmation that black is beautiful.”53

  Black power also inspired restaurateurs to put soul food on their menus. An article in Sepia confirms the growing popularity of soul food. Published in 1969, the article says, “Soul Food is so ‘in’ these days that restaurants all over the right neighborhoods are featuring it. But now restaurants in many of the wrong neighborhoods are opening up to serve soul food too. . . . Soul food is ‘in’ and wouldn’t you know it, the price has gone up as the demand has soared.” The article goes on to say, “Four bits used to get you a meal in lots of restaurants if you didn’t mind a cracked plate and no tablecloth. The menu was scratched fresh everyday onto a blackboard and your choice was typically either chicken or ox-tail served up with greens and rice. For an extra dime you could have a piece of fresh homemade sweet potato pie. Now that such substantial eating has been dubbed ‘soul food’ it’s started moving downtown—and the price
s are moving up.”54

  Notable African American celebrities in the 1960s invested in shortlived attempts to sell soul food restaurant franchises. Starting in 1968, gospel recording artist Mahalia Jackson sold a Chicken Store franchise that sold “mouth-watering southern fried chicken along with catfish, sweet potato pie and hot biscuits.” James Brown entered into a similar venture franchising Gold Platter soul food restaurants all over the country. The “menu at the look-alike chain outlets will feature chicken with French fries, cole slaw and cornbread; catfish with hush puppies; or less cultured hamburgers and cheeseburgers. Everything is to be served up, of course, on a gold platter just like the sign out front.” Muhammad Ali got into the act too, with a franchise of restaurants that featured what he called the “Champburger.” Starting in Miami, Ali hoped to start a chain of black-owned-and-operated Champburger Palaces in black neighborhoods. “In addition to the Champburger, the establishments also will sell hot dogs, fried chicken, fried fish, boiled fish, other food products and soft drinks.” Southern-born blacks, however, argued that Ali’s Chamburger palaces were not serving soul food.55

  REAL SOUL FOOD

  Debates over soul food were common on the streets of New York City and other cities. Northerners and southerners just did not agree on the definition of soul food. Southerners complained that much of the food advertised as soul food by restaurants was not soul food at all or was “more Southern than soul.” “To people who just do not know better,” wrote Bob Jeffries, it means “only chicken and ribs, corn pone, collards, and ‘sweet-taters,’ but nothing could be more authentically soul than a supper of freshly caught fish, a fish stew, or an outdoor fish fry.”56 Southerners in New York argued that, for real soul food, you had to stand in line at Harlem restaurants like the Red Rooster, Jock’s Place, and Obie’s, where they sold trotters, neck bones, pigs’ tails, smothered pork chops, black-eyed peas, candied yams, and “grits ’n’ eggs.”

  For many, soul food was difficult to describe because it was all wrapped up in feelings. “Soul food takes its name from a feeling of kinship among Blacks,” wrote Jim Harwood and Ed Callahan, who coauthored a soul food cookbook. It is “impossible to define but recognizable among those who have it.” Similarly, Harlem restaurant owner and cook Obie Green, who, like James Brown, was a native of Augusta, Georgia, insisted that soul is cooking with love. “And I cook with soul and feeling.” Bob Jeffries, also a southerner, argued that soul food was down-home food “cooked with care and love—with soul.”57 South Carolina–born culinary writer and cook Verta Mae Grosvenor also makes the argument that the right feelings are essential to making soul food, “and you can’t it get [them] from no recipe book (mine included).” She insists that a good cookbook does not make a good cook. “How a book gon tell you how to cook.” It’s what you “put in the cooking and I don’t mean spices either.” Jeffries also agreed that soul food was made without recipes; it was made with inexpensive ingredients that “any fool would know how to cook” if they grew up eating it.58

  Soul food, then, according to black cooks, is an art form that comes from immersion in a black community and an intimate relationship with the southern experience. Soul food originated in the quarters of enslaved Africans in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. It is a blend, or creolization, of many cooking traditions that Africans across the Americas seasoned to their own definition of perfection with their knowledge of culinary herbs gained from their ancestors. Soul food was spiritual food because some dishes were served only on Sundays and other special days during slavery and thereafter.

  It was simple food, yet it was often complex in its preparation. Soul food required a cook with a good sense of timing of when to season, how long to stir, mix, fry, boil, sauté, bake, grill, dry, or smoke an ingredient and how to cut, skin, dip, batter, or barbecue. Without timing and skill, a cook had no soul worth talking about. Soul food was nitty-gritty food that tasted good and helped African Americans survive during difficult times. For a long time, none of its ingredients came in a can or box, and thus soul food was free of artificial preservatives. Oral history based on African folkways ensured that cooks passed on recipes from one generation to the next, and recipes and cooking techniques developed out of a common black experience and struggle with racism. Summing up reflections and commentaries on soul from the black power era, I have been able to formulate six statements about and working definitions for soul food:

  Soul is a cultural mixture of various African tribes and kingdoms

  Soul is adaptations and values developed during slavery and emancipation

  Soul is the style of rural folk culture

  Soul is the values and styles of planter elites in the Americas

  Soul is spirituality and experiential wisdom that make black folk unique

  Soul is putting a premium on suffering, endurance, and surviving with dignity

  During the 1960s and 1970s a somewhat heated debated developed between three camps within the African American community: African American intellectuals who argued that soul food was uniquely part of black culture and therefore the intellectual capital of black folk; white intellectuals who insisted that soul food was a southern regional food that belonged to southerners; and members of the Nation of Islam, advocates of natural food diets, and college- and university-educated African Americans who argued that soul food was nothing to be celebrated or guarded as their own because it was killing black folks. I discuss the last school of thought in the final chapter, when I turn to critics of soul food and movements advocating natural food diets. But before that, in the next chapter, I turn to a look at the history of Caribbean influences on soul food and urban identity.

  THE DECLINING INFLUENCE OF SOUL FOOD

  The Growth of Caribbean Cuisine in Urban Areas

  In the summer of 2005, while combing through the 1930 census records for Westchester County, New York, to locate southern black migrants for research I was doing on the Great Migration and the Great Depression, I noticed that African Americans and Latinos (Chileans, Puerto Ricans, Iberians, Mexicans, and Argentines) tended to reside in the same lower-income neighborhoods in the villages of North Tarrytown (now Sleepy Hollow) and Tarrytown. Earlier, I had also noticed that WPA records described blacks and Latinos in 1930s eating in the same restaurants, frequenting the same nightclubs and theaters, and intermarrying in Harlem, thirty-five miles to the south of the Tarrytowns. These descriptions struck me as odd when contrasted to contemporary Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow, where Latinos now far outnumber African Americans residents and mostly Ecuadorian-, Dominican-, Puerto Rican–, Colombian and Brazilian-owned bodegas, restaurants, and luncheonettes are part of the uptown culinary landscape of both towns. What is even more interesting is the fact that there is not one black-owned soul food restaurant in either town, although there are three black churches. Similar descriptions fit the current situation in the surrounding urban centers in the Hudson Valley that also attracted black southern migrants in the 1920s and 1930s. The changes in urban centers of New York encouraged me to use interviews and written sources to explore the declining influence of soul food and the growing influence of Caribbean cuisines on African American foodways in different times and places.

  My findings, though they concentrate only on New York City and Westchester County, nonetheless suggest a tentative framework for explaining where and why the Caribbeanization of soul food has emerged in urban New York. Caribbean influence on black foodways has been the strongest within the ethnic subgroups in which blacks and Caribbean migrants felt the most comfortable. While the nature and location of these subgroups shifted over time, interethnic relationships tended to be strongest between those who shared a common language, passion, or employer, as well as among younger African Americans and Caribbean migrants who shared the same class status and ethnic group identity. This understanding of the conditions that fostered connections among African Americans and Caribbean migrants in New York emerged from my examination of a wave of migrants who came to
New York between 1930 and 1970, particularly Cubans, Afro-Panamanians, and African Americans in Harlem and Brooklyn in the 1950s and 1960s and in the smaller suburban setting of Westchester County, where Tarrytown and North Tarrytown experienced an influx of Puerto Ricans and Cubans.

  THE 1930S AND 1940S

  MIGRATION AND SETTLEMENT PATTERNS IN THE FIRST WAVE

  Because motives for and patterns of immigration influence to a large extent migrants’ subsequent experiences and relationships with other groups, it is difficult to understand the influence of Caribbean cultures on urban identities. Some of the earliest examples of Cuban immigration to New York, for example, were rooted in a long history of colonialism, racism, and classism in the Caribbean basin. Political persecution, poverty, hunger, and lack of opportunity under Spanish colonialism motivated Cubans to start emigrating to the United States beginning in the 1860s. Cuban oligarchs and foreign investors continued to dominate the best land, occupations, and opportunities on the island following Cuba’s independence from Spain in 1898, prompting Cuban immigrants to arrive in the United States in a slow but steady stream. Until the 1930s, Tampa was the center of the Cuban American expatriate community and a thriving cigar industry. After 1930, however, new arrivals of Afro-Cubans, many of them musicians, baseball players, and cigar makers, tended to settle in New York City. Because of restrictive racist housing practices, the majority of black immigrants from the Caribbean who settled in New York in the early twentieth century, whether Puerto Rico, Cuban, or Panamanian, found lodging in existing African American neighborhoods. Most of New York’s early Afro-Cuban immigrants settled in Harlem. Much smaller and whiter Cuban communities developed in Brooklyn (near the Navy Yard), Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island. The small number of Cuban immigrants in New York City—they account for only a fraction of the eighteen thousand or so Cubans in the United States in 1940—prevented the development of distinctive Cuban communities there before 1950.1