After sharing about our rich history of “Soul Music”, I felt it would be great to learn more about our culture and its beginnings when it comes to “Soul Food”
Wikipedia has an excellent source of exhaustive information; so much that I’m only doing except from the site.
Except taken from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Soul food recipes have pre-slavery influences, as West African and European foodways were adapted to the environment of the region.[3][34] Soul food originated in the home cooking of the rural Southern United States or the "Deep South" during the time of slavery, using locally gathered or raised foods and other inexpensive ingredients.[35][36] Rabbits, squirrels, and deer were often hunted for meat.
Fish, frogs, crawfish, turtles, shellfish, and crab were often collected from fresh waters, salt waters, and marshes.[37][38] Soul food cookery began when African American/Black American enslaved people learned to make do with what they were given to eat by their enslavers: leftovers and the undesirable parts of animals such as ham hocks, hog jowls and pigs' feet, ears, skin, and intestines, which white plantation owners did not eat.[39][40]
Soul food was created by enslaved African Americans, who created meals out of minimal ingredients.[41] Slaves combined their knowledge of West-Central African cooking methods with techniques borrowed from Native Americans and Europeans, thus creating soul food.[42][9]
Enslaved people in the American South cooked the African guinea fowl and paired it with rice, a combination common in the foodways of sub-Saharan Africa.
Pork and corn were two staple items in the Southern United States for both slave owners and slaves. Many of the foods integral to the cuisine originated in the limited foodstuffs that poor southern subsistence farmers had at hand. This in turn was reflected in the rations given to enslaved people their enslavers.
Enslaved people were typically given a peck of cornmeal and 3–4 pounds of pork per week, and those rations formed the basis of African American soul food.[43] Most enslaved people needed to consume a high-calorie diet to replenish the calories spent working long days in the fields or performing other physically arduous tasks.[44] The slave owners would have smoked ham and corn pudding while the enslaved were left with the offal.[45][46]
The leftovers and scraps from meals cooked for the "big houses" (plantation houses) were called "juba" by the enslaved. They were put in troughs on Sundays for the slaves to eat. The term "juba" occurs in numerous African languages, and folk knowledge records that early on it had the meaning of "little bits" of food.[47][48]
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FYI- most of those foods were not good enough for the slaveowners to eat. Look how things have turned around and these foods are popular and people of all walks of life eat this delicious food. Sharing is caring about us being educated about our history.
His handmaiden, Betty A. Burnett ~ burnettministries.org
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