Bless My Soul Cafe Blog

From “Soul Food Cook Book” Jim Harwood & Ed Callahan
1969 Pacific Productions, San Francisco, Ca
Published by Nitty Gritty Productions, Concord, Ca

If everyone in the world were born rich, maybe Soul Food wouldn’t exist. Maybe everyone would dine only on the most delicate morsels and ignore the “lowly” foods.
Maybe. But we doubt it. Soul Food is too good to ignore, even if you know nothing of the kind of gnawing poverty that created it. People keep eating Soul Food long after they can afford something else – and for good reason. Discovering Soul Food for the first time is not akin to taking up a fad like chocolate grasshoppers. You don’t’ have to close your eyes and curl your nose and let a mouthful slide down untasted. You can simply enjoy Soul Food for the taste.
Soul Food takes its name from a feeling of kinship among Blacks. In that sense, it’s like “Soul Brother” and “Soul Music” - impossible to define but recognizable among those who have it. But there’s nothing secret or exclusive about Soul Food.
The Black man does have a right to feel close to Soul Food; after all, Blacks have been the caretakers of Soul Food from the beginning. But Soul Food is not exclusively Black. The Redman and poor White Southerner had an important share in its development, too. Not to mention any number of soldiers, explorers, settlers, traders and others of varied nationalities.
Actual Soul Food recipes come mainly form three diverse sources: American Indian, European and African. There’s little point in arguing about which influence is the greatest. There’s no way to trace the answer. For too long, Soul Food recipes were carried around in the heads of people grubbing for a living. They didn’t have much time for writing cookbooks.
But a lot is known about what people ate as they built this country. And from that, we can tell a lot about where Soul Food comes from.
We know, for example, that the Indian had no domesticated animals except dogs. So we can safely assume the Indian didn’t dream up hog jowls and chitt’lin’s. But the Indian did hunt wild game for meat and thereby fell upon ways of preparing rabbit, ‘possum and squirrel. And, as Columbus mentioned in 1492, the Indian was way ahead in the growing and preparation of corn, having discovered it growing wild.
The Indians also had methods of preparing roots like the yam and Tuckahoe. And after years of trial and error, the Indian had learned to avoid the pitfalls in preparing the bony, quick-cooking catfish, the slippery oyster, tough turtle and other indigenous fish and game. Indians were also specialists in the art of cooking food in the ground and these methods were later adopted by whites and blacks. As a grower, the Indian planted beans, peas, pumpkin, squash, melons and sunflowers.
When the passengers on the Mayflower showed up, all they had with them after centuries of civilized European eating was dried, salted beef, dried fish, cheese and beer. So the Pilgrims were quite ready to borrow some fresh food ideas from the Indians.
There were a lot of items on the Indians’ menu which were unfamiliar to the European palate, like catfish and the various corn cakes. Of course, many of the Indian foods were familiar to the Europeans, who had their own ways to cook them. Some of these European methods were in turn adopted by the Indians. Perhaps the Europeans’ single greatest contribution to Soul Food was the swine, which is not native to North America or Africa. At its base, Soul Food is really a merger of the Indians’ corn and the European-developed porker.
The African contribution to Soul Food is hardest to trace, but was considerable. Africa was, after all, one of the places where men first began to cultivate edible foods some 10,000 years ago. (If you really want to boggle the mind in tracing these food histories, consider that some respected historians believe African explorers reached America long before Columbus. If so, the African may have taught the American Indian some farming tricks.)
The African slave thus had more than a little knowledge of what eating is all about when the slave traders showed up to give him passage to America. His diet was full of his own native food plus what he had borrowed from European influences – particularly Portuguese – that were already present in Africa at the time the slave trade began. The Portuguese influence dominated Africa’s Western Coast where slave shipping concentrated.
A large portion of the slaves brought to America were kidnapped from farming tribes and their knowledge of how to live off the land was to help them in the years of deprivation to follow. The slaves were familiar with maize, cassava and rice and they also knew about the yam in their homeland. In fact, the yam may be native to Africa, although some experts trace it to Southeast Asia.
Most African Blacks were probably unfamiliar with pork since the pig is not native to Africa and still is not a major herd animal there. However, although a slave might not recognize a pig in the new country, he would know sheep, goats and cows because those animals were possibly first domesticated in Africa. So the slave came to this country stripped of all his personal possessions – but not his knowledge of food. This he was to share with others for years to come.
Slaves who came to this country via the West Indies also brought some cooking practices and refinements on curing pork without salt. Blacks employed in producing sugar in the West Indies often escaped from their masters and lived on wild hogs in the brush, where salt was unavailable. In Spanish, these slaves were called “maroons” or runaways, but the term became synonymous with “hog hunters.” The work “maroon” and the hog-curing method filtered into the South.
Watermelon is a native of tropical and Southern Africa and was possibly brought to this country by slaves or slave traders. “Goober” – a present-day Southern term for peanuts – came into use in this country during the slave trade. The word is originally African or Portuguese or partly both. Traders at fist would take a shipload of goobers from the Americas to Africa and leave half the load to feed slaves in pens. The other half-load would be used to feed the slaves being brought back aboard the ship. Later, the system was simplified by growing goobers in Africa.
So we can see that the basic ingredients for Soul Food were floating around in this country from the beginning. But at first the hardships and deprivation of life in this country was shared by everyone; there were no distinctions of foods for different classes. Capt. John Smith’s men, for example, found ‘possum while searching through trees for persimmons and everyone- officer and underling alike- was pleased with the discovery. Only later would the ‘possum be rejected by gentlemen as something lonely slaves or “white trash” would want to eat.
The rigid class and food distinctions took form in the Plantation life of the South. This “grand” form of like took seed in the 17th Century, but took more than a century to develop into its affluent state at the time the Civil War began. The slave-owning Southern plantation master began this century of development with the baronial notions of the British common in his own background and enriched it with fancy flairs borrowed from the French.
Men bred to the European mutton taste found new delights on the plantation in Virginia hams, fried chicken, and hundreds of other rich items. Dinners in the plantation main house commonly became affairs for 50 to 75 persons at a time. Tables were spread with elaborate dishes served by French stewards. As in all aristocracies, life for the aristocrats became a veritable orgy of fine eating.
But what of those in the fields?
To the field hand, food was issued once a week – a peck of corn and three or four pounds of bacon or salt pork. This pork usually went to season whatever coarse vegetables plantation slaves could grow or gather in the land around their huts. To supplement their diet, slaves often trapped ‘coons and ‘possums in the field or stole corn and chicken from their masters. Some luckier slaves were permitted to raise their own chickens, pigs and vegetables by more “enlightened” masters.
Of all foods, the hog best symbolizes Soul Food. Almost every part of the hog is edible and you could tell man’s status in later Southern society by which parts of the hog he was accustomed to eating. Naturally, the upper classes took the “best” portions.
Consider the cuts of one hog carcass: The tasty ham cuts are least plentiful and were most preferred by the masters. So you won’t find genuine Soul Food recipes for ham. The same is true of the roasts, chops and Canadian bacon cut “high on the hog.” The bacons are a little more plentiful so the slave got a little. But he had to use it sparingly in Soul Food for seasoning; only the master could afford to fry quantities of bacon for breakfast.
Without going further cut by cut, suffice to say that the poor were left with those parts of the hog the master didn’t want: The entrails (chitt’lin’s), the feet and head (snout and jowls), stomach lining (hog maws) and neck (scrapple). In large part, these were the same portions the British barons discarded from mutton. The mutton prejudices were transferred to the hog.
Soul Food ‘s private joke is that the poor were able to take these “leavings” and make so many delicacies of them. And there’s more than one tale told of the master sneaking a nibble from a pickled pig’s feet jar left within his reach.
Pork experts may argue forever about where the fist pig appeared in history. But most authorities agree that American breeds of swine stem from the European wild boar and the East Indian pig. It took a long time to domesticate swine because Nomadic tribes didn’t fancy the lumbering, slow-moving animal. Besides, shepherds accustomed to living with sheep, cattle and horses found the odor of a pig sty a little hard to take.
Early pig herders were looked upon with contempt and the animal itself fell from grace in the Hebrew and Moslem religions. If left untended, a domesticated pig will revert in a few generations to a wild state. Their fat bodies will turn lean and hard to they’ll again sprout long tusks. The feared Razorback of the United States probably has a fat sluggish ancestor brought into the country by Spanish explorers.
Hernando De Soto is given credit for bringing the first hogs to America. When De Soto’s army arrived in Tampa Bay in 1539, there were 13 pigs among the hundreds of soldiers and horses. The Army began its treacherous trek from the Everglades of Florida to the Ozarks of Missouri. Despite the hardships of the journey, De Soto’s hog herd had grown to about 700 in the three years since he left Tampa Bay. And all along the way, he probably lost runaway hogs into the forest and traded others to Indians.
Columbus brought eight hogs to the West Indies on his second voyage in 1493 as foundation stock. Thirteen years later, settlers in the same area found themselves confronted with hordes of offspring from the first eight. But these had turned into vicious wild swine which were killing cattle.
For a long time in the colonies, the pig was not considered a source of tasty food, but was largely tolerated because his meat was easy to cure and preserve. No one considered herding hogs; they ran wild in the countryside and nobody seemed to care much if one were stolen.
But as the early scruffy pigs began to munch on the native corn, a different animal began to emerge. In remarkable fashion, the bony boar got fatter and tastier. Moreover, pig raisers discovered to their glee that, unlike any other animal, the pig can increase its weight one-hundred-fifty fold in the first eight months of life. Incidentally, as good as corn proved to be for pigs, the pigs were even better for the local corn industry. Farmers found that letting nature make hog fat out of corn was much more profitable and nutritious then just marketing corn as corn.
In the South, and in Virginia especially, pig raisers fed their herds on peanuts instead of corn and achieved a totally different-tasting ham. The Virginia ham became a classic and breeders would consider no other feed for their hogs.
But there were still plently of ways to use up the corn in Virginia and throughout the south. Borrowing from the Indian and his own heritage, the 19th century Southerner – Black and White alike – accomplished corn wizardry at every meal. At breakfast, corn became pancakes, waffles, grits and muffins. Other meals featured corn pones, cakes, breads, puddings and cooked corn and hominy.
Corn pone is a variety of Indian corn cake or “appone”. To make it, Indians mixed corn flour and water and spread out broad, flat cakes on a wood platter. The cakes were covered with hot ashes and cooked. White settlers generally preferred cooking the Indian batter over heat without the ashes and this technique produced plain corn pone. Settlers who did follow the traditional Indian method came to call their pones “ash cake.”
A similar item was “hoecake”, which was basically the same Indian batter cooked on the blade of a hoe or a shingle. Hoecake was popular at supper with gravy or was often actually prepared in the fields while working. And, of course, cornbread was then – as it still is – a popular accompaniment to many meals.
Hominy corn and its resulting “grits” were also in wide demand by Soul Food fanciers. Basically just hulled corn, hominy was soaked in very weak lye, washed and boiled until it was tender. It was often served instead of potatoes. Ground into tiny pieces, hominy becomes grits. Traditionally a breakfast dish, grits are usually eaten with butter and milk or butter and pepper. Fried grits and fish are another popular combination. And grits can be made into breads, puddings, and waffles.
Spoon bread (actually nearer a pudding) is one of the better-known Southern corn recipes. It traces its origins to the Indian porridge called “suppawn.” Another well-known treat is the Hush Puppy. The name stems from stories of slaves gathering around an iron pot to cook catfish and corn pones in fat. On the outer edges of the circle would sit the hounds, whiffing the savors from the pot. Occasionally, a hound could quiet his hunger no longer and would bark. Usually, the hound would be noticed with a pone piece tossed his way with the words, “Hush, puppy!” Knowing dogs, it’s doubtful the words had much effect, but the name stuck to the pones anyway.
Achieving authenticity with some of these corn delicacies depends on strict attention to the kind or corn used. In breads, for example, purists look for Boone County White, a species started on the banks of the Wabash River. But for most cooks, it’s enough to know that Southerners mainly relied on varieties of dent corn. Cooking with another strain (such as flint corn) will result in a distinctly different product.
Mixing other vegetables with corn produces such items as succotash – another treat borrowed from the Indians. Originally “misickquatash”, as the Indians called it, was composed of corn and kidney beans cooked in bear grease. It may have been one of the first dishes friendly Indians introduced to the Pilgrims. It was later modified into a combination of corn and lima beans, seasoned with salt pork.
Salt pork (or bacon) seasoning was the key to many Soul Food vegetable preparations, particularly the greens. Also essential to the seasoning were vinegar and hot pepper sauce. In part, the heavy seasoning was used to disguise the bitterness of available wild vegetables. And seasoning was also needed to heighten the taste of the homegrown varieties, which were rather bland.
Here again, the slave was often left with vegetables the master didn’t want. For example, the turnip was popular at upper-crust tables but the turnip greens were tossed away. (This attitude prevails in most grocery stores today. Although turnips are readily available in the vegetable sections, it may take some searching to find a store – particularly a supermarket – that stocks any fresh turnip greens.)
Some of the other common greens available to the poor were mustard greens, kale, collard greens and chards. These were the most usual domesticated varieties of greens. In addition, there was an abundance of edible greens growing wild; Dockweek, pigweed, purslane, lambs-quarters (or goosefoot), marsh marigold leaves, pokeweed, emerging ferns, young milkweed shoots and dandelions. BUT MANY WILD GREENS ARE POISONOUS IN WHOLE OR IN PART. The pokeweed, for example, has edible shoots but the root and leaf are poisonous. A cook, therefore, should approach any strange wild greens with caution.
The most-often confused vegetable in the South is the yam, which is mistaken for the sweet potato, which in turn is not a potato at all. Only the dark orange tuber called yam has ever been eaten in the South, but the sweet potato (a Yankee marigold not grown in the South) has gotten the credit in a number of recipes. The confusion is undoubtedly beyond repair and such traditional servings as “Sweet Potato” Pie will forever be a misnomer. Interestingly, there are tubers similar to the yam grown in Africa and called “nyams”, but a direct link between American and African plants and names has never been clearly established.
The watermelon, however, did definitely come to this country from Africa, either during the slave trade or earlier. The watermelon thrived under cultivation in the South and was highly favored by the slaves as well as the upper classes.
The black-eyed pea is still Soul Food’s superstition vegetable. Even nowadays, it’s a rare Southerner who can feel comfortable on New Year’s Day without a dish of black-eyed peas for good luck. For the occasion, the peas are most often prepared as Hopping John, a seasoned blend of peas and rice. It’s believed Hopping John takes its name either from a practice of children hopping around the table before the dish was served or from the nickname of an energetic waiter who is otherwise forgotten.
Outside of pork and corn, rice may rank as the next most common staple of the Dixie diet. Introduced by Europeans, rice naturally adapted to the moist tropical climate of the South and became readily available for a wide variety of dishes. Its tradition is strong in Creole cookery, which in turn has had an influence on Soul Food. Many of the Gumbos, like Gumbo Z’Herbes, combine methods used in the Congo to prepare greens with Indian ways of using herbs. Others of the gumbos combine Indian and French styles adapted by Blacks. A dish like the famed Jambalaya of New Orleans reflects some new Spanish techniques that began to filter through the South in the 1700’s. Although Creole cookery remains a distinct division all to itself, there are traces of its influence in almost all Southern dishes.
Wild rice is a variation that is Indian in origin. Technically, wild rice is not a real rice but a grass seed native to both North America and Eastern Asia. The Sioux and Chippewa once fought wars over wild rice. Although slaves came in contact with wild rice preparations, its relative unavailability probably kept it from being widely used.
In general, rice was a great “filling” whose bulk felt comfortable to empty stomachs. As such, it finds itself in many a modern Soul Food soup pot. The slave was naturally attracted to soups and stews as a way to spruce up whatever was on hand at the moment – be it hen, beef, pork, squirrel or all of them at the same time. The soup and stew themselves, of course, were useful for stretching a scarce amount of meat a long way.
Although individuals made smaller portions, consider the ingredients of the massive Burgoos used to feed armies, field workers and political gatherings. One old recipe requires “800 pounds of lean beef with no bones or fat, one dozen squirrels for each 100 gallons and 240 pounds of fat hens or roosters, besides potatoes, cabbage, tomatoes, carrots and other vegetables.” Blackbirds have also been known to end up in a burgoo from time to time. Slaves, of course, weren’t officially invited to the big political rallies, but they were on hand as cooks and adapted the mammoth recipes to their own homes later.
Along the many rivers, creeks and streams of the South, a handy ingredient for soup and stews was terrapin. However, the ready availability was offset by the complications of preparing the meat. For starters, the turtle first had to be parblanched, drained and cooled. When cool enough to handle, the turtle had to be tediously scrubbed. Next a plunge into boiling water for almost an hour until the claws could easily be pulled out. After draining came the tough job of prying the shell apart. Then it was necessary to separate the liver from the gall, save the eggs, skin the carcass and remove the meat.
This prodigious job – called “turning the turtle” – was worth the effort for those who had to do it. The modern cook will probably prefer to start with canned or frozen turtle meat.
In Southern rivers, the catfish is plentiful and easy to catch. Although a bit bony for many tastes, the catfish is flavorful and was a favorite with slaves. For those with the patience to pick between the bones, a meal of catfish and Hush Puppies is a delight. Oysters and crab, too, were available to the poor who lived near the oceans and swamps.
Among the fowl, chicken was the cheapest and most available domestic bird. Southern Fried Chicken remains a classic American food item. But the slaves also became adept at converting some of the less-desirable chicken parts into pot pies, gumbos, hash, cakes and chicken ‘n dumplings.
There is nothing that can be called exclusively a Soul Food dessert. The poor man struggles just to keep his stomach satisfied with the basic food needs. But no doubt the slave got a chance occasionally to try some of the many Southern desserts of his time, like molasses pie, fruit fritters, apple pandowdy, pecan pie and similar delicacies.
In modern times, there are lots of people who still eat and enjoy Soul Food because they can’t afford “finer” food. But the ultimate tribute to the tastiness of Soul Food is the number of eating-places that cater to people with spending money who want to buy Soul Food already cooked. The local barbecue pit is one of the best examples, with its pork links and ribs and ‘tater pie. And there are more and more Soul Food restaurants, dealing exclusively in food that once would never have been considered by anyone dining out.
But none of this is so surprising. As we said in the beginning:
Soul Food is too good to ignore.

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