Is It Southern Food, or Soul Food?
Todd Richards and Virginia Willis, both authors of recent books on Southern cooking, chew on questions of culture, identity and cuisine.
ATLANTA — When you’re a Southern cook everyone thinks they know what you’re about. You bake your cornbread in a cast-iron skillet. Your kitchen is stocked with grits and greens and grease. You’re probably white or African-American, a churchgoer, a straight woman and a mother. And you learned at your own mother’s apron strings, never wanting to cook anything other than the foods of your own tradition.
More and more Southern cooks are chipping away at that stereotype, both in who they are and what they cook. Two cooks based here — Todd Richards and Virginia Willis — have published cookbooks this year that reflect new ways of thinking about Southern food and the terms that have come to define it.
Mr. Richards, 46, is a self-taught chef with Southern roots; in “Soul: A Chef’s Culinary Evolution in 150 Recipes,” he describes his journey from Chicago, where he grew up, through a culinary career that began in the butcher department at a local Kroger supermarket, continued at the Four Seasons and Ritz-Carlton hotels, and now involves overseeing multiple restaurants here in Atlanta. His book is both a manual and meditation, in chapters moving alphabetically from collards to potatoes, on the forces of history that made him the cook that he is.
Ms. Willis, 51, is a Georgia native, taught the classics by her mother and grandmother, and polished by years spent cooking in France and working in food media in New York. As a gay woman, she felt she had to leave the South to explore her identity, and came out only when she found her way into the professional food world.
“Secrets of the Southern Table: A Food Lover’s Tour of the Global South” is her sixth book, and her first to illuminate the diversity of Southern food: not only its African, Italian, French, Vietnamese, Mexican and other influences, but its agricultural range.
I brought them together for a conversation about this exciting and complicated time for people who love Southern cooking. The rest of the world is waking up to the multicultural reality of the New South: Korean-Southern fried chicken, Vietnamese-Cajun crawfish, tacos stuffed with barbecue. And new studies and discoveries by historians of African-American food like Toni Tipton-Martin, Adrian E. Miller and Therese Nelson are fueling debate over the origins of the Southern culinary tradition.
“There’s a huge piece smack in the middle of the Southern food conversation and that’s the black-white divide,” said Ms. Willis, putting the elephant in the room right on the lunch table.
So far, no one has managed to draw a clear line between white food and black food in the South. Many of the cooking traditions and techniques that define Southern food were invented and executed by African-Americans, whether they were cooking for their own families or for white families that enslaved or employed them.
“When you take a good look, it’s mostly about class and place, not race. People who lived in the same region mostly ate the same food,” according to what ingredients they could afford, said Mr. Miller, the author of “Soul Food” and other books on African-American food history, in an interview. “They weren’t eating it together, but they were eating the same thing.”
And yet, the term “soul food” came to represent the food of black Southerners, and “Southern” or “country” the food of white Southerners — even when the dishes were exactly the same. (According to Mr. Miller, the word “soul” was first used this way around the 1950s, by black jazz musicians who wanted to distinguish their own music from the white copycats they encountered in places like Chicago and Detroit. “Soul music,” “soul brother” and other terms followed.)'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/07/dining/is-it-southern-food-or-soul-food.html?
Recipes: Grilled Peach Toast With Spicy Pimento Cheese | Tomato Pie With Pimento Cheese Topping | Peach Upside-Down Skillet Cake With Bourbon Whipped Cream
= new reply since forum marked as read
Altho a true Southern divide is cornbread with or without sugar.
Also....Chilton County, Ala. peaches are to die for, and local watermelon is the only kind I will eat. It's got about a 6 week season here, worth waiting for.
And Sand Mountain tomatoes.
Too right about sugar in cornbread. That stops at the Mason-Dixon line (pretty much).
I grew up on granny's fried chicken, black eyed peas, turnips and turnip greens. But an Italian supper was a heated up can of Chef Boyardee spaghetti.
yum 
Many years later I learned that you didn't have to boil greens to death.
Sweated down in some oil and butter or (OMG!) bacon grease with some garlic and onion was way better.
