>> From the Library of Congress in Washington DC. [ Silence ] >> I've been happy to introduce many of the authors at the festival since I came to the Post in 2006, but I think it's safe to say I've never been more excited to introduce anyone that I am to introduce you to this morning's speaker, Adrian Miller. Adrian has written a book that has won really just about every prestigious award that a scholarly food book like his can win, including the prestigious James Beard Award for Scholarship just last year. But his work is anything but dry, as I think you will realize as soon as he starts speaking. I've had the pleasure of hearing him speak several times. Adrian describes himself as a recovering lawyer. He's also a former special assistant to President Clinton, and he turned his attention to the confluence of the culinary and the cultural, particularly as it applies to African-American food ways. To read Adrian's book, which demystifies this vibrant, ever-changing cuisine we know as soul food, charting its earliest routes in 17th Century slave culture, and coming right up to the present, is to realize that this is a book that many of us have been waiting to read for a long, long time. Thankfully, Adrian was waiting to write it. He hasn't stopped there. After I heard him talk about it, I actually asked him to write a piece for the Post food section that some of you may have seen on his next project, which involves unearthing the records of all of the African-American cooks who worked in the White House kitchen. Ladies and gentlemen, please give a big round of applause to Adrian Miller. [ Applause ] >> Well good morning everyone. How are you this morning? All right, so I'm from Denver, Colorado, which I know immediately lost me street cred with everybody in this room on the subject of soul food. [Laughter] And the only thing that's saving me right now is that I'm black. Okay, I get that. All right. So let me try to win you back. My mom is from Chattanooga, Tennessee, and my dad is from Helena, Arkansas, so I grew up eating these foods. It was, the strongest expression was on the holidays, but day in and day out we usually had some kind of food that we call soul food. So the game plan this morning is to tell you a little bit about the journey, because people wonder, how did this lawyer turned politico get to a point where he wrote a book on soul food? Describe the process, and then go through a little brief history of soul food, and then give you some of the highlights of my eating tour around the country. Now basically I grew up in Denver, went to Stanford undergrad, then went to Georgetown for law school. I practiced law for about four years, and it got to the point where I just really didn't like it. Now there are lawyers in the audience, I'm not trying to disparage you. I'm just saying the career choice was not for me. I mean, I got to the point where I was singing spirituals in my office, so I figured I probably should do something else. I was going to open up a soul food restaurant in Denver, but then I got a chance to work in the Clinton White House, on something called the President's Initiative for One America. It was about honest dialogue on race and racial reconciliation. After finishing that, I was deciding whether I was going to stay here in DC, or go back to Denver, and the job market was really slow. So it got to a point where I was just watching way too much daytime television, and I said, 'I guess I should read something.' I decided to go to the bookstore, and I got a book called Southern Food At Home, on the Road in History, written by John Egerton, who recently passed. In that book, which was a history of Southern food, he said the tribute to African-American achievement in cookery has yet to be written. I thought that was interesting, so I reached out to Mr. Egerton. Now, he wrote the book in the late 80s, I'm reading it around 2000, and I said, 'Hey, you wrote this a while ago. Do you still think this is true?' He said, for the most part, people have dealt with parts of the story, but nobody has taken on the full story. So with no qualifications at all, except for eating soul food a lot, and cooking it some, I decided to dive in. So one thing led to another, and quickly I had enough material to write five books. That's how much I found. It was a surprise because when I reached out to food writers early in this journey they said, 'Look, this country is racist. There's just not a lot of information about these cooks. Cobble together the best book that you can.' But soon afterwards, thanks to the digitization of old newspapers, cookbooks, pamphlets, and other things that are in these database, that are word searchable, I got a lot of information. So rather than having a grand time, I thought maybe I'll just write a book on soul food, because I think that's the most recognizable aspect of African-American cooking, and that's led me to the journey for this book. So this is how I decided to write the book. I created a representative soul food meal, and I'd write a chapter about every part of the meal. And I explain what it is, how it gets on the soul food plate, what it means for the culture, and then most chapters have recipes; a traditional, a health conscious, and then a fancy one in case you want to show off as a cook. So here's the meal, all right. Now, feel free to do catcalls or whatever when I describe this meal, all right? I'm giving you license to do that. Entrees, fried chicken, catfish, or chitterlings. Side dishes, mixed greens, candied yams, mac and chees, and black-eyed peas. I wrote a chapter about cornbread. I also wrote a chapter about hot sauce, because in the soul food tradition we put hot sauce on everything. And then I wrote a chapter about red drinks, because I believe that red Kool-Aid is the official soul food drink. [Laughter] Now, I have to say, there is some generational tension happening, because I'm finding a lot of young'uns like purple drink. I don't know what that's about, and I write this in my book. 'I do believe that children are our future, that we should teach them well and let them lead the way, but not on Kool-Aid. They're messing it up.' And then I couldn't make up my mind about dessert, so I wrote about four desserts, and usually when you go to a soul food outing there are several desserts. So I wrote about peach cobbler, pound cake, banana pudding, and sweet potato pie. So that's the meal. Now, when I got to the point to do the research for this book, I decided I'd need to eat my way through the country. So I went to 150 soul food restaurants, in 35 cities, in 15 states. If you are my Facebook friend, I brought you along for the ride. I would take a picture of the exterior of the building, and then I would take a picture of my plate. I got so many notes of concern about my health during this eating tour, that I called it my year of living dangerously. So that's the journey. The book came out in August of last year, and as Joe mentioned earlier, it won the James Beard Award, so I was very happy about that. And that brings me to you here today. So let's explore this question about what is soul food. For the most part, people tell you that soul food is the traditional food of African-Americans, and the conventional wisdom is that the term soul food was born in the 1960s, when we had these strong expressions of black cultural identity. You know, black is beautiful, black power. If I had hair, I would be wearing an Afro in those times, right? So, but when I did my research, the earliest conjunction that I could find of the words 'soul' and 'food' in the English language actually go back to Shakespeare. Is there anyone here who can name Shakespeare's first play? Oh, your high school English teachers would be so disappointed in you. Al right. Two Gentlemen of Verona. In that play, you've got characters. I know, it was right on the tip of your tongue, right? [Laughter] In that play, you've got two characters, Julia and Lucetta, talking about a hunky guy named Proteus. So while they're talking about him, Julia says to Lucetta, 'Oh, know'st thou not that his looks are my soul's food. Pity the death that I have pined in, by longing for that food so long a time.' No applause for my dramatic interpretation? [Applause] Wow, rough crowd here at the National Book Festival. So we learn a couple of things from that. First of all, even in the late 16th Century, it was not unusual for two girlfriends to get together and describe a guy as yummy. The other thing is that you've got Shakespeare, the master of wordplay, playing the tangible off the intangible, and that really gets to the heart of the soul concept. The idea that because of centuries of oppression, African-Americans, what they do is going to be the most soulful expression of humanity. But, for the next four hundred years, soul food has a religious connotation. It means doing anything to edify your spiritual life, listening to hymns, listening to a sermon, studying your scripture. It's only in about the 1940s that it takes a decided musical turn. So what happens is, you've got these disgruntled African-American jazz artists, and they're disgruntled because the white jazz artists are the ones getting the most publicity, the best gigs, and it's almost like they created this musical genre. So these musicians, this cadre of musicians, decided to take jazz music to a place where they thought white musicians could mimic the sound, and that was the sound of the black church in the rural South. So that gospel sound, as early as the mid-1940s, they started to call funky and soul. Those terms start to get cultural cache, and get applied to other aspects of black culture. So you get soul music, soul brother, soul sister, soul food. What does happen in the 1960s is that the term soul food gets radicalized and racialized. Fast forward to about 19966, you've got black power movement advocates like Stokely Carmichael and others, who are trying to figure out, how do I unify a very disparate African-American community? One way they decided to do that was to create these kind of cultural norms, and cultural ties, and food is a very strong connector. So in the 1960s they started to apply soul food as a coin term to a lot of different things. In 1966, there was actually a manifesto from the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, which had become kind of radicalized by this time, that was leaked to the New York Times. This manifesto said that white people can't understand and can't relate to things like chitterlings, greens, ham hocks, and these other things, right? Now, this was news to white Southerners, because they had been eating the same foods for about two hundred years, but that's where we get the divide between soul equals black, Southern equals white, and we're living with that dichotomy even to this day. If I were to ask you, name a prominent soul food cook, I think you might struggle to figure out who that person is. But, if I were to say, name a prominent Southern cook, I think you'd start thinking Paula Deen, her kids, Trisha Yearwood, there are a lot of other people. So the unfortunate aspect of this is that the African-American contributions to soul food become obscured over time, so much so that when you think about Southern food, at least representations in media, you don't see the African-American presence that much. I'm hoping to change that. So some interesting aspects of where soul food is going, after I give you a little brief history. So to talk about African-American history, you have to go back to the source, which is West Africa. In West Africa, the typical meal is some kind of starchy base, with a savory soup, stew, or sauce either served alongside it, or on top of it. Within West Africa there are different starch traditions depending on which part of the region you're in. So on the northern part of West Africa, like Senegal and Gambia, they have a rice tradition. As you move further down the coastline, grains start to become more important, so millet and sorghum, and other things. Then when you get even further south, Nigeria, Ghana, and other places like that, root crops are more dominant, so plants, yams, tropical yams. Just a public service announcement, what we call yams in this country are dark flesh sweet potatoes, okay? They are not tropical yams, two different - Oh, you're a very savvy audience, so you already knew this, all right. And then plantains, cassava, and other things. So there was a West African restaurant in Denver that I tried, and I had poundage yam, which has almost the look and consistency of mashed potatoes, with a tilapia fish sauce that had chilies and other things. Very good place, unfortunately that place went out of business, and it may have something to do with the name. It was called The Palace Nigerian Food and Philly Cheesesteaks. [Laughter] So during the middle passage, when millions of African-Americans were forcibly brought across the Atlantic, and we don't know the numbers for sure because records were not kept very well, but anywhere between 10 million to 25 million people made that journey. During that time, the enslaved were kept below the ship, in the hold, and they were fed two times a day. In the early years of the slave trade, that meal was essentially European foods that were forced upon the enslaved. So they would get horse beans, rooting, fish, rotting meat, stuff that was not very appetizing. The mortality rates got so high that the slavers actually had to change their strategy, and they started feeding the enslaved the foods that they were used to from their home country. So if they knew they had enslaved people from Senegal and Gambia, they would give them rice rations. So fast forward over across the Atlantic, what happens is, as people settle in the Americas, the food traditions of West Africa start to replicate themselves. The interesting footnote here is that, of all the millions of people that crossed the Atlantic, only about four percent wind up in what we call British North America. Most people go to points south from here. That's why if you eat with somebody of African ancestry in the Americas, mainly the Caribbean or South America, you're usually going to have a West African meal with European influences. In the United States it's the complete opposite. We have a European meal with African influences. So in the early days of slavery, and for the next couple of centuries, the enslaved were fed through rations. So once a week the enslaved population, a family of a single person depending on the plantation, would get about five pounds of some kind of starch. That could be cornmeal, sweet potatoes, or rice. They would get a couple of pounds of meat that was either smoked, salted, or dried. That could be beef, pork, or fish depending on what was cheapest. Then they would get a jug of molasses. Other than that, the enslaved had to figure out how they were going to survive in this system. So many resorted to gardening, hunting, fishing, and other things to supplement their diet, that's what rounds out the slave diet. But we start to see these West African food ways replicate themselves. So in much of the South, cornmeal becomes a dominant starch that's served, mainly because it was easy to grow corn. But for people that were form grain countries, they were used to something like that. On the Carolina coast, if you've ever been to Charleston or Savannah, you know there are a lot of rice dishes in their cuisine. That is reminiscence of the food of Senegal and Gambia, rice based culture. But there are instances where the enslaved would ask for sweet potatoes, and I think they were trying to create a substitute for what they got in West Africa. So these basic food patterns take place. One thing I want to stress here is, if you look at what the enslaved were eating during slavery, it was a lot of seasonal vegetables, it was not a lot of meat, and it wasn't a lot of processed ingredients. Because under that caste system, anything that was refined or processed was deemed more appropriate for the whites in society. So looking back at it from a distance, it's very close to what we now call vegan, All right. I want you to hold that one, I'm going to come back to that later. After emancipation, you see the same food patterns kind of existing for a little while, but then the big food story is the advent of the sharecropping system. I'm greatly going to over simplify this, but essentially the former plantations become these estates, and the former masters become landlords, and they divvied up land to the newly freed men for farming. So the sharecropper would come into an arrangement where they would get a plot of land. They would agree to farm that land, and give half the proceeds to the landlord and keep the rest. But often they were entering this arrangement without enough tools, or seed, or fertilizer, or anything to really get going. So they would have to basically sign an advance against their half of the proceeds in order to get the capital costs to start up the farming. So the big implication here is that they move away from raising their own food, to having more store bought food, and the store in this situation was the commissary on the plantation that was controlled by the landlord. So they controlled the prices, the terms of engagement, everything. So a cycle of dependence keeps deepening, and deepening, to a point where millions of people leave the South to settle in other parts of the country. To me, that is the key migration of the soul food story. My argument in the book is that soul food is really about what African-Americans are eating outside the south. So thus it's a limited repertoire of southern food, and it's really the celebration food of the south. Now think about other immigrant cuisines that we have in this country. What we think of as Indian food, Chinese food, any other immigrant group or ethnic group is usually the celebration foods of the old country, and that's what's happening in soul food. I'll give you two examples. You have to excuse me, I'm from a very dry place, so this DC humidity is a little tricky for me. It's not that I have anything to hide, all right? It's just the humidity. So one example is greens. In soul food, the greens are mustard, turnip, collard, kale, and cabbage. Now if you've spent any time in the Deep South, you know that they eat a ton of different greens, but those greens were the ones that were perfect for the emerging commodity system. So essentially collards are dominant because they were the ones that lasted the longest on the train ride to various parts of the country without spoiling. Same thing with black-eyes peas. Black-eyed peas in its dried form didn't spoil as much as other beans, so that's why black-eyed peas are the dominant pea in soul food. So you see that the soul food diet is really a narrowing of the southern menu. So I often get asked, what's the difference between southern and soul? And again, I invite you to catcall and quibble with me on this. I think the differences are mainly this. Soul food has more intense seasoning. I think it's going to be sweeter, it's going to have more fat, it's going to have more spice than you typically would get in a southern restaurant. Also, you're going to have funkier cuts of meat on the menu. So if you go into a soul food place, you're going to see chitterlings, right? You're going to see pig feet, or pig ears, or things like that. Maybe even more game. So those are, to me, they're the two big hallmarks between southern and soul. One of my observations, after I ate my way through the country, is that you see a lot more difference between southern and soul once you get outside the south. One of the big takeaways I had is that, really this more about place and class than it is about race. For the most part, through time, black and white southerners of the same socio-economic status were pretty much eating the same foods. When we think about slavery and the plantation system, the Tara plantation of Gone with the Wind, that was not the majority situation. Most of the enslaved were in a situation where they're on a family farm, with five or fewer slaves, and they were living practically next to the family. So the economics of slavery in that context did not make sense to have a separate feeding system. So for the most part, master and slave were eating out of the same pot. So that's a brief history of soul food. Let me give you some highlights of my tour around the country, and kind of emerging trends. So one of the big things that surprised me is that most soul food restaurants now, at least in terms of their side dishes, are vegan or vegetarian. So they swapped out the pork, they may have had turkey for a short period of time, but they're actually vegan. To give you highlights of a vegan place, I went to a place called Souley Vegan in Oakland, California. This is what I had: southern fried tofu, vegan mac and cheese, and vegan collard greens. The tofu was shaped to look like fried chicken, but in terms of texture and taste it was very much like catfish. In terms of the mac and cheese, when you're having vegan mac and cheese, you cannot think of your traditional mac and cheese, okay? Because it's just not creamy, that's just not the vibe, because there's no dairy in vegan. So it was very different, but still, still good. Then the vegan collard greens were like any collard greens you would have because they managed to get that smoky profile, probably putted some smoked paprika or something like that. Then they also used other traditional seasonings. So it was very good stuff. LA gets the prize for the weirdest soul food that I've had, okay? I'll tell you about two places. There's one place called Tony's Soul Burgers, not too far from the Inglewood. If you're a Laker's fan from the 1980s, the fabulous Forum, not too far from that. So I had two, I had the James Brown Soul Burger, and I had the Thanksgiving Burger. Let me describe the Thanksgiving burger to you, layer by layer. Bun, all turkey patty, a layer of collard greens, then a layer of sweet potato puree, then a layer of cornbread dressing, and then a layer of cranberries, bun. Not too bad. That placed closed, believe it or not. Then I went to another place called Otis Soul Dog. This is a soul food hot dog; bun, wiener, collard green and cucumber relish, a pureed sweet potato drizzle, crumbled bacon bits. Not too bad. I also liked this place because on the wall, if you're a fan of the show Good Times, they had a complete replica of the mural at the very end, when the credits are rolling, except instead of pool cues, everybody had a hot dog. So I just thought that was pretty cool. Then one of the funkier things I ate was in a place called Cleveland, Mississippi. Has anybody here been to Cleveland, Mississippi? Oh, all right. You kind of have to want to go to Cleveland, right? It's kind of out of the way. So I went to a place called Delta Fast Food, and I encountered the Kool-ickle, the Kool-Aid pickle. All right, my friend here, she was one of the strongest reactions when I posted it on Facebook. I think she just said, ew, right? So here's a Kool-Aid pickle, if you've never had one. You get a jar of pickles, already made dill pickles, take the pickles out, make red Kool-Aid with the pickle brine, poke holes in the pickles, drop them back in, leave them there for three days to two weeks, take the pickles out and eat them. If you like the taste of Kool-Aid and pickles, it's just a sweet and sour. If you don't like the taste of either one, it's probably the nastiest thing you'll put in your mouth. But this I something that's very popular in the Mississippi Delta. It hasn't gone national, I thought it was going to pop up in other places, but it just hasn't happened yet. Then one of my favorite places, which is an unusual place, is a place called Mr. And Mrs. G's, in San Antonio, Texas. You would never think about San Antonio, Texas for soul food. Usually you think about Tex-Mex, but it was a great place, well-seasoned food, had a nice crowd there, and it was just really, you could tell it was home cooking. There are other places like Deborah's Kitchen in Philadelphia that I liked, where you place your order, and you hear something starting to sizzle after you've placed your order, so you know you're getting kind of fresh food. Another interesting thing about Deborah's Kitchen is there's something there called a smothered turkey chop. So turkey chop is an Amish cut of meat that has been embraced in soul food circles because there's so many black Muslims in Philadelphia. If you have a pork-laden menu, you're just not long for this world as a restaurant. So they prepare this turkey chop just like you would do a pork chop. They lightly flour it, get a nice sear on it, and then braise it in some gravy, and that was just a really good dish. Now in terms of the current trends in soul food, I see several things happening. So you have your traditional places that are struggling because in many instances, they're just not being supported. Part of that, I think, is the legacy of the civil rights movement, because these places were once neighborhood joints, right? They were in black neighborhoods, and then as people were able to live in other parts of the city, what was once a destination place became - Sorry, a local restaurant, became a destination place. Unless people come back and support those places, it's hard for them to survive. The biggest trend in terms of where the creative energy is, is in the vegan soul food restaurants. They're popping up all over the place, even within the south. I mean, during my national eating tour, it got to the point where I was just saying, can a brother get some pork? Just a little bit? And that was even in the south. Then you see some of the down-home healthy cooking, and that is essentially taking the traditional soul food format, and then substituting healthier ingredients. So that's changing from pork to smoked turkey, or to vegetables, reducing the butter or lard, or other things. Now interestingly, if you've been following kind of food discussions, lard and butter, these things are making a comeback, right? Because we're finding out maybe they're not as bad as partially hydrogenated whatever that we've been using to cook. But you see those trends a lot. I have not seen a strong, molecular, gastronomy trend in soul food, so I'm waiting for somebody to do, you know, a chitterling foam with sweet potato dust, and collard green pebbles. You know, I'm waiting to see all that, but I haven't seen that a lot. I hope that a couple things come from this book. One is that people recognize this is an American cuisine, very much worth celebrating. There are two strong critiques of soul food. One is that it needs a warning label, right? Because if you keep eating all of these foods, you're supposed to die o fa heart attack. That's one critique. And the other critique is that this is slave food, thus it's not worthy of being celebrated. In my book, I really challenge those hypotheses. There is a grain of truth to those things, but what I found out is, it's a much more complex story. I'm hoping that more African-American cook swill embrace soul food and not distance themselves from it. I don't know if you know any French chefs who say, don't associate me with rustic French cooking. I mean, I don't know many chefs like that, but I find a lot of African-American chefs don't even want to be associated with soul food. At the meantime, you've got chefs outside the culture embracing elements of soul food, gaining recognition, and making a lot of money from it. I mean, when you think, if you're into the gourmet chef circles, when you think fried chicken these days, I think you're thinking David Change and Thomas Keller for their fried chicken recipes. So these foods are out there, and should be celebrated. One of the things I'm working on right now is, I'm deathly trying to get soul food in space, and here's why. For a lot of the manned missions in the future, you're talking about six to eight months, at least, one way. So because of the weight restrictions, you just can't carry all of your food. So NASA's really looking at how to grow food in space. So earlier this year, six volunteers spent about six months on a volcano in Hawaii, and the side of this volcano simulated conditions on Mars. I was reading accounts of what they were looking at eating, and what they were growing, and I found out it was pretty much soul food. So you know, I'm just trying to change that up. I would love for black-eyed peas and collard greens to be eaten on the International Space Station on New Year's Day. Personally, I believe if we're going to go to a red planet, we need a red drink. [Laughter] So I'm working on that. But one thing that also struck me was the prominence of home cooks in the soul food tradition. I don't think these home cooks get very celebrated, but one reason why I'm worried about the future of soul food is, I think home cooking is on the wane. There are a lot of people my age and younger who are just not cooking that much. They rely on a care giver, you know, big mama, or grandmamma, to make these things. If you had a grandmamma like mine, whenever I tried to get recipes out of her, all I would get is this response, 'Oh baby, I'll make it for you. Don't worry about it.' So if you are a cook, would you please just give up your recipes, all right? Share them. You don't have to take them to the grave with you, because a lot of people want to know about what you're cooking. You have to have some confidence that what you bring to a dish is your own signature. Yeah, somebody might make it as well as you do, or better than you, but the reason why we like that soul food recipe from you is because we're trying to connect with you. Another aspect of soul food that I think is really interesting is the church restaurants. I'm finding that the church restaurants are really thriving, and this is something I think is fairly unique to soul food culture. One of the best church restaurants that I cover, I cover two actually. There's All Saints Cafeteria here in DC. I don't know if you've ever been to that, that's a great place. You know, I have to give a shout out to the home crowd, right? Score some points. Another place is called Masada's Kitchen in Savannah, Georgia. I talk about this in my chapter on fried chicken, because each chapter has some kind of theme. I gave the fried chicken chapter a religious theme because in soul food circles, we actually call fried chicken 'the gospel bird' or 'Sunday cluck'. So I called that chapter Fired Chicken and the Integration of Church and Plate, just to talk about these religious themes. But in Masada's Kitchen, they have really what I call glorified chicken. It was just really great stuff. The kind of chicken I like is something with a paper thin crust, with a nice moist inside for the meat. You know, I'll take the crunchy stuff as well, but it was just straight ahead fried chicken that I really love. So I hope that you enjoy soul food, that you have a chance to read it, and find out the journey of soul food. Right now, soul food has a bad reputation, and I'm hoping to rehabilitate that, and I'm trying to be soul food's PR agent, I guess, in many ways. Soul food, I think, is worthy of celebration, and one of the prime motivators when I wrote this book is, I thought, okay, all of these other ethnic cuisines are being celebrated. Why not ours? Why can't our food be celebrated? And that was the motivation for the book. As much as people talk about vegan and vegetarian food as a departure from soul food, it's really a homecoming because it's tapping into a strong vegetable tradition within soul food. Even now, a lot of soul food ingredients are starting to get fame. First, the big example is kale. I mean, people have been going crazy for kale for the last few years, and I tell audiences especially outside the south, welcome to the party because we've been eating kale for about three hundred year, right? Believe it or not, there is a sign at a store in Chicago that says, 'collards, the new kale' all right? That's how bad it's getting. But when you look at the traditions from restaurants, from these home cooks, and what are the components of soul food, it deserves another look. Think about what nutritionists are telling us to eat; dark, leafy greens, sweet potatoes, legumes, okra, all of these soul food items are getting super-food status. So it's not so much the foods in and of themselves, it's really about how they're prepared. If you understand the roots of soul food, and how some of it is celebration food, you'll probably step back and say, okay, I don't have to fry everything all the time. There are other ways to make these foods, and to make them delicious. You know, does anybody really think we should have fried chicken every single day? There's usually one person that raises - Okay, yes, thank you. [Laughter] I was going to say, there's usually one person that raises their hand. So I hope that people revisit soul food, and understand that, at its core, it's very healthy food. It's a matter of how it's prepared. So you can make it healthy ways during the week, and then have the glorious stuff every once in a while. So in closing, I don't think soul food needs a warning label, I just think it needs more love. Thank you. [ Applause ] I have time for questions, if anybody has questions. Yes? >> Thanks, Adrian. I'm of Cuban descent and to the extent that the slave tradition exists outside of the United States as well, Cuba and South America, I'm curious to know what you know about those soul food traditions maybe in South America or Cuba. Have you encountered anything like that? >> I have, and the person who's done a lot of scholarship on that is an author named Jessica B Harris. So if you have time, you should check out her book. She's really talked about the commonalities between West Africa and foods in the Americas. But you see things like the use of dark, leafy greens in a lot of dishes, the rise and bean combination is throughout that area, so there are commonalities, hot sauces and other things. So you do see things those threads throughout the Americas. Yes, sir. >> How do you feel about identifying soul food with other foods, in order to enhance its salability, so to speak? You know, you have Tex-Mex, would you have Cuban soul. A restaurant opened up in our town recently, it was called Jamaican Soul. I haven't been there yet, but - >> Yeah. No, great question. So I have mixed feelings about it because I'm struggling to define soul food as this discreet thing, and I know that the soul food term is just - I don't know who trademarked, if somebody had, but they'd be making a lot of money because it does have a resonance. The more I think about it, I think every culture does have its soul food. It's often defined as poverty cooking. To me, I do the same thing with soul food, but I apply some limits because a lot of ingredients within soul food have a high class pedigree. For instance, sweet potato pie, banana pudding, even chitterlings. That used to be the food of the aristocracy four hundred years ago. So I don't want to reduce everything to this poverty food, but I want to show the complex story. So I have mixed feelings about it because it's just interesting that as soul food is losing currency within the African-American community, I feel it's gaining currency with all these other cultures around the world. So I have a little cringe, but then I'm kind of proud because I'm like, yeah, that term came out of our culture, and other people are embracing it. So I guess I'm ambivalent, is the best way to answer that. >> I've got a question. You were talking about the green vegetables and such. Now a lot of times with soul food, the foods tend to be overcooked, or you said, fried or grease. So have you thought, or have you seen, or considered, when you look at the ingredients, but keep them a lot more healthier, and keep the nutrients in the food? And did you see that when you talked to people? Because I came up, people were cooking food, but they didn't talk about the nutrients as much. They were just, hey, this is what we been eating, you know, and this is good. You know, you put a lot of sugar and salt in it. >> Right, right. Yeah, no. You see that a lot in the vegan and vegetarian, and also the raw food movement. I'm starting to see more raw soul food out there. So yes, people are tapping into that. One way that people try to capture he nutrients is, they would boil these vegetables to death, but then they would drink the pot liquor. Pot liquor has nothing to do with alcohol, or getting your drink on, right? It's just the broth that's created after you stew these things for a long time. So in the south, a lot of people would crumble up their cornbread, and drink that pot liquor, and recapture the nutrients. Actually, even during the slave days, there was a division of eating, so to speak. So the adults would eat the solid food, but then the kids would the pot liquor. I think in essence, the kids were getting the more nutritious stuff. So that hits on something I didn't mention during my talk. I have to say that most of the food that I ate during my national soul food tour was just okay. Because I think people are cooking things to death. If you didn't get one earlier, I have a recipe card to give all of you, that has my mom's greens recipe. I get a little flak for that, because in that recipe I'm calling for you to cook the greens just till they get tender. So this is not a recipe where you cook for hours, and again, the idea is you just get them tender enough so you can eat, so you can get a lot of that good stuff and those nutrients. So it's going to take a lot of education, because people have set in their mind. This is the way my grandmother, or my father, made this, and this is right. That's the most flak I get on the soul food, as I talk about this book, is just the jarring contrast to what maybe their parents did, or something like that. Yes? >> I'm a North Carolinian by birth, southern North Carolina. >> Okay. >> And I understand the connection now between the soul food and the vegan food. First of all, we go back to the quality of the food. There are not that many chemicals used, and the foods were fresh, even if the chickens were out in the yard. Someone would go out and grab one, wring a neck. You didn't have a chicken the size of a turkey or a buzzard. You had flavor, so you could close your eyes, and if you were eating something, you knew distinctively what you were eating. So with the vegan food, if you think about it at that time, a lot of the foods were natural, healthy foods. So I sometimes question why they want to make a distinction between the two because actually you're speaking of the same thing in many instances. But when you come to preparing the food, it was interesting, you said that your grandmother said, baby, I'll fix it for you. I grew up with the phrase, a pinch of this, and a pinch of that. And if that didn't work, look at it. >> Um-hm. Yeah. >> And I passed that on to my daughters because that's what I know. I am not capable of writing a recipe. I can tell you the ingredients of this, but I still must tell you, a pinch of this, a pinch of that, and look at it. >> Right. >> Next, taste it. It doesn't taste right, add a little bit more. But it's interesting when you come down to the foods because when soul food, the term, became very prevalent, at that particular time I was at Goddard. I used the term not knowing that I was insulting some of my coworkers, because they very quickly told me, I don't know why you want to claim this as soul food, because we've been eating this all our lives. So there again, it's that connection between the ethnic groups in the south, and the food, who wants to claim the soul food. >> Right, and that's a big battle that's happening right now. It came to light with the Paula Deen events of last year, kind of culinary justice, is the term that some are using. But it's just the idea of attribution. My hope is that from now on, people will take a point to culturally source what they do. Whether it be in restaurants or in articles, just to talk about, this is where this food comes from, rather than just kind of ignoring it, or just covering over it and going forward. So you hit on some, in your question, you hit on a lot of deep themes that I discovered. And even when soul food came on the scene in the 60s as a coined term associated with a certain menu, there was lot of tension over it. Mainly, upper class blacks didn't want that term used, they thought it was going to be a fad, and that it wouldn't last too long. But just to show you, it's such a brilliant coined term, it's endured to this day. But like you, I just hope people will embrace it, and not have a negative image of soul food. And then also, just in your question, you hit upon the oral tradition within our community, and just kind of improvisational cooking. I know there's some people like Michael Twitty, a local culinary historian, who calls cooking, you know, soul food our jazz. Improvisation and other things are a very important part of it, but getting the taste right. I have to tell you, in a lot of restaurants, I just went, has anybody tasted this food before it comes out? [Laughter] So. Yes? >> A lot of African-American people, and my grandmother was a kosher cook in Nashville, Tennessee, and her, the family was Dinah Shore. So I grew up with this whole, when my grandmother came to visit us in Philadelphia, she would bring all of this kind of cooking that we learned to do, and my daughter's a chef too. So we have this family, but I wanted to ask you, do you cook? Because you - You do cook. >> Oh yeah, I have skills. >> Okay. [Laughter] >> You like corn flakes? [Laughter] Please, would you stick around because I want to connect with you after that? I'm interested in your grandmother's story. But yes, I do cook. Not always soul food, I do a lot of southwestern cooking as well, and I'm starting to raise my game in barbecue. Because barbecue is actually my favorite food. If I could barbecue every day without any health consequences, I would. But yeah, I do cook soul food, and I do a lot of dinners for charity in the Denver area, where I'll make a meal for eight, a soul food meal. That's how I really earned my chops. But I grew up cooking because my mother worked nights, and I had a brother and sister, and so we would cook, and that's how I really learned how to do it. Now, I'm not saying it was great stuff. I mean, it was classics like cream of wheat, Malt-O-Meal, scrambled eggs with egg shells, you know, that kind of thing. >> My question is actually about barbecue, and how that fits into the equation. The sides and the desserts seem to overlap, like the traditional barbecue sides and desserts are like, a hundred percent overlap of what you've got in the book. But you didn't talk about the meats, so how does that fit in? >> The only reason I didn't is because the barbecue story is so rich, that I actually wanted to get to it in another book. And as an aside, you should know I'm a certified barbecue judge, so that shows you the depth of my obsession. >> I'm a competition cook, so - >> Oh, you are? Okay, good. All right, we definitely have to talk. >> Yeah, we do. >> So, barbecue fits in the story because it's a Native American culinary art form, but it gets embraced within southern plantation culture, and often the enslaved African-Americans were pressed to cook this. So coming out of emancipation, that was a culinary skill that a lot of African-Americans had. So in the late 1800s and early 1900s, if you wanted top notch barbecue, often you would go to an African-American pit master to do that. And then once people got enough capital to open up restaurants, they often brought in the soul food sides, to the point now that, as southern food, soul food, was exported out of the south, most restaurants will have some kind of barbecue item. It may not be pit smoked, it may, it's probably just baked with some barbecue sauce on it, but that something that comes along. So they go hand in hand, and I was going to have a chapter on that separately, but I decided to write a book about that later. All right, thanks. >> Hi. Oh. >> I don't - Okay. >> I loved your book, thought it was very insightful. >> Thanks. >> And as you look forward, what is your next project? >> So the next project's going to be on black chefs in the White House, and I hope to do a companion film and book on this subject. From my own research, I found out every president in the United States has had an African-American chef, and I've got their stories and their recipes. So that will be the next book, so thanks for asking that question. Yeah. >> [Inaudible] naturally, but every recipe I see for greens, southern greens, soul food, whatever we want to call them, always ask for ham hocks, or like, a turkey bone. What would you say is a good substitution, so I could still get that? Would vegetable broth work, or - ? >> Oh, vegetable broth will work. I wanted to say, as a vegetarian, I still love you. >> Okay, thank you. >> So you're welcome to the soul food family. I just want you know that. >> Thank you. I appreciate that. >> Yeah, so I think the idea is just to get these flavor profiles. So I would suggest maybe some smoked paprika for the heat. >> Okay. >> And then garlic, onion, thyme, and I think you can nail it with that. >> Okay, great, thank you. >> All right. Enjoy. Well thank you so much. You've been a great audience. Thanks for getting up and coming to hear about soul food. [ Applause ] >> Thank you. >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.