In Search of Soul Food

Soul food is just what the name implies. It is soulfully cooked food or richly flavored food, 8ood for your ever-loving soul.
-SHEILA FERGUSON

In 1900, a Kentucky mountain woman walked fifty miles to seek a place for her granddaughter at Berea College high school. "It's a lot worse to be soul-hungry than to be body-hungry," she explained. Now I know why every year I travel a thousand miles for a plate of pinto beans.

Soul food is our personal passport to the past. It is much more about heritage than it is about hominy. It's Grandma's beaten biscuits or Nana's borscht. Sheila Ferguson tells us in her cookbook Soul Food: Classic Cuisine from the Deep South that it's "a legacy clearly steeped in tradition; a way of life that has been handed down from generation to generation." And while the expression "soul food" is usually used to describe traditional African¬American cooking, this emotionally evocative cuisine is color-blind. Real soul food only knows the borders of the heart. Soul food is universal culinary memories, stories, and recipes. It's how to fry the chicken or the wan¬ton, shape the noodles, simmer the brisket, roll the tortilla, sweeten the iced tea.

Whenever I've gone home to visit my parents, over the last twenty-five years, the fil'S rand last meal my mother has always prepared for me is my favorite: soup beans, a tangible time transporter to her old Kentucky home and mine. Soup beans are pinto beans that have simmered slowly for hours, until they create their own soup. Ladle soup beans over mashed potatoes. Serve with coleslaw, hot cornbread slathered with real butter, and an ice¬cold beer. This summer my mother is gravely ill and my sister, brothers, and I are struggling with the traumatic reality of saying good-bye. In a few days, Katie and I will travel north for a family reunion of all my mother's children and grandchildren; there will be conversation, cooking, comfort, closure. Although I know intellectually how to prepare my favorite meal, I don't emotionally. I don't think about my mother dying, I think about my last helping of her soup beans. There are many ways to grieve.

When preparing soul food, we can't cook by the book but rather by instinct, by using our senses. "You learn to hear by the crackling sound when it's time to turn over the fried chicken, to smell when a pan of biscuits is just about to finish baking, and to feel when a pastry's just right to the touch," Sheila Ferguson tells us. "You taste, rather than measure, the seasoning you treasure; and you use your eyes, not a clock to judge when that cherry pie has bubbled sweet and nice. These skills are hard to teach quickly. They must be felt. . . and come straight from the heart and soul" As I write, I have just come to the heart-wrenching awareness that I need at least another lifetime to learn how to cook like my mother but that I only have today, if I'm lucky.

This summer, collect soulful recipes, or have someone you love but don't see very often cook for you. Better still, try taking a personal cooking lesson. You might think you know how to make jam cake with caramel icing, but do you?