The Black Plate: Soul Food’s Long March To Freedom

Part I: From Seed to Soul

By Stephanie Gadlin

The aroma rises before dawn on a Sunday morning; red beans simmering low with smoked turkey, the sharp whiff of vinegar and pepper in the greens; crispy fried chicken or baked fish, seasoned to perfection with spices; creamy, tangy and crusty baked macaroni and cheese, followed by a big slice of buttery pound cake and scoop of the heavy sweetness of butter pecan ice cream that had been churned on salty ice.

In the kitchen, a cast-iron skillet heats to crackling perfection, waiting to receive chicken that has been seasoned, floured, and prayed over. The Black plate is filled, and hungry bellies follow, often as family stories, tall tales, laughter, and lessons are shared. This is the altar of Black Heritage Cooking (BHC), and the meal being prepared is more than sustenance.

It is Soul food. It is the edible autobiography of a people.

It is a cuisine and culinary techniques forged in the cooking fires of West African nations, tempered in the crucible of the Great Maafa (Great Calamity) and the Middle Passage; hardened in the plantation kitchens of the antebellum South, expanded by travels and shared heritage throughout the Diaspora and politicized during the Black Power movement into what Stokely Carmichael called “edible Black Power.”

This is a cuisine as complex and layered as Black American existence itself—at once a survival mechanism, a celebration, and a cultural declaration of existence. It is a culinary tradition that fed a nation and upon which nearly all so-called American dishes are built. It has been both venerated and vilified by both those who inherited it and others who seek to commodify and claim its recipes as their own, while denying the truth it tells.

“Soul food is the intellectual invention and property of African Americans,” writes Frederick Douglass Opie, the Babson College food historian whose book “Hog and Hominy” traces this cuisine from the Atlantic slave trade to the Black Power movement. “Soul is the style of rural folk culture. Soul is Black spirituality and experiential wisdom. And soul is putting a premium on suffering, endurance, and surviving with dignity.”

To understand the dishes that define BHC today is to understand the story of a people. Soul food is not merely a collection of recipes and cooking styles; it is the receipts documenting centuries of resistance, resilience, adaptation, triumph and celebration.

Black foodways sit inside several overlapping economies: restaurants, grocery/CPG, and agriculture, with Black ownership playing a powerful role. According to the Growth Market Reports, in 2024, the global soul food restaurant market was estimated at about USD 4.22 billion, with projected growth to $7.63 billion by 2033 at roughly 6.7 percent annual growth.

The report also noted that North America generates over 55 percent of that revenue (around $2.32 billion), and the United States is described as the epicenter of commercial soul food.

The U.S. restaurant industry has a higher proportion of minority- and women-owned businesses than the overall private sector. Based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Annual Business Survey and Nonemployer Statistics by Demographics programs, 19 percent of restaurant firms are Asian-owned, 14 percent are Hispanic-owned, and 9 percent are Black- or African American-owned.

For Black consumers specifically, the average spend per trip with soul food products in the cart is about $79.17, versus $25.37 when those items are not present, indicating that soul food products materially increase ticket size.

Despite their anti-DEI policies and campaigns to destabilize public schools with privately held, publicly funded charter operations, Walmart captures about 31.7 percent of all grocery trips that include soul food items among Black consumers, far above its 13.8 percent share of their overall grocery trips, which shows how heavily this category flows through big box chains rather than independent Black grocers.

Among Black diners, 75 percent say they are likely to choose restaurants, food trucks, diners, cafes, and grills that offer soul food dishes when dining out, which keeps demand high even as ownership remains unstable due to a lack of access to capital and other economic and geographic factors. Chefs are finding new and creative ways to interpret traditional dishes that have long been staples in Black households, bringing customers back for more.

But where did these dishes truly begin? According to Adrian Miller, author of “Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time,” to understand BHC, one must journey back thousands of miles and hundreds of years—to the cooking fires of West Africa. 

Foods that Define Us

Consider the fried chicken, known as “Yard Bird,” the poultry that wandered outside their coops, was also dubbed the “Gospel Bird,” thus named because it graced the table on Sundays and whenever the preacher came to dinner. As a guest, the minister was offered the best parts of the chicken before the children and others were served their portions.

The technique of batter-dipping poultry and frying it in deep fat traces directly to West African women who fried Guinea hens in palm oil and shea butter long before any enslaved cook ever touched a cast-iron skillet in Virginia. In Africa, chickens were sacred birds, reserved for religious ceremonies and honored guests. That sanctity crossed the ocean intact.

The collard greens that simmer for hours with smoked meat and spices, producing the prized “potlikker” that soaks into cornbread, echo the West African tradition of cooking bitter leaf and sweet potato greens in long-simmered, heavily seasoned stews. Black-eyed peas, native to Africa and cultivated there since the Middle Ages, became the foundation of dishes like Hoppin’ John, eaten on New Year’s Day for luck because the enslaved understood that fortune was not given but earned. Red beans and rice, the Monday tradition of New Orleans, mirrors the West African meal structure of legumes and grain that sustained entire civilizations.

Macaroni and cheese was once a European luxury, but it was enslaved cooks in plantation “Big House” kitchens who mastered and transformed it into a dish that now anchors every family reunion and church dinner. It was mastered and perfected into what has become a U.S. staple by the enslaved chef James Hemings in the kitchen of President Thomas Jefferson.

Sweet potato pie emerged when Black cooks, denied access to the African nyami (yams) they remembered, substituted the American tuber, and created what has become the quintessential soul food dessert.

Red velvet cake, with its deep crimson hue, carries cultural resonance and is the official dessert of Juneteenth. Red beverages and foods hold significance across the African diaspora, from the hibiscus tea of Senegal to the sorrel of the Caribbean. And butter pecan ice cream owes its existence to the pecans that enslaved people gathered throughout the South, nuts that became central to Black confections from pralines to frozen desserts.

The color symbolizes the blood and sacrifice of enslaved Africans, as well as the spiritual power in many Western African cultures.

Roots in African Soil

The culinary sophistication of West Africa before the slave trade defies every stereotype that Europeans later imposed upon the continent and its people. Historians have identified three distinct carbohydrate zones that defined the region’s foodways: the Rice Zone of Senegal, Gambia, and Sierra Leone, where native red rice had been cultivated since at least 1500 B.C.; the Grain Zone stretching from Senegal to Nigeria, where millet and sorghum were dietary staples; and the Root Crop Zone of Benin, Ghana, and Nigeria, where the yam was not merely food but a divine gift with its own creation myths and harvest festivals.

“Soul food is an amalgamation of West African societies and cultures, as well as an adaptation to conditions of slavery and freedom in the Americas,” Dr. Opie said.

That amalgamation began with meal structures that would prove remarkably portable. A typical West African meal consisted of a starch accompanied by a stew or sauce made of vegetables, spices, and protein, a pattern that persists in soul food cooking to this day.

Professor Jessica B. Harris, the James Beard award-winning scholar, is often called the “Dean of African American food studies.” She spent three decades documenting these connections. In her book “High on the Hog,” she describes the traditional meal structure: “A soupy stew over a starch or a grilled or fried animal protein accompanied by a vegetable sauce and/or a starch. It has been that way for centuries and remains that way today. Any Southerner who has ever sopped the potlikker from a mess of greens with a piece of cornbread would be right at home,” she said.

West African cooks used palm oil and shea butter for frying, healthier fats that would later be replaced by lard in the Americas. They seasoned liberally with hot peppers and salt, techniques that survived the racial, social, spiritual, familial, and psychological trauma of kidnapping, sexual exploitation and forced labor.

Fish was the primary protein, often preserved by smoking, salting, or drying, a practice that explains the affinity for smoked meats in soul food and the proliferation of smokehouses built by Black farmers and barbecue entrepreneurs.

Among the Igbo people of Nigeria, the yam held sacred status. Harvest festivals celebrated its cultivation, and the preparation of fufu—pounded yam formed into balls and used to scoop up stews—was a communal ritual. Cowpeas, known to Americans as black-eyed peas, were native to the region and cultivated since medieval times. Okra, watermelon, and sesame were all African crops that would cross the Atlantic.

The Columbian Exchange of the 16th and 17th centuries introduced New World crops to Africa, such as maize, chilis, sweet potatoes, cassava, and West African farmers adapted them seamlessly into existing foodways. This adaptability, this genius for culinary negotiation, would prove essential when Africans found themselves in chains on ships bound for the Americas.

Slave traders understood one brutal truth: the captives had to eat, or they would die, and dead cargo brought no profit. Colonizers and slavers studied West African dietary preferences and provisioned their ships accordingly. Those from rice-growing regions received rice; those from the yam belt received yams; those from the grain zones received corn and millet. The infamous “slabber sauce”—a mixture of palm oil, flour, water, and chili—was forced upon the enslaved, an acknowledgment that familiar flavors might keep them alive.

“African Americans developed a cultural identity through soul and the associated foodways of people of African descent over hundreds of years,” Opie observes. That identity was forged first in the Middle Passage, where African women were assigned to process grain and husk rice during the voyage, keeping ancestral cooking knowledge alive even as their bodies were transported toward bondage.

On American plantations, the rationing system was designed for control, not nutrition. A typical weekly allowance consisted of a peck of corn and a pound of meat, often spoiled, according to numerous slave narratives and other historical accounts. Enslaved cooks received meats the master’s family refused: the chitterlings (entrails), trotters (feet), snouts, jowls, and neck bones. This was the “kingdom of necessity” that Opie describes in a world where survival depended on transforming refuse into sustenance.

But necessity birthed genius. Enslaved cooks applied African techniques of long simmering to break down tough connective tissue, rendering offal tender. They seasoned heavily with the peppers and salt they remembered from home—cayenne replacing the melegueta pepper of the African coast. They used lard in place of palm oil, sweet potatoes in place of yams, and cornmeal porridges in place of millet-based ancestors. Where masters permitted garden plots, they cultivated the crops they knew, such as black-eyed peas, watermelon, greens that whites mistook for weeds, and the more nutritious sweet potatoes rather than the white ones their enslavers preferred.

The soul food tradition, as noted by Black culinary historians, was developed by “people who were grubbing for a living” who “didn’t have much time for writing cookbooks” because they carried recipes “in the heads” of cooks who transformed forced deprivation into cultural dignity.

Down Home Goes North

Between 1916 and 1970, approximately six million African Americans fled the Jim Crow South for northern and western cities in what became known as the Great Migration. They carried with them their rural tastes and a determination to recreate the flavors of home. But urban life imposed new constraints that would transform the cuisine.

Limitations to fresh produce and well-sourced grocery stores proved challenging for migrants who were used to growing and raising their own food sources. The proliferation of tin-canned goods, filled with preservatives, heavy salt and high-fructose corn syrup, replaced mason jars of fruits and vegetables cultivated by elder women in expanding urban families.

In the rural South, Black communities preferred water-ground white cornmeal; yellow cornmeal was considered “chicken feed,” fit only for livestock. But northern industrial mills produced primarily yellow corn, making the preferred white cornmeal difficult to obtain. Urban Black cooks adapted by adding sugar to their cornbread recipes thus compensating for the coarser, less naturally sweet yellow meal. This adaptation cemented the soul food tradition of sweet, golden cornbread, distinguishing it forever from the unsweetened white cornbread of the rural South.

The addition of extra sugar to satiate palettes, salts and preservatives to mask or enhance lesser quality products, limited access to quality food sources, and socioeconomic stress and racial violence, led to an increase in food-related illnesses such as Type II diabetes, heart disease, obesity and various cancers among African American families. This, along with the proliferation of fast-food chains targeting the Black consumer with quick knockoffs, led to authentic, slow-cooked “soul food” being falsely labeled as unhealthy and associated with disease and premature death.

Housing constraints also shaped Black cooking methods. Many migrants lived in overcrowded tenements or “kitchenettes” with only scheduled access to a shared stove called “kitchen privileges.” High utility costs discouraged long baking and roasting. Cooks turned instead to quick frying and stovetop simmering—techniques that used less fuel but preserved the flavors of home.

“We have developed a language and a vocabulary of food that is uniquely ours,” Professor Harris writes. That vocabulary shifted in the urban North. Before the 1960s, African Americans called these dishes “down-home food,” “country cooking,” or simply “real good cooking.” The term “soul” entered the lexicon through music, jazz musicians in the 1940s and 1950s used “soul” and “funky” to describe styles rooted in the Black church, sounds that resisted white appropriation labeled as “southern” or “country” cooking.

The craving for heritage dishes prepared with traditional or regional methods, and both men and women having to work full-time to feed their families, led to a proliferation of soul food restaurants, owned and operated by African American chefs, home cooks, professional caterers, and entrepreneurs. These establishments not only served delicious meals reminiscent of Down South but also served as employment engines, and social spots and political hubs within their respective neighborhoods.

By the 1960s, “soul” had spilled over into food. In 1966, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee issued a position paper that transformed the vocabulary of Black dining. Chitterlings and ham hocks were named “vital to the Black experience.” Soul food became “edible Black Power,” a political statement as much as a meal, a declaration that the cuisine born of slavery was now a badge of cultural pride rather than shame.

“Soul was the cultural arm of the Black power movement,” Opie explains. It was “a declaration of the right and the necessity to be different.”

What began in West African villages, the one-pot stews, the fried fish, the communal gatherings around the cooking fire, traveled across an ocean of sorrow and emerged transformed but unbroken. Black Heritage Cooking is not merely about what we eat, but about who we are. It is a cuisine that testifies.

[In Part 2 of this Black History Month series, the Crusader examines the economic and political power of Black-owned restaurants and how Soul Food fueled the movement for justice. To learn more visit Stephanie’s interactive website for this series at www.theblackplate.org.