Soul Food Revival

How Obama is going to lose his fat

Yams, innards fried in fat and a delicacy named “pot-licker”: Soul food, once despised as a cholesterol bomb and poor people’s food of African-Americans, is experiencing a comeback under Barack Obama’s presidency – even the Black Panther founder is causing a furor with barbecue books.

The waitress calls most of her guests “Baby” and places huge cups of ice tea on the plastic tablecloths. All around are plastic chairs, dried flowers and a greasy ventilator in the corner: Charles’ Southern Style Kitchen on 151st street in Harlem has an exterior more reminiscent of a shabby family kitchen than a classy downtown restaurant. And still: There is almost always a crowd in front of the glass entrance doors with the taped-on message: “$12.99 per person. All you can eat.”

Soul Food: Sizzled on a low flame

Church goers and professors from the New York University nearby, families from the neighborhood, old men armed with walking sticks and youths in over-sized hip-hop clothes, all waiting for the next free table. It is the smells from Charles’ aluminum vats that attract them. Fat-inseminated scents promise heaven on earth, amidst the empty window frames and the garbage-lined wastelands of the most northern part of Harlem. Steamed oxtail tips in a creamy sauce. Crisp and peppery, breaded chicken legs. Spare ribs braised in honey. Catfish marinated in garlic. Cabbage seasoned with bacon. Sweet yams. Black beans. In short: soul food.

Soul food, food for the soul – This is what the African-Americans have consciously been calling their own ethnic cuisine since the sixties, accompanied by the emergence of slogans like “Black and Proud”. But with the growing nutrition consciousness of recent decades, it was on the verge of coming to an end: The hot, greasy temptations made from grits, glazed yams or innards baked in fat, called chitterlings, simply contained too much cholesterol. But now soul food is celebrating its comeback.

The first black American president may be considered to be a fitness fanatic: But during the electoral campaign, Barack Obama was regularly served Southern cuisine specialties and ostentatiously dined in soul food restaurants. Since then, Sylvia’s, the most famous black restaurant in Harlem, advertises its “Fried Chicken Wings” as “Obama’s favorite dish”. Prominent guests are also featured on the walls of local soul food competitors, such as Amy Ruth’s or Mamie’s Spoonbread: LL Cool J, Whoopi Goldberg, Denzel Washington, Oprah Winfrey, Bill and Hillary Clinton . . .

Ingenuity born out of necessity

And more and more soul food establishments in the American inner city are recognizing the potential of a new, substantial clientele in suits and ties. Thus, Charles Gabriel recently opened a classy version of “Charles’ Southern Style Kitchen” on 125th Street: in the style of a diner, with dishes weighed to the gram.

“I brought my recipes with me from my grandmother in North Carolina,” explains the restaurant owner. But ultimately, a lot of the meals date back to the era of slavery. Hot chili peppers, melons, okra, rice and sesame were at one time introduced into Southern cuisine from Africa. Like the vegetable stew, cooked slowly with bacon.

One thing is for sure: Without poor African-Americans from the Southern states, the All-American cuisine would be lacking in a few standard dishes – from spare ribs to chicken wings. Historians refer to an ingenuity born out of necessity: In the past, most African-Americans had to settle for slaughterhouse waste and the parts that were not used for anything else, such as pigs’ feet, pigs’ ears, chicken wings and innards. Side dishes included corn, rice, yams and sweet potatoes, and occasionally okra, cabbage, pumpkin and beans – vegetables, which many slaves could plant in their own small gardens.

One characteristic of soul fool cuisine is to not let anything go to waste. Old bread was made into bread pudding; fish remains, into croquettes. Pigs’ feet were marinated in vinegar. And even the liquid in which the vegetables were cooked was used as gravy: This delicacy is called pot-licker. But traditionally, soul food contains too much fat, sugar and spices: additives, used in former times to improve the taste of the often poor-quality meat products.

Charles Gabriel reduced the calorie bombs, as did many of his colleagues: For example, he uses ham and not bacon with vegetables, and only puts half as much sugar in the iced tea as his grandmother did. But he especially sneers at the saying, “quickly on the table”. The tempo to which fast food chains – like Kentucky Fried Chicken – prepare their surrogate soul food, is responsible for the adulteration of Southern cuisine. After all, what soul food needs first and foremost is: Time. And a ceremonial effort.

One more time to the potato salad from Patti Labelle’s kitchen

“Ninety-five percent of my job is patience. The other five percent consists of seasoning and the right temperature, so that everything stays juicy and tender.” As a child, explains Gabriel, he performed the tedious task of removing the fat and skin from pork innards or spent an entire afternoon taking care of spare ribs over a low flame on a sizzling barbecue. “After you have prepared and seasoned the ribs, you have to babysit them until they are tender. This can take hours. Soul food is no quick meal. If you work too quickly, then it doesn’t taste good anymore.”

Today, soul food represents no less than prepared-to-please-the-palette African-American history. How else could the soul singer and Motown veteran, Smokey Robinson, get the idea of the advertising slogan, “The soul is in the bowl,” and market his image with a palette of dishes, from gumbo to red beans and rice?

He’s not the only African-American celebrity who uses his name to market gastronomy products: Norma Jean Darden, one of the first successful international black models, now runs a soul food catering business in Harlem. Ex-heavyweight boxer, George Foreman, sells his own barbecue sauces. And even Black Panther founder, Bobby Seale, is a sensation, especially with his barbecue cookbooks.

When asked about his biggest dream, glassy-eyed hiphop producer, Questlove, from the band, The Roots, describes: “To eat potato salad from Patti Labelle’s kitchen one more time.” Colleagues raved to him about the fantastic culinary talents of the soul veteran. Whereupon, he made a deal with Labelle: Potato salad, crab pâtés, baked chicken, collard greens and blueberry pies in exchange for his drum part on her disk.

The dining invitation failed to materialize, and when Labelle’s son, a rapper, was looking for help in producing his album two years later, Questlove reminded him about his mother’s promise. “You get two beats valued at 20,000 dollars, if soul food is brought into the studio by next week . . . ”