Hall Carla - Carla Halls soul food: everyday and celebration

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Contents

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Carlas Comfort Foods

Cooking with Love

CARLA HALLS SOUL FOOD. Copyright 2018 by Carla Hall. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

Cover design by Joanne ONeill

Cover photographs and interior photography by Gabriele Stabile

Hall, Carla, and Ko, Genevieve.

Carla Halls soul food : everyday and celebration / Carla Hall with Genevieve Ko.

p. cm.

1. African American cooking. 2. Cooking, AmericanSouthern style. I. Cookbooks.

TX715.2.A47 H34 2018

Digital Edition OCTOBER 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-266984-1

Version 10052018

Print ISBN: 978-0-06-266983-4

To all my ancestors, whom I call upon daily for strength and inspiration.

In memory of George Hall.

Ive been eating soul food all my life and cooking it my whole career. I dont just know soul food. Soul food is in my soul. This book is a collection of my favorite recipes. It combines easy weeknight meals centered on seasonal vegetables with rich celebration dishes for special occasions. Even though the recipes have roots in history and heritage, theyre my present-day twists on the classics and my original creations.

By definition, soul food refers to the dishes of the Cotton Belt of Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama that traveled out to the rest of the country during the Great Migration. (The term itself came around the middle of the twentieth century.) You know what travels well? Fried chicken. Mac and cheese. Delicious, but not what anyones meant to eat every day. Im here to redefine soul food, to reclaim it.

Soul food is the true food of African-Americans.

The roots of our cooking are in West Africa. And from there, the American South, from the slave ports along the eastern coast to the southern border. We relied on seasonal vegetables, beans, and grains, with meat on rare occasions. Lets be clear: those were horrible times of suffering under the most unspeakable evil. I dont want to romanticize any of it. Not even the food. Remember, we didnt get to choose what we ate. But we made the most delicious dishes from what little we had. And what we cooked for the slave owners effectively became what we know as American food today.

After emancipation, African-Americans relied on the land and water for their daily meals. Collards in winter, peas through spring, tomatoes come summer. Chickens were for laying eggs, not frying. Fish and shrimp were abundant for coast and river folks. We lost that connection during the Great Migration and in the decades since as industrialized convenience food has made us unhealthy and sick. Our celebration foodssmoked whole hogs, candied yams, caramel cakebecame what we ate all the time. We forgot about all the amazing daily meals we created from greens and beans and grains.

This book shines a light on those everyday foods my people were eating for generations in the South. That, my friends, is as much soul food as our celebration meals.

You may be wondering, Whats the difference between Southern food and soul food? Easy answer: black cooks. And Im one of them. A lot of the dishes, seasonings, and techniques are the same, but theres an extra oomph in soul food. Its like the difference between a hymn and a spiritual. Both sound beautiful and express the same message, but the spirituals got a groove. Southern foods delicious any which way, but when its made in the Black-American tradition with influences from Africa and the Caribbean, it delivers the kind of warmth and joy that makes you want to get up and dance.

I got that soul food in my bones. I was born into it in the South, with roots that go back generations. I grew up dunkin cornbread into pot likker at the table, snapping green beans for church suppers, slicing chess pie at every baby shower and graduation party. At my very core, Im always going back home to Tennessee when it comes to what I cook and eat. Ive got a Nashville-born-and-bred palate, which marries heat and spice with tart and tangy and a sweetness thats not too sugary. Coming from that heritage, I got a hold on the food with the soul that bears its name.

For this book, I tried to imagine what my ancestors would be cooking from the farm if they were alive today. By looking to our roots, Im showing you how delicious and healthy true soul food is. African-Americans were cooking farm-to-table centuries before it was a label to slap on hip restaurants. Foraging, pickling, preservingthats how we survived. Our farms were all organic. You think you discovered kale? Child, weve been eatin those greens for hundreds of years. Im going back to all that.

The bulk of this book is vegetable-centric weeknight recipes so comforting they taste like big ol hugs. Just like the celebration foods. Even though I dont think you should eat feast foods every day, I still love em. Youll find my spins on the celebration foods thatve been passed down by black cooks for generations for Sunday suppers, holidays, Juneteenth, family reunions, and parties.