Place remaining drippings in a skillet and turn on medium heat. Add boiling water and 1 tablespoon bacon drippings. Soul BreadĢ cups sifted cornmeal 2½ cups boiling water 2 tablespoons bacon drippings She also served tomato juice made from home-canned tomatoes and for dessert, homemade pound cake. Butter for the bread was on the table, along with fruit jars of homemade chowchow to spoon over the beans and peppery vinegar to spoon over the chitterlings. Our hostess passed the corn bread in its metal baking pan. Another baking dish on the stove held candied sliced sweet potatoes. From pots on the range in the kitchen guests helped themselves to collard greens, dried navy beans, and stewed chitterlings. The meal included fried chicken cooked to perfection and served from a baking dish on the dining room table. Soon after the bread came from the oven, she announced: “It’s ready. As the bread baked, she sliced cucumbers, tomatoes, and onions into a glass bowl. Between the trips from the kitchen and the front door, she managed to stir up and bake a pan of corn bread. And so she invited me to one of her luncheons. “I can’t explain soul food, I have to cook it for you,” she said. Some years ago, to help define soul food for people who did not grow up on it, I interviewed Minnie Brown, whose work with the North Carolina home economics extension service took her all over the state. By the same token, to understand soul food, you have to grow up on it. To understand a southern woman, you have to be one. The wise answer they received was that there is little chance of predicting or understanding a southern woman. When Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro were running on the Democratic ticket for president and vice-president of the United States, the question of predicting how southern women would vote came up. Must be something to keep body and soul together.”Ī certain mystique has been woven around soul food-the same way there is some mystery surrounding the southern woman and out-and-out consternation in the face of a card-carrying southern belle. If my grandmother were living and I asked her the meaning of the term, she would probably answer: “Land sakes, I don’t know. One thing is for sure and that is we never heard of anyone sitting down to a meal of soul food. The list of soul foods tended to include the dishes we grew up on in our part of the country. (For example, see Commissioner Frank Crane’s letter in Chapter 7.) Pigs’ intestines still have their adherents, so in his article John Robinson included a recipe from Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine, by Norma Jean and Carole Darden (Fawcett Crest, 1978), one of the better books on soul food.Īs the expression soul food turned up more and more often in print and as the food was more widely served in restaurants, I began to try to learn more about the subject. Hungry blacks would labor for hours to turn these castoffs into tasty meals.” That sounds as if only hungry blacks ate chitlins, but such was not the case. “They were part of the pig that plantation owners had no use for. “Chitterlings were once survival food for blacks,” according to Knight-Ridder writer Jane Snow. In the old tradition, black slaves in the pre-Civil War South ate them out of necessity. John Robinson, writing in the Boston Globe in 1984, tried to identify soul foods but singled out only one: “One food that is unarguably associated with American black traditions is chitterlings, pronounced CHIT-lins, unless you are hopelessly refined.” Chitlins, as he continued, are pigs’ intestines.

Halston named the offerings “Nouvelle Soul Cuisine.” Each noon from four to twenty-four individuals gathered around Halston’s table, which was filled with foods such as fried chicken, lima bean soup, and peach cobbler prepared by Ms. Soul food did take a step in the direction of the highfalutin when Viola McKee, a native of Winston-Salem, was in charge of the kitchen for the executive dining room for Halston, the designer, in Manhattan, where he entertained the likes of Liza Minnelli and Elizabeth Taylor. As to fine southern cuisine being in or out, the general southern reaction to the announcement that it was “in” was that it had never been out. In 1984 the late Nina Hyde, Washington Post fashion editor, put fine southern cuisine on the “in” list and rich European cuisine on the “out” list. Some, including meat loaf and mashed potatoes, are called comfort foods. These old favorites were given the name soul food. About the time that the classic French cuisine appeared in a less rich, lower caloric version called nouvelle cuisine, interest in old American favorites increased.

Cooking with nimble nectar