Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America. By Frederick Douglass Opie. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. xviii, 238 pp. $24.95, ISBN 978-0-231-14638-8.)

Abstract

Is soul food the American expression of the mixing of diverse African foodways from across the Atlantic world? Is it a gift from rural folk culture, black and white? Is it what happened when African American cooks interacted with other cultures? Is it a memory of southern roots tasted on the end of a fork? Is it a dish that becomes more than the sum of its parts when inexpensive ingredients combine with wisdom and spirit? Is it the invention of the 1960s and 1970s black power movement, naming what had previously been just dinner? Is soul food a little different to each person who describes it? Frederick Douglass Opie argues that the answer to all those questions is yes. In Hog and Hominy, he traces a careful history of soul food, untangling the multiple roots, challenging some cherished mythologies, and ultimately bringing a helpfully complicated world perspective to an often individualized term.