Q 01/05

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

A) Home cooking

B) Black culture

C) Rural life

D) Church suppers

Answer · why

B) Black culture

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

Q 02/05

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

A) Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

B) The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

C) Manchild in the Promised Land

D) The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Answer · why

D) The Autobiography of Malcolm X

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

Q 03/05

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

A) James Baldwin

B) Langston Hughes

C) LeRoi Jones

D) Ralph Ellison

Answer · why

C) LeRoi Jones

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...

Q 04/05

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

A) Jet

B) Ebony

C) Essence

D) Life

Answer · why

B) Ebony

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

Q 05/05

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

A) Bacon fat

B) Whole corn kernels

C) Sugar

D) Buttermilk

Answer · why

C) Sugar

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