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Soul food is an American cuisine, food typically associated with African Americans of the Southern United States. more...

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Although many of the dishes and ingredients included in soul food are unique to this cuisine, others are also standard regional fare and are a part of general Southern cuisine, as well.

The roots of soul food can be traced back to Africa. Some of these foods became part of America’s crops and food. Using discarded meat from the plantation such as pig’s feet, beef tongue or tail, ham hocks, chitterlings (pig small intestines), pig ears, hog jowls, tripe and skin, cooks added onions, garlic, thyme, and bay leaf to enhance the flavor. The slaves were also given discarded tops of vegetables, like the tops of turnips, beets, and dandelions. These items can be found in many soul food dishes today. As slaves began to cook for their masters, they added things like fried chicken and puddings. The term soul food became popular in the 1960s, when the word soul became used in connection with most things African American.

After slavery ended, many African Americans, being poor, could afford only off-cuts of meat, along with offal. Subsistence farming yielded fresh vegetables, and fishing and hunting provided fish and wild game, such as possum, rabbit, squirrel, and sometimes waterfowl.

While soul food originated in the South, soul food restaurants—from fried chicken and fish "shacks" to upscale dining establishments—exist in virtually every African American community in the USA, especially in cities with large African American populations, such as Charleston, Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, Detroit, New York, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Miami, Baltimore, St. Louis and Washington, D.C.

Poor whites and blacks in the South ate many of the same dishes, but styles of preparation sometimes varied. African American soul food generally tends to be spicier than Anglo-American cuisine. The recipes and cooking techniques tended to be handed down orally.

Cookbooks

It was illegal for African slaves to read or write, and as with most rural cuisine, soul food has a primarily oral history. However, since the mid-20th century, many cookbooks highlighting soul food and African American foodways compiled by African Americans have been published and well received. Vertamae Grosvenor's Vibration Cooking, or the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl, originally published in 1970, focused on South Carolina "lowcountry", Geechee, or Gullah, cooking. Its focus on spontaneity in the kitchen—cooking by "vibration"— rather than precisely measuring ingredients, as well as "making do" with ingredients on hand, captured the essence of traditional African American cooking techniques. The simple, healthful, basic ingredients of lowcountry cuisine, like shrimp, oysters, crab, fresh produce, rice and sweet potatoes, made it a bestseller.

Read more at Wikipedia.org