Slave owners fed their captive workers as cheaply as possible, often with leftover/waste foods from the plantation, forcing slaves to make do with the ingredients at hand. In slave households, “vegetables” consisted of the tops of beets, dandelions, and turnips. Soon, African-American slaves were cooking with new types of “greens”: collards, cress, kale, mustard, and pokeweed.
They also developed recipes which used cornmeal, lard, and offal; discarded cuts of meat such as ham hocks, oxtail, pig’s ears, pigs’ feet, pork jowls, skin, and tripe. Cooks added garlic, onions, and thyme as flavor enhancers. Slave owners provided their slaves with the poor parts of the pig such as the small intestines: chitterlings or offal.
Sheep intestines had been a common dish in Africa for thousands of years before the Atlantic slave trade; since African-Americans did not have access to sheep intestines, chitterlings came to fill that culinary void. Some African-American slaves supplemented their meager diets by gardening small plots given to them for growing their own vegetables; many engaged in subsistence fishing and hunting, which yielded wild game for the table. Foods such as opossum, rabbit, raccoon, squirrel, and turtle were, until the 1950s, very common fare among the then still predominantly rural and Southern African-American population.
Traditionally-prepared soul foods tend to be very high in starch, fat, sodium, cholesterol, and calories. In contemporary times, some traditional-style soul foods have been implicated in the abnormally high rates of high blood pressure (hypertension), type 2 diabetes, clogged arteries (atherosclerosis), stroke, and heart attack suffered by African-Americans – especially those living in the Southern and Central United States.
A foundational difference in how the perceived health of contemporary soul food may differ from ‘traditional’ styles is the widely different structures of agriculture. Fueled by federal subsidies, the agricultural system in the United States became industrialized as the nutritional value of most processed foods, and not just those implicated in a traditional perception of soul food, have degraded.
This urges a consideration of how concepts of racial authenticity evolve alongside changes in the structures that make some foods more available and accessible than others.
An important aspect of the preparation of soul food was the reuse of cooking lard. Because many cooks could not afford to buy new shortening to replace what they used, they would pour the liquefied cooking grease into a container. After cooling completely, the grease re-solidified and could be used again the next time the cook required lard.