Carla Hall wants to take soul food mainstream
Carla Hall’s intentions were clear when she started working on her third cookbook: She wanted to focus on the food of her native South. But it wasn’t until a “pivotal point” with okra and tomatoes that the D.C.-based chef and TV personality figured out how to put her vision on the page.
“There is a stewed okra dish that everybody in the South knows,” said Hall, who was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. “I’m not a huge fan of okra, but I respect it as part of the ingredients and the culture.” She tried making a broth with canned tomatoes, onions, garlic and bay leaf, and roasting the okra separately, so the pods got crunchy, before dropping the vegetable into the aromatic liquid. “Immediately, the broth just permeated with this beautiful okra taste,” Hall marveled, triumphant that there was no trace of the vegetable’s signature sliminess.
At that moment, Hall remembers, she said: “This is it. This is what I want to do. I want to take a classic dish and think about the way that we live now and have those same tastes, and food memories, but in a dish from today.”
But “Carla Hall’s Soul Food: Everyday and Celebration” (Harper Wave), which was just released, is much more than a cookbook that updates traditional recipes. It also seeks to educate home cooks across the country about, as the introduction states, “the true food of African-Americans.”
The impetus was a DNA test that revealed Hall’s ancestors were the Yoruba people from Nigeria and the Bubi from Bioko Island off the west coast of Africa. She wondered what they might eat today if they lived in the United States. At the same time, she noticed that many grains — millet and sorghum among them — that were brought from Africa as part of the transatlantic slave trade and eventually incorporated into Southern foodways were available here again. Her soul food, she decided, would be that of her culture’s heritage, and of her family, childhood and adulthood.
She and co-author Genevieve Ko did copious research, relying on the work of such culinary scholars as Tonya Hopkins and Jessica B. Harris and such literary powerhouses as Maya Angelou — for her poetry, fiction and cookbooks — and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, whose novel “Americanah” juxtaposes African and African American cultures with notable depictions of food. They also traveled extensively through the South with Italian photographer Gabriele Stabile, whose documentary-like images, candid portraits and intimate shots are a departure from the carefully styled pictures of standard cookbooks.
Collectively, these choices allowed Hall to convey the multivalent nature of her subject, which, as Harris said, is “difficult to define because people tend to view African Americans and African American life in the United States as monolithic, and it’s not. People therefore are at a loss when it comes to seeing the varieties, and the range of lives and lifestyles that are involved in something like soul food.”
While the term “soul food” didn’t come around until the mid-20th century, Hall writes, it “refers to the dishes of the Cotton Belt of Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama that traveled out to the rest of the country during the Great Migration,” when millions of African Americans left the rural South.
Michael Twitty, whose book “The Cooking Gene” (Harper Collins, 2017) won top honors this year from the James Beard Foundation,
has three definitions for it. The first is “the product of the Great Migration,” except, for him, “The Great Migration is an idea: the idea that we will use momentum to leave our past.” It is also “the memory cuisine of the great, great grandchildren of enslaved people,” an answer to the question “Who are we?” Finally, soul food is “the African American vernacular cuisine.” It is the culinary counterpart to African American vernacular English, “in other words, black English, Ebonics,” he explained. “Because it’s not slang, and it’s not a poor adaptation. It’s not a pathology.”
The tendency to disparage soul food as “poor people’s food” is one that Hall and many African American food writers and chefs continue to challenge. “It’s a melding of West Africa, Western Europe and the Americas,” said Adrian Miller, author of “Soul Food” (The University of North Carolina Press, 2013). “Like many other cuisines, it’s a mix of the high and the low. There are elements of soul food which started as European royalty food, but soul food is consistently cast as a poverty cuisine.” That association dovetails with another myth Hall wants to dispel: that soul food is unhealthy. “When you hear nutritionists telling us what we need to eat,” Miller said, “they keep saying dark, leafy greens; sweet potatoes; more legumes; okra is now a super food. You know, more fish and chicken,
less red meat — these are all the building blocks of soul food.”
Hall battles this misconception by offering two categories of recipe: Everyday and Celebration. Remembering the vegetables her grandmother picked from her garden and cooked for the daily meals of Hall’s childhood, it struck her that portrayals of soul food tend to focus exclusively on large festive gatherings and holidays instead of reflecting how people eat on a regular basis. Some dishes are present on both daily and celebratory tables, and she identifies those accordingly. But the cookbook emphasizes vegetable-centric items you could eat any day of the week, and is mindful of reducing fat and sodium.
Readers will find such dishes as a three-bean skillet stew that lives up to the “speedy” in its recipe’s name and draws its flavor from bacon (about one slice per serving); a Caribbean-inspired smothered chicken made with light coconut milk, lime and habanero, in lieu of pork, which was introduced to the United States by Europeans; and, for special occasions, a sweet vanilla cake doused in a glossy, amber caramel sauce.
This is another way, as Hall writes in the book, to “redefine soul food, to reclaim it,” and to do that on behalf of her community. “It’s really getting back to being proud of this food ... to reintroduce it to other African Americans,” she said. She was met with skepticism from her literary agent, who, when Hall announced her next cookbook would focus on soul food, advised against it out of concern that her client would ostracize the rest of the country. “Nobody would say that about other cultures,” she replied.
Hall, 56, who splits her time between Washington and New York, was an accountant and model before she moved into food, catering and later parlaying her breakout appearances on Bravo’s “Top Chef” into a gig co-hosting the daily talk show “The Chew.” After it was canceled in May, she landed a regular cooking segment on its replacement, the third hour of “Good Morning America.” With the book, to some extent, Hall is trying to achieve what a crossover artist in the music industry might. But, as she clarified, “The crossover that was in my head wasn’t like a hit that would cross over into a different culture; it was the crossover in terms of interest. The same way that we would all pick up an Italian book if we didn’t know about Italian food, or a Korean book, or Japanese, or Indian food — it’s to honor the culture in that way . ... I’m just asking that you will honor our food.” 6 servings The bacon gives this quick dish a long-simmered flavor, says chef Carla Hall, but she doesn’t crisp it: When it’s cooked just to a golden soft consistency its salty goodness will soak into the creamy beans.
Serve it plain with corn bread; the photo shows it with a gremolata-type accompaniment.
MAKE AHEAD: The stew can be refrigerated for up to 1 week; reheat with a bit of water to loosen it up.
Adapted from “Carla Hall’s Soul Food: Everyday and Celebration” (Harper Wave, 2018).
Ingredients
Heat the oil in a large, deep skillet over medium-high heat. Once the oil shimmers, stir in the onion and 1 teaspoon of the salt. Cook for 2 to 3 minutes, until softened, then push the onion to one side of the pan.
Scatter the bacon pieces on the other side; cook for about 5 minutes, until golden but not crisped. On the bacon side, stir in the garlic, chile pepper and the remaining 1/2 teaspoon salt. Cook for about 1 minute, then add the beans and broth. Once the mixture begins to bubble at the edges, reduce the heat to medium and cook for about 5 minutes, so everything’s heated through.
Serve hot.