Chefs, Academics, & Activists Talk Southern Food History

My great-grandmother is well-known throughout Camden, Alabama for an infamous ability: feeding her husband and two children on $25 a month.

Jane Phipps, her daughter and my grandmother, spent a Saturday afternoon in April telling me about the skill. "When she got paid, she would go and buy a coupon book. Some of the coupons would have a dollar printed on it, some would have 50 cents. She would pay $25 at the beginning of the month and receive $25 in the form of coupons in return. When she went to buy groceries, she would tear out whatever the cost," she said.

"The purpose of it was that you knew you always had the money to pay for groceries, it was done, it was a way of budgeting. This way she guaranteed that she would be able to feed us,” Phipps said, “My mother was a solo sport. My father died when I was 10, and he didn't work at all– he was completely bedridden– the last two years of his life."

It was her father, my great-grandfather, who insisted on raising chickens. He worked in construction before developing rheumatoid arthritis. “He was in horrible pain, so he had to give up the job in state road construction. He thought he could take up chicken houses. He thought that was something he could do, because he could rest and then do a little bit,” Phipps said.

“My mother agreed to build the chicken house, and my brother put the cages together. But my father’s arthritis kept getting worse and worse. By the time the chickens got there, my father was completely barren. So, he never took care of the chickens. My mother, brother, and sister would come home from work and go out there,” Phipps said.

The family used a clothespin system to keep track of collected eggs. “If the chicken had laid an egg, you would move a clothespin over one. So, you would know which of your chickens were no longer laying eggs,” Phipps said.

Outside of raising chickens, Phipps said that her family grew most of their produce. "We did a lot of gardening. My mother did a lot of canning and freezing, so we ate a lot of vegetables," she said.

The rest of the Phipps family's diet came from a market in the center of town, within walking distance of their home. “It was just a little small store, if you saw it, you would think, how could this ever have been a grocery store?" Phipps said.

The small grocer sold limited ingredients. "The only thing really available was Campbell's," said Phipps. As a result, Campbell’s brand products soon made their way into family recipes.

“The recipes my mother passed down all included Campbell's products,” Phipps said, "Most of my casseroles use Campbell's soup, the squash casserole recipe I make uses Campbell's soup, Chicken Tetrazzini uses it, the green bean casserole. I did some kind of hamburger and noodles that had Cream of Mushroom or Cream of Chicken."

Charla Draper, a former Communications Manager for the Campbell Soup Company, said that recipe creation was at the center of her team’s strategy. "The strategy was certainly to promote additional sales of the product by creating and delivering flavorful recipes that use the soup, perhaps as a convenient time saver, in place of something more complicated," she said. These recipes included the infamous green bean casserole served by families, including mine, across the South.

Draper also handled publicity for the flagship condensed soup line. She recounted pushback to the sodium content in Campbell's Soup. "When people learned that I worked for Campbell Soup, the next thing out of their mouths would be, ‘oh, but it's so salty,’" Draper said.  

Campbell Soup did eventually release a low-sodium line. In February 2010, the company announced it would re-formulate its Select Harvest soups, a line marketed as a natural option made with “real ingredients,” to reduce the sodium content from 800mg to 480mg per serving.

In the following months, Campbell Soup faced weak sales and a lawsuit over misleading low-sodium labeling on the reformulated soups. By July 2011, Denise Morrison, the company’s CEO-elect at the time, announced the company would raise the sodium levels up to 650mg per serving. The announcement was met by a 1.3% increase in the company’s stock price.

Draper described product design as a constant tradeoff between consumer preferences and nutritional value. "The company was looking toward reducing the sodium content, but I won't say there was a point in research where the consumer would not balk at the samples that had a reduction of the salt," she said.

After her time at Campbell's, Draper worked as a food editor for Southern Living and Ebony magazine. She described the Ebony test kitchen as "very colorful, with lots of oranges, purples, and golds in it, which certainly reflected the diversity and creativity of the African American consumer audience."

Consumer and corporations alike informed the recipes published by the magazines. "We wanted to appeal to both our readers and advertisers, so many of the products we use in the recipes were things that you would purchase in the supermarket," Draper said. The Campbell Soup company was one advertiser who had a designated position in Ebony, referred to by staff as "The Campbell Soup Page."

Food editors worked with companies to develop recipes using their products. Draper explained that, oftentimes, increasing the spice content of a recipe would add flavor value and increase its appeal to African American consumers. She said this process could transform an ingredient or recipe into soul food.

"Many soul foods start with a food that is traditionally Southern, however, with creativity and mother wit, African American cooks have made an adjustment, creating food that is more representative," Draper said.

Adrian Miller, a self-proclaimed Soul Food Scholar, agreed. “Southern food is the mother cuisine and soul food is the food that African American migrants took out of the South and transplanted in other parts of the country," he said.  

In the context of Southern history, Miller said that food was dictated by class and place, rather than race. "People have the same economic status, we're eating the same foods. Because of racism they weren't eating them together, but they're pretty much eating the same foods," he said.

Soul food influenced the culinary traditions of both high- and low-income white families. "A lot of families had a Black cook, so they were used to the Black aesthetic when it came to eating certain foods. Poor whites would come to the edge of the plantation and get food, they would barter for food from enslaved people. I'm sure an enslaved person would say, well, this is how you cook that," Miller said.

Miller's mother was raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee and his father in Helena, Arkansas. He described soul food as a tether to Black culture and history. "Even though we grew up in a predominantly white suburb of Denver, I kept going to a Black church where I regularly ate soul food and that was the main food in our home," he said.

Soul food is a tradition in constant evolution, and Miller noted a growing trend toward health-consciousness. "People have been taking out the fat, the sugar and the salt," he said. Home and professional chefs are also preparing plant-based foods. "Vegan is where you're seeing the most creativity and excitement when it comes to African American food right now," said Miller.

Miller also described the cultural fusion of soul food with other traditions, including soul food egg rolls, Black tacos, Mississippi Delta-style tamales, and collard green quesadillas. "This is a direct result of Black folks living in close proximity to other people from different places in the world," he said.

I asked Miller whether he thought there was a problem with transforming recipes. "It depends on how you're changing it. Things need to change, that's the nature of human evolution. I can't think of any place where people are eating the same as they did two hundred years ago,” he said, “What I would want is for the people making these changes, to still be fully versed in the traditional foodways of their people, and at least be able to make the traditional stuff."

Though, it is difficult to find information about African American and Southern culinary traditions, a history which is marred by slavery and oppression. "For a long time, African Americans were purposely kept illiterate, so a lot of these recipes were just verbal," Miller said, "Since the 1800s, [recipes] have been put down to paper, sometimes by whites, but we have a historical record of how this food was made at one point. It's a matter of learning those recipes and understanding the flavor profiles that those recipes were trying to accomplish."

Miller used the example of greens to illustrate how traditional flavor profiles can be matched in a modern context. Dark, leafy greens were typically cooked with pork. Today, families substitute paprika for pork to retain a smoky taste. According to Miller, old recipes can set parameters within which to experiment.

Miller said that recipes like smoky greens will inevitably go in and out of style. "Today, people may not want to eat chitlins which, a hundred years ago, people did. A hundred years ago, the preeminent dish in African American foodways was possum and taters, a possum roasted with sweet potatoes. I don't know anybody who eats that now," he said.

According to Miller, popular foods have traditional roots which are unknown to many eaters. Chicken and waffles is one example of a popular dish that went in and out of style. "In 1920s Harlem, a restaurant entrepreneur named Joseph Welch said, 'Hey, I'm gonna bring back chicken and waffles, but I'm gonna tell people I invented it' and they bought his invention story," Miller said.

Recipes go out of style for several reasons. Possum and taters, for example, is a dish cooked less frequently because it became difficult to acquire possum as people moved from rural areas into urban centers. Miller also explained a perceptual opposition to the dish, "You know, eating possum and taters makes you look like a country bumpkin. Going into an urban area, you wanted to look more sophisticated because you want to be accepted by people."

Miller finds the stigma against soul food a result of lazy thinking. “[They are] saying, oh, well look at all these Black people that have various diseases. It's got to be because they keep eating X, Y, and Z,” he said, "If you talk to a lot of people who have these health challenges, you'll find they're not eating a lot of soul food. They're loading up on convenience food, junk food, and processed stuff."

Miller said the earliest versions of a dish are often the healthiest, a line of reasoning which is especially true in the context of soul food. "If you go back and look at what enslaved people are actually eating, it's very close to what we call vegan today. Because of their lower status in society, they weren't allowed to eat a lot of processed foods, they got limited access to white flour and white sugar," he said.

Health guidelines point to the nutritional value of soul food. "Nutritionists are telling us to eat more dark leafy greens, sweet potatoes, okra, the hibiscus is a superfood, all these things are the building blocks of soul food,” Miller said.

According to Miller, consumers do not intentionally turn away from soul food, rather, processed foods offer a mechanism to eat nostalgic foods within environmental and economic constraints. "When people leave a place and show up someplace else, their natural instinct is to recreate home, and food is one of the ways to recreate home. If you can get the same stuff in the new place that you got to the old place that you called home, you do that, but often you have to find substitutes," he said.

Companies use the nostalgia of traditional foods to market their products. Marcia Chatelain, recipient of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History for her book Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, said traditional Southern foods were presented with the option of highly processed consumer products after the Civil War because of new markets and manufacturing products. “What you see, during this time, is advertising engaging in nostalgia for the period of enslavement, while also selling foods that are predicated on convenience— meaning you do not need outside, household help in order to make biscuits, cakes, or other food that is time-consuming or requires high levels of skill,” she said.

The religious and politically conservative roots of fast-food ignited its expansion in the South. “The big fast-food brands that emerged out of Southern California were influenced by Christian movements that called for financial prosperity, and in many ways that does connect to the South. Businesses that are infused with Christian ideology are appealing to a certain consumer base,” Chatelain said, “Additionally, conservatives have long supported the practices that favor, the fast-food industry, whether it be very little regulation on franchising contracts, or the suppression of raises to the minimum wage.”

A 2011 study by Sandelman & Associates, a market research firm, classifies heavy fast-food user markets. Of the top ten “super-heavy fast-food user markets,” translating to an average of twenty or more fast-food visits per person each month, nine are in the South. 

Chatelain said that fast foods are unhealthy but represent the only affordable option for many families. “The fundamental problem of processed foods is that it introduces chemicals into the American diet. That may not be the healthiest, but I’m always very careful not to completely bash, processed foods in a context in which it is affordable and reliable for people with little money or resources,” she said.

“Southern food often gets a reputation as being particularly unhealthy, but I don’t know if there’s a great understanding of the fact that everyday food isn’t always the most fat-laden, or the most complicated. The Southern diet includes very simple foods, and those foods aren’t necessarily unhealthy,” Chatelain said, “That characterization of Southern food is often associated with African Americans and marked as unhealthy. Additionally, I think the foods of the South are associated with poverty, and therefore, the foods that people used to sustain themselves are associated with lacking nutritional value.”

“American history is full of both admiration for and contempt for African Americans and their cooking. On one hand, many standard American things can be traced to African American origins. On the other hand, racism and stereotypes about race include food,” Paul Freedman said.

Freedman is a professor at Yale University who studies food and society. He was first fascinated by food when he visited the New York Public Library, home to the world’s largest collection of menus which reached 45,000 in 2023. “The oldest [menu] is from 1840. What people ate in the 19th century seemed so different. What happened to American taste? Is there such a thing as American food?” he asked.

Freedman was especially intrigued by community cookbooks as a mechanism to understand the evolution of food traditions. “Everybody contributes a recipe, they're often in loose leaf bound books. Churches, neighborhoods, volunteer organizations, and other groups do this,” he said.

He described one community cookbook from a church in a rural Tennessee county. The cookbook blends recipes involving only whole food ingredients and recipes which require processed foods. “There are recipes for squirrel, possum, rural kinds of stuff that [you] go out and shoot or only old people know how to make. There are recipes for things involving artificial whipped cream or Reddi-wip,” Freedman said.

Freedman said the dessert section is especially saturated with ultra-processed products. “It's Butterfinger candies, pounded out cake, and then layers of Reddi-wip and Butterfingers. They are still making things with Jell-O, cake, and artificial whipped cream with Nilla Wafers on the top,” he said, “That same potluck or supper will have a deer shot in the woods, beans harvested from somebody's farm and simmered for eight hours, country ham, red-eye gravy, and these highly processed things.”

Freedman said that Southern recipes using processed foods have begun to reflect a past tradition, rather than modernity. “An optimistic account would be that people, in adopting crappy modern food, haven't forgotten their roots. But, of course, the crappy modern food that they've adopted is itself archaic. Nobody makes Jell-O salads up here anymore. They have been for 50 years,” Freedman, who lives in New Haven, Connecticut, said.

Freedman offered pimento cheese as another example of a traditional Southern food with Northern roots. “If you look at women's magazines from 1920s Connecticut, they would routinely serve pimento cheese at lady’s lunches or teas. Pimento cheese went out here before the Second World War and didn't in the South. The South preserves things,” he said, “It preserves rural things like raccoon, but it also preserves early first wave industrial cuisine like pimento cheese— industrial cuisine because you don't grow the pimentos, you bought a little jar of them and mixed it with cheese from some commercial establishment.”

Freedman said his dislike of processed ingredients is not driven by a commitment to nutrition, but to taste. “Yeah, it would be good if people ate healthfully, but I think a lot of that's overdone,” he said, “Why use something like that when you could whip cream yourself? Why use frozen strawberries? Pop Tarts are crappy because they don't taste very good. They're full of artificial or artificially enhanced tastes.”

A prevailing lack of culinary knowledge bothers Freedman. He said industrial foods caused a mass deskilling, an exaggeration of convenience and its importance, and a nutritional loss. “When it comes to cooking, National Public Radio has a feature on Thanksgiving where you can ask them questions in an emergency: you're cooking for company, and something happens. One of the biggest question they get is ‘how do I turn on my oven?’ because these are people who never use their oven, except, you know, once a year,” he said.

Freedman noted that the people who have lost culinary skills are female, since most men did not have those skills in the first place.

“I don't know how to clean a fish. I buy filets just like everybody else of my background tends to, unless they've decided they're going to go a step further into authenticity. If they do, it's a kind of hobby interest,” Freedman said, “Deskilling is all over the place. Your phone does at least a dozen tasks that I had separate tools to do, ranging from calculating arithmetic to measuring something, serving as an alarm clock to serving as a library, a thesaurus, or a dictionary.”

During pandemic era stay-at-home orders, Freedman predicted a wave of culinary reskilling. “People were going to relearn how to cook at home and discover that it’s really nice and healthier, more family time would wean them away from fast-food and delivery. Certainly, that hasn't happened, people have gone back to work and so convenience becomes important again,” he said.

Melissa Hall said the changing notion of work caused the transformation of Southern foods. "All of a sudden, a woman might be working outside of her home for the first time, and yet still expected to provide meals and keep a house in the same way that she might have when working inside," she said.

Hall, the director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, grew up at the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in Southeastern Kentucky. She explained highly processed ingredients as a relic of post-World War II industrial and social revolutions. "We're climbing out of the Great Depression. We are in the middle of one of the greatest economic recoveries. We are building an interstate system that will finally connect the American South to the rest of the world. The [Tennessee Valley Authority] is doing its work to build the hydroelectric dams that are going to bring electricity into a whole part of the South," she said.

According to Hall, serving a processed food like Jell-O became a symbol of status. “To make Jell-O, you need refrigeration, and to have refrigeration means you need to be a house with electricity. Being a house with electricity, at that moment, says something about the economic status of the family. The ability to create a Jell-O based dessert or a Jell-O based salad, carries with it some social capital,” she said.

“This is not somebody saying, ‘I don't care about traditional Southern food anymore,’ it's somebody saying, ‘I want to embrace all of the opportunity that access, interstates, and electricity, give me,’” Hall said.

Hall said the rise of restaurant chains like Cracker Barrel and PoFolks, which were born in the South and claim to celebrate its food, also marked the South when they began to publish recipes.

She noted a hashbrown recipe, for example, which showed up in community cookbooks during the 1960s. “You can trace that recipe back to Cracker Barrel. That wasn't in anybody's house. That’s not coming out of anybody's food tradition. That's coming out of a restaurant and going back into homes,” Hall said.

Hall is often asked about the nutritional value of Southern foods. “I would always [answer], ‘say more about that question.’ It would come down to, essentially, ‘fried chicken is unhealthy and it's contributing to the obesity crisis,’” she said.

When she was growing up, Hall explained that fried chicken was a monthly treat and required keeping chickens. Now, fried chicken is a culinary experience for most Southerners. “The fact that it's become ubiquitous, that's not really born of the South, that's born of a consumer culture,” she said.

Hall said that when she lived in Kentucky, she rarely ate meat during June, July, and August. “In those months, we ate fresh tomatoes, corn, cucumber, watermelons, and my grandmother would make cornbread,” she said.

“I remember when we got our Burger King, I remember when we got our McDonald's. [I] wanted those things badly. That’s what you needed to be a town, and maybe you’re not just a town anymore, you're a real city. There's a wanting to be able to buy whatever you want and cook whatever you want,” Hall said.

While she was initially excited about the opening of fast-food restaurants and the development of new food items, Hall said she prefers traditional Southern dishes made from whole food ingredients. “I don't want to eat that casserole. I don't like it. I don't think it's good. I don't want to eat things that have a can of cream of something soup, or a container of sour cream, or any of the Jell-O based salads in the South. I don't think they're delicious,” she said.

Though, Hall is not bothered by the presence of recipes involving processed foods in cookbooks or at family gatherings. “Southern food draws people in its vibrancy. It speaks to communities and people and reflects a moment,” she said, “The hashbrown casserole, it's had its moment. When we move on to something else, that's okay. Recognizing the moment and understanding how the moment happens doesn't threaten Southern food.”