Soul Food & Southern Cooking

I am white. My ancestors were various shades of european, as is the case for most white people in America. As such, I know next to nothing about the African-American culture shown in both Soul Food and Once Upon A Time When We Were Colored. I’ve never had most of the traditional “soul food” we see in the films, except for mac and cheese. 

The families in these films do not look like mine. The culture they share is not the same as mine. The ethnic identity they show through their food is not like mine. So on the surface, it’s hard to find a touchstone to understand their stories from a cultural angle. However, when I read the article by Robin Balthrope, I started to understand how, much like the comparison between Tortilla Soup and Eat Drink Man Woman, food can again bridge the gap between the African-American families in the movies and my own family.

The Balthrope article mentions Big Mama’s “four pinches of this,” technique of cooking measurements. Almost every recipe in my family works by similar methods, much to the chagrin of anyone who asks for the recipes. I remember one year when we visited my family in West Virginia, my sister watched and took notes as my grandmother made her homemade biscuits. Whenever we asked our grandmother for the recipe, she couldn’t tell us how much flour or butter or water she used. She just did what she knew felt right from experience. The only way to learn her recipe was to see for ourselves. 

The overlap between southern cooking and soul food is no secret, and the reasons for those similarities have to be at least partly attributed to the history of slavery in the south, so it’s not a very pretty story to examine. While I can’t pretend that isn’t a part of southern food’s history, I can use it as a window to the cultures that I might otherwise have trouble understanding.

At my grandmother’s house, I see what it means to cook from the heart. I see what it looks like to make the most of the little food you may have, and what it looks like to celebrate family and love with an abundant sunday meal. And while I will never be able to fully understand African-American culture, there are some things that I can understand, if for no other reason than the fact that oftentimes, food and family is universal.