Journalist, professor, and cookbook author Jessica B. Harris has chronicled the culinary traditions of the African diaspora for 30-plus years, long before “foodways” became a catchphrase. In High on the Hog, she braids together all the strands of this rich heritage.
Soul food has been defined as the traditional African American food of the South as it has been served in black homes and restaurants around the country, but there is wide-ranging disagreement on exactly what that food was. Was it solely the food of the plantation South that was fed to the enslaved: a diet of hog and hominy supplemented with whatever could be hunted or foraged or stolen to relieve its monotony? Was it the traditionally less-noble parts of the pig that were fed to the enslaved, like the chitterlings and hog maws and pigs’ feet, the taste for which had been carried to the North by those who left the South in search of jobs? Was it the foods that nourished those who danced at rent parties in Harlem and who went to work in the armament factories during World War II? Was it the fried chicken that was served by the waiter-carriers who hawked their wares at train stations in Virginia or the chicken that was packed in boxes and nourished those who migrated to Kansas and other parts of the West? Was it the smothered pork chop that turned up in the African American restaurants covered in rich brown gravy or the fluffy cornbread that accompanied it?
Soul food, it would seem, depends on an ineffable quality. It is a combination of nostalgia for and pride in the food of those who came before. In the manner of the Negro spiritual “How I Got Over,” soul food looks back at the past and celebrates a genuine taste palate while offering more than a nod to the history of disenfranchisement of blacks in the United States. In the 1960s, as the history of African Americans began to be rewritten with pride instead of with the shame that had previously accompanied the experience of disenfranchisement and enslavement, soul food was as much an affirmation as a diet. Eating neckbones and chitterlings, turnip greens and fried chicken, became a political statement for many, and African American restaurants that had existed since the early part of the century were increasingly being patronized not only by blacks but also by those in sympathy with the movement. In the North, those who patronized soul food restaurants also included homesick white Southerners as well as the occasional white liberal who wanted a taste of some of the foods from below the Mason-Dixon Line.
As had often been the case in African American society, there was a culinary class divide that must be acknowledged. At one pole were those whose social aspirations led them to eat dishes that emulated the dietary habits of mainstream America and Europe. At the other were those who consumed what was a more traditional African American diet: one that harked back to the slave foods of the South. In the 1960s, soul food based on the slave diet of hog and hominy became a political statement and was embraced by many middle-class blacks who had previously publicly eschewed it as a relic of a slave past. It became popular and even celebrated.
A look at the cookbooks of the period confirms the enormous impact that the term had on the minds and indeed the palates of many. Most African American cookbooks published prior to the 1960s and in the early part of the decade referenced the plantation South or the historic aspect of the recipes with titles like Plantation Recipes, The Melrose Plantation Cookbook (to which folk artist Clementine Hunter made numerous contributions), and the National Council of Negro Women’s Historical Cookbook of the American Negro. Others invoked the name of a well-known local cook or caterer, like Bess Grant’s Cook Book, published in Culver City, California, and Lena Richard’s eponymous cookbook, published in New Orleans, Louisiana. The trend continued through the early 1960s, with such works as His Finest Party Recipes Based on a Lifetime of Successful Catering, by Frank Bellamy of Roswell, Georgia, and A Good Heart and a Light Hand: Ruth L. Gaskins’ Collection of Traditional Negro Recipes, published in Annandale, Virginia.
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, soul food had gained a powerful allure, and a tidal wave of cookbooks with “soul food” in the title was unleashed, including Bob Jeffries’s Soul Food Cookbook, Hattie Rinehart Griffin’s Soul-Food Cookbook, and Jim Harwood and Ed Callahan’s Soul Food Cookbook—all published in 1969. The same year also saw the publication of Princess Pamela’s Soul Food Cookbook, by the owner of an East Village restaurant in New York City that had become a mecca for whites who wanted a taste of “authentic” African American cooking.
If the period of the Civil Rights Movement began with traditional African American cookbooks extolling the virtues of greens, macaroni and cheese, neckbones, chitterlings, and fried chicken, it ended with a transformation of the diet of many African Americans. By the end of the decade and throughout the 1970s, brown rice, smoked turkey wings, tahini, and tofu also appeared on urban African American tables as signs of gastronomic protest against the traditional diet and its perceived limitations to health and well-being, both real or imagined. One of the reasons was the resurgence of the Nation of Islam.
The Nation of Islam (NOI) originated in the early part of the twentieth century but came to national prominence in the 1960s under the leadership of Elijah Muhammad, who preached that peaceful confrontation was not the only way. In Chicago, Detroit, and other large urban areas, the Nation of Islam offered an alternative to the Civil Rights Movement’s civil disobedience, which many felt was unnecessarily docile. It preached an Afro-centric variation of traditional Islam and provided a family-centered culture in which gender roles were clearly defined. Food always played an important role in the work of the Nation. As early as 1945, the NOI had recognized the need for land ownership and also for economic independence and had purchased 145 acres in Michigan. Two years later, it opened a grocery store, a restaurant, and a bakery in Chicago. One of the major tenets of this religion was the eschewing of the behaviors that had been imposed by whites, who were regarded as “blue-eyed devils.” Followers abjured their “slave name,” frequently taking an X in its place and adopted a strictly regimented way of life that included giving up eating the traditional foods that were fed to the enslaved in the South.
NOI leader Elijah Muhammad was extremely concerned about the dietary habits of African Americans and in 1967 published a dietary manual for his followers titled How to Eat to Live; in 1972 he published another, How to Eat to Live, Book 2. As with much about the Nation of Islam, there is considerable contention about Muhammad’s ideas and precepts, which are a combination of traditional Islamic proscriptions with an idiosyncratic admixture of prohibitions that seem personally biased. He vehemently opposed the traditional African American diet, or “slave diet,” as he called it. Alcohol and tobacco were forbidden to Nation of Islam members and pork, in particular, was anathema. Elijah Muhammad enjoined his followers:
Do not eat the swine—do not even touch it. Just stop eating the swine flesh and your life will be expanded. Stay off that grandmother’s old fashioned corn bread and black-eyed peas, and those quick 15 minute biscuits made with baking powder. Put yeast in your bread and let it sour and rise and then bake it. Eat and drink to live not to die.
Pork is haram, or forbidden, to traditional Muslims. Pork, especially the less-noble parts, was also the primary meat fed to enslaved African Americans. Pork in any form was anathema to NOI members, as were collard greens or black-eyed peas seasoned with swine. The refusal of the traditional African American diet of pig and corn was an indictment of its deleterious effects on African American health, but also a backhanded acknowledgment of the cultural resonance that it held for most blacks, albeit one rooted in slavery. Pork had become so emblematic of African American food that the forbidding of it by the Nation of Islam was radical, and the refusal to eat swine immediately differentiated members of the group from many other African Americans as much as the sober dress and bow ties of the men and the hijab-like attire of the women. Forbidding pork made a powerful political statement, but the real culinary hallmark of the Nation was the bean pie—a sweet pie, prepared from the small navy beans that Elijah Muhammad decreed digestible. It was hawked by the dark-suited, bow-tie-wearing followers of the religion along with copies of the Nation’s newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, spreading the Nation’s gospel in both an intellectual and a gustatory manner....
Increasing numbers of African Americans chose to celebrate Kwanzaa in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a part of a growing awareness of their own African roots. The Peace Corps and continuing missionary work by churches black and white sent African Americans to the African continent, resulting in more widespread knowledge of the African Diaspora and expanded gastronomic horizons, and contributed to a growing sense of shared culinary underpinning. In larger cities and college towns, dishes of West African jollof rice and Ghanaian groundnut stew began to be found on dinner tables alongside more traditional favorites.
Then, in 1977, the publication of the autobiography of writer Alex Haley, Roots, and the subsequent television miniseries based on it transformed the way many African Americans thought of themselves and of Africa. Blacks were galvanized by Roots, and large numbers made pilgrimages to the African continent with hopes of discovering their own ancestral origins. (Coinciding with the release of the television miniseries, a travel organization began to offer trips to Dakar, Senegal, for $299, a price that was affordable for many who might otherwise never have traveled to the continent.) They boarded the planes by the hundreds and on the other side of the Atlantic found myriad connections between African American culture and that of the motherland. One major connection they discovered was West Africa’s food. They visited markets and recognized items that had for centuries been associated with African American life: okra, watermelon, and black-eyed peas. They tasted foods that had familiar savors and learned new ways to prepare staples of the African American diet like peanuts, hot chilies, and leafy greens. In Senegal, they tasted the onion-and-lemon-flavored chicken yassa and the national rice-and-fish dish, thieboudiennse; in Ghana, they sampled spicy peanut stews; in Nigeria, they savored a black-eyed pea fritter called an akara. African Americans began to taste the culinary connections between foods they knew and those of the western section of the African continent.
This new knowledge found its way to a larger public, as the avant garde of African American cookbook authors took a more international approach and reflected a sense of the African Diaspora in their work. Vibration Cooking: Or, The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl, by Verta Mae Smart Grosvenor, and The African Heritage Cookbook, by Helen Mendes, look at the traditional foods not just of the American South but also of an international African culinary diaspora and contain recipes for dishes from the African continent and the Caribbean as well as traditional Southern ones....
The 1970s were a time of political consciousness on all fronts. How one dressed—dashiki or three-piece suit or shirt jacket—subtly advertised a point of view. For women, long skirts or short, afro or straightened hair all took on great significance. How one ate was equally fraught with political subtext, and a meal with friends of differing political stripes could be transformed into a minefield of culinary dos and don’ts.
Members of the Nation of Islam were identified by their bow ties and their well-pressed suits. They were also recognized by their diet, which was without any hint of swine. It was a highly codified regimen with foods that, although they were considered healthier than the newly named “soul food,” retained some aspects of the traditional African American taste profile—sugary desserts and well-cooked vegetables. There was no alcohol to be seen, and dessert was more often than not a bean pie—one of the religion’s hallmarks.
Dashiki-clad cultural nationalists ate a diet that was multicultural and infused with international flavor. The calabashes and carved wooden bowls that appeared on their batik tablecloths were likely to be filled with dishes like the spicy jollof rice from western Africa, or the seafood-rich stew of leafy greens known as callaloo from the Caribbean, or a Louisiana file gumbo, or one of the newly created health-food-inspired dishes with a real or ersatz African name. Anything might turn up on their tables.
The upwardly mobile bourgeoisie continued to dine on Eurocentric foods and to emulate the culinary styles that James Beard, Julia Child, and Graham Kerr, the Galloping Gourmet, were bringing to the television sets weekly. Beef bourguignonne, beef Wellington, and cheese fondue were party standbys. In the privacy of their homes or those of their friends, they might indulge in some chitterlings or a slice of watermelon, but unless done to evidence culinary solidarity with others, it was not their public position.
The classic foods of the African American South—stewed okra and butter beans, pork chops and fried chicken—maintained their place at the table as well. These were the foods of rural Southerners and those Northerners and activists who wished to signal their solidarity with the more traditional arm of the Civil Rights Movement. For some, they remained the daily dietary mainstays; but for most, they evolved into the celebration food of family reunions and Sunday dinners.
Those with no special allegiance to any one faction ate what they wished or whatever was placed in front of them. Their tables might groan under a meal of Southern fried chicken and Caribbean rice and peas or be set with the finest family china upon which would be placed chitterlings and a mess of greens. The gastronomically flexible developed a chameleonlike ability to change with the prevailing culinary trend and political view.
By the end of the 1970s, food, like all aspects of African American life, had become a battleground for identity. The period’s multiplicity of gastronomic and political positions and their dietary restrictions were difficult to navigate and confounded more than one diner. The political table wars were fierce, and ostracism, often accompanied by indigestion, awaited anyone who unwittingly crossed the dietary dividing lines. However, the new foods and the myriad cooking styles they brought into the African American culinary lexicon expanded African American taste, globalized the foodways of the African American world, and paved the way for the African American culinary omnivore of the last decades of the twentieth century and the twenty-first century.