As a young cook, I pushed back against the term when it was used to describe my food.
Heres why I finally stopped fighting, and what Im excited about in the years ahead.
I have a confession: I love soul food.
Latria Graham.
I would return with my backpack stuffed with fresh ingredients.
“It’s inescapable, that term,” award-winning restaurateurAlexander Smallssaid as he sighed through the phone.
Instead, he called it heritage cuisine.
Alexander Smalls.
I associated it with funky, undesirable plates of offal that my ancestors only ate because they were starving.
But under no circumstances did we call it soul food.
What is soul food, if it is not explicitly Southern food?
Who owns the term?
The hallowed halls of learning threatened to take the little pride I had in my homeplace.
I couldn’t tell people I was Swiss, French, or Senegalese.
I had watermelon, peaches, and cotton in my past, and I was ashamed of it.
Reclaiming My Story
My environment’s messaging was clear: Modern women don’t make soul food.
Sometimes the name of a dish didn’t help either.
Adrian Miller.
After all, why would I want to eat junk?
I stuck to the safer staples like fried chicken and sweet potato pie.
Soul food brought me something that I desperately needed: community.
Carla Hall.
What happened around the table is what sustained me.
Soul food spots owned by black businesspeople were havens from segregation.
At a number of establishments like Dooky Chase’s Restaurant, proprietors gave activists a place to organize.
Alejandro Bolar.
Cooks likeGeorgia Gilmoresold food to fund the alternative transportation that Black people used during the Montgomery bus boycott.
But under no circumstances did we call it soul food.
Who owns the term?
Adrienne Cheatham.
“Soul food tends to be more seasoned.”
For him, there are also differences in ingredients.
“In a lot of Southern restaurants, I’ve just never seen chitlins,” he points out.
“I’ve seen them in soul food restaurants.”
ChefCarla Hallhas decided to reclaim the term Soul Food.
Now she believes Soul Food is a cuisine that demands capitalization.
“Usually a cuisine is capitalized because it comes from a particular place.
Well, we [Black people] don’t have a place.
“We made the most delicious dishes with what we had,” she adds.
Hall presents Soul Food as filling but also intellectually challenging.
That’s kind of my jobto see things and reinterpret them,” she emphasizes.
For eight years she worked at the three-Michelin star restaurant Le Bernardin, eventually becoming its Executive Sous Chef.
She then became the Chef de Cuisine of the Marcus Samuelsson Group.
“It was home cooking,” she says.
This is exactly how you make mac and cheese.
At the restaurants where she worked, she occasionally tried to add regional ingredients to the menu.
“Why does Southern food have to stay in a vacuum?
Why can’t it be something that evolves and grows and changes?”
It is a tool used to signify who we are and how we ground our identity.
America is my country and Soul Food is my cuisine.
What happened around the table is what sustained me.
Soul Food is slowly starting to be appreciated and is finally earning James Beard Awards.
