Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time AdrianMiller. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013.

Abstract

Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time Adrian Miller. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013.Soul Food, like its subject, is deliciously entertaining and rich in its history. Adrian Miller uses many perspectives to present soul food's history, influences, ingredients, and innovations old and new. Miller's credentials as an attorney and political analyst may seem off-point, but he is also a Southern Foodways Alliance board member and a certified barbecue judge. He argues that the story of soul is more complicated and surprising than earlier works have indicated; he has built his book on the oral histories of slaves and former slaves gathered in Federal Writers' Project interviews; written accounts from slavers, plantation visitors, and newspapers; interviews with famous soul cooks; and a year visiting 150 restaurants in thirty-five cities.This reviewer's favorite facts from Miller's research: Louisiana Senator Huey Long created a controversy in the 1930s when he argued that cornbread should be dunked whole in the likker left after cooking greens. Among those holding opposite views was then-Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who declared he preferred his cornbread crumbled into pot likker. Later, Roosevelt became the second US President who craved sweet potatoes and roasted possum (Taft was the first). Roosevelt, who spent months of therapy in Warm Springs, Georgia, learned to enjoy regardless of ethnic or class origins.Miller addresses the southern or soul food question very thoroughly, arguing that poverty foods became significant in the cultures of both African Americans and poor whites, especially during the Civil War years when successful blockades and destruction of crops and livestock reduced all southerners' to only a few home-grown necessities. Miller identifies a Slave Food period (1619-1865), marked by the constant introduction of new foods and different cooking brought by the forced migration from West Africa. A Southern Cooking (1865-present) saw the development of African American foodways in the rural South after Emancipation, which then traveled north with the millions-white and African American -leaving the rural South during the Great Migration. Miller also identifies modern, overlapping trends: a Soul Food (1950s-present) with traditional food now overtly merged with racial politics (7) and the current Neo-Soul Period, when the aesthetics and ingredients of the cuisine are being changed for health reasons (among others).Miller does not ignore the influences of Native American crops and cooking, nor the European sources of many foods that we think are West African in origin. …