Ten Restaurants That Changed America by Paul Freedman

Author:Paul Freedman
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Liveright

And when I cook, I never measure or weigh anything. I cook by vibration. I can tell by the look and smell of it.40

In the 1997 film Soul Food, directed by George Tillman, the family matriarch Big Mama Jo tells one of her daughters that she never relies on written recipes and doesn’t need to measure out ingredients—it’s all in her head.41

In her two cookbooks, Sylvia Woods, of course, accommodates the home cook who lacks her experience; measurements are precise and steps are spelled out. Cooking is always a skill acquired by experience, in Woods’s accounts, not a magical gift, but it is also not something to be followed dutifully according to written instruction either, especially for basic but difficult things like biscuits. It takes some practice to make biscuits, Sylvia Woods asserts, and those made by her longtime Hemingway-born chef Ruth Gully she considered superior to anyone else’s. In order to master biscuit making it is important to remember what the dough should feel like. When it comes to pot roast, Woods presents both her recipe and Ruth’s, inviting the reader to choose. They are very similar, except that Woods’s calls for cooking the meat with A1 and Worcestershire sauce.42

For many years the prevailing official (white) consensus was that black people had a talent for cooking, but didn’t create anything other than a marginal kind of food of their own—what then became identified as soul food, set apart from anything whites were interested in. Southern food, on the other hand, was deemed white even if, more often than not, it was cooked by African Americans.43 Arbitrarily barbecue, fried chicken, and biscuits were said to belong to whites while chitterlings (intestines), pigs’ ears, poke salat, and paw-paws were marginalized as exclusively black property. Contradicting this orthodoxy, surveys by the South Carolina agricultural experiment station undertaken between 1939 and 1942 showed that African American “dietary habits resembled those of white families in corresponding sections of the state.” There were some differences—whites ate shrimp often, while blacks tended to have them only for an occasional breakfast. Hambone with green beans or stewed pears was distinctly white while hominy or cabbage with fat meat gravy and collards boiled with meat was black.44

The “ownership” of Southern food remains controversial, as attested by disputes launched in 2013 by allegations that celebrity restaurateur and chef Paula Deen not only made racist remarks, engaged in sexual harassment, and underpaid her kitchen workers but also presented their recipes as her own creations. One of her African American former collaborators, Dora Charles, recently published a cookbook called A Real Southern Cook in Her Savannah Kitchen. On the question of differences between black and white Southern cooking, Ms. Charles said recently “Southern country food is pretty much the same for black people and white people, except most black cooks are more concerned with seasoning.” African American cooks often make up their own spice mixtures. For example, “Savannah seasoning” is one of Ms. Charles’s favorites. It has Lawry’s seasoned salt, garlic, black pepper, and table salt and is used with ribs, pork chops, and baked spaghetti.

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