41 Fun Facts About Soul Food

When 'soul food' spread in the 1960s, what did the word 'soul' describe?

Black culture: yet English had joined the two words centuries earlier, using soul food for whatever nourishes the soul.

One of the earliest written uses of the term 'soul food' appears in which 1965 book?

The poet LeRoi Jones, later Amiri Baraka, also published an essay titled 'Soul Food' that argued for the cuisine as part of Black identity.

Under what earlier name did Amiri Baraka publish the article 'Soul Food'?

LeRoi Jones was the name Amiri Baraka wrote under before changing his name; his essay 'Soul Food' answered a claim that Black Americans had no cuisine of their own.

Freda DeKnight, author of the 1948 cookbook A Date with a Dish, was the first food editor of which magazine?

Ebony: later editions of A Date with a Dish were even renamed The Ebony Cookbook.

Per historian Adrian Miller, Black cooks distinguish their corn bread from white Southern versions by adding what?

White Southerners, Miller notes, say that once you put sugar in cornbread it becomes cake.

Which dessert did the Nation of Islam promote while rejecting soul food dishes?

Bean pie: Elijah Muhammad's How to Eat to Live shunned larger beans but praised the small navy bean, the pie's main filling.

By tradition, enslaved African women smuggled seeds to the Americas by hiding them where?

In their braided hair, oral tradition holds: the women hid seeds against an unknown future, hoping they could someday be planted in the new land.

Which African bird, brought to the Americas via the slave trade, fed enslaved people on plantations?

Guinea fowl were carried from Africa to the West Indies, and many people keep the birds because they eat ticks.

Frederick Douglass wrote that enslaved men and women got eight pounds of pork a month, or its equivalent in what?

Fish: slaves sent to fetch the allowance sang wild songs on the way, and Douglass wrote that such singing showed sorrow, not contentment.

Which African American holiday, created in 1966, includes a communal feast called the Karamu?

Kwanzaa: Maulana Karenga created it after the 1965 Watts riots, drawing on African harvest festivals, and its Karamu feast usually falls on December 31.

What did archaeological digs of slave cabins suggest about enslaved people's meals?

They were mostly stews and one-pot dishes: cabins held more bowls than flatware, while planter households left more plates, pointing to separate cuts of meat.

Which enslaved man in George Washington's household was allowed to sell kitchen leftovers for his own money?

Hercules Posey sold the presidential kitchen's leftovers in Philadelphia, then escaped from Mount Vernon on February 22, 1797, Washington's 65th birthday.

Chitterlings are which part of the pig?

The intestines: enslaved people were often left such scraps while owners kept the better cuts, yet chitterlings are eaten in Europe too, as in France's andouillette sausage.

What is 'pot liquor'?

The liquid left after boiling greens is pot liquor, or pot likker; the vitamins that leach out of slow-cooked collards end up in it, so it was drunk from the pot or sopped up with bread.

Which pie is the traditional soul food holiday dessert, in place of pumpkin pie?

Sweet potato pie: enslaved Africans likely used the American sweet potato in place of the yams of their homeland, and the two tubers became interchangeable in Southern cooking.

Eating Hoppin' John with collard greens on which holiday is believed to bring prosperity?

New Year's Day is the traditional date: the collard greens stand for paper money, and some families slip a coin under the dishes for luck.

Southern field peas such as crowder peas belong to which Old World plant domesticated in Africa?

The cowpea, Vigna unguiculata, was domesticated in Africa, and a deep taproot makes it so drought-tolerant that it can yield a crop with little rain.

What job does okra do in a pot of gumbo?

Thicken the broth: okra reached Louisiana through the slave trade, yet gumbos thickened with filé powder traditionally leave the okra out.

Botanically, collard greens share one plant species with which common vegetables?

Cabbage and broccoli: farmers bred one wild cabbage, Brassica oleracea, into collards, cabbage, broccoli, kale and cauliflower, some so changed they barely look related.

Hominy is corn treated with an alkali in a process called what?

Nixtamalization, a Mesoamerican technique, soaks corn in lime or lye, a step that helps protect people who live on corn from the deficiency disease pellagra.

Which pancake brand, long criticized as a racist 'mammy' stereotype, was renamed Pearl Milling Company in 2021?

Aunt Jemima: the new name revives the Pearl Milling Company, the 1880s business that created the original ready-made pancake mix.

Which American tradition made waffles with chicken and gravy a common Sunday supper by the 1860s?

Pennsylvania Dutch: hotels later sold chicken-and-waffle dinners to tourists, making the dish a reason to visit the region.

Cracklins, stirred into crackling bread, are fried pieces of what?

Pork skin: cracklins are the crisp bits left when skin and fat are rendered into lard, so lard-making also gave cooks the crunch for crackling bread.

Which mid-20th-century seasoned salt is a staple in Black American kitchens?

Lawry's seasoned salt reached grocery stores in 1938, and since one shaker mixes salt with paprika, turmeric, onion and garlic, many Black home cooks use it on nearly everything but desserts.

Rufus Estes, author of the 1911 cookbook Good Things to Eat, had worked for which company?

The Pullman railway car service hired Estes in 1883, and he ran private railroad cars for travellers including Presidents Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland.

Sylvia Woods bought the Harlem luncheonette that became Sylvia's with money borrowed from whom?

Her mother: Woods had spent years waiting tables at that same luncheonette before its owner offered to sell it to her in 1962.

Which Atlanta soul food restaurant did Martin Luther King Jr. use to eat, meet, plan and strategize?

Paschal's, the restaurant the Paschal brothers opened on Hunter Street, fed and hosted King and the SCLC as they planned campaigns; Georgia Gilmore's Montgomery kitchen played a similar role during the bus boycott.

What is the New Orleans restaurant of the 'Queen of Creole Cuisine', a civil-rights-era meeting place, called?

Dooky Chase: Leah Chase invited activists into its upstairs dining room, and Martin Luther King Jr. joined their strategy sessions over meals in the 1960s.

Edna Lewis wove memories of her childhood in Freetown, Virginia, into which 1976 cookbook?

The Taste of Country Cooking, published in 1976, is arranged by season around Freetown, the Virginia community founded by freed people, her grandfather among them.

What is Jessica B. Harris's 2011 book on African-American food, later a Netflix docuseries, titled?

High on the Hog: the series adaptation opens in Benin, where Harris and host Stephen Satterfield tour the country's markets.

Juneteenth commemorates General Granger's order enforcing emancipation in which Texas city in 1865?

Galveston is where Gordon Granger's General Order No. 3 announced in 1865 that all enslaved Texans were free, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation.

Which New York hotel claims credit for inventing red velvet cake?

The Waldorf-Astoria gets the credit, but the cake's true origin is unknown, and the hotel likely built on a recipe already known elsewhere.

Traditional banana pudding is layered with sliced bananas, custard and what?

Vanilla wafers replaced the sponge cake of popular 1890s recipes, and Nabisco's banana pudding recipe on the Nilla Wafers box in the 1940s helped make them standard.

Who wrote and directed the 1997 film Soul Food, about a Chicago family and Sunday dinner?

George Tillman Jr.'s film earned $43.7 million and spawned Showtime's Soul Food series, which ran from 2000 to 2004.

Which actress plays the matriarch Big Mama in the 1997 film Soul Food?

Irma P. Hall plays Big Mama, whose death leaves her close-knit, Sunday-dinner family falling apart.

Per historian Adrian Miller, who took soul food worldwide by opening restaurants abroad after World War II?

Discharged Black servicemen: many who served in Europe stayed overseas, where they met less racism than under Jim Crow at home, and opened restaurants.

James Hemings, Thomas Jefferson's enslaved head chef, trained under French cooks in which city?

Paris is where Hemings trained, including under a cook in the Prince de Condé's household; back home he won his freedom in 1796 after training his brother Peter as Jefferson's cook.

Jim Crow-era nightclubs in Black communities were collectively known by what name?

The Chitlin' Circuit gave Black musicians and comedians a stage under segregation, and in 2025 Beyoncé named her Cowboy Carter tour after it.

Which SNCC leader asked Ben's Chili Bowl to stay open during the riots after King's assassination?

Stokely Carmichael, the former SNCC chairman, asked Ben's Chili Bowl on U Street to stay open past the curfew, and it fed police, firefighters and activists through the 1968 unrest.

Benne seeds, grown by enslaved Gullah people, come from which plant?

Sesame is benne: the seeds reached the Lowcountry in colonial times, and cooks baked them into thin sesame cookies that became a Charleston tradition.

Gullah people celebrated emancipation on 1 January 1863 at Camp Saxton, near which South Carolina town?

Beaufort: the camp stood on the Beaufort River, where the Emancipation Proclamation was read to formerly enslaved soldiers, and Susie King Taylor recalled a grand barbecue.