Words For The Work

Cornmeal dough wrapped in greens or paper and baked directly in hot ash. Indigenous-rooted, plantation-era, almost entirely unwritten.

Sesame seeds, brought to the Lowcountry from West Africa. Used in benne wafers, in Gullah cooking, and in modern Black Southern pastry.

See also: Lowcountry

An heirloom long-grain rice cultivated by enslaved West Africans on the Carolina coast. Recovered through Anson Mills and others; the historic rice of red rice and Hoppin' John.

See also: Red rice, Lowcountry

Pork small intestines, deeply cleaned, slow-simmered with vinegar and aromatics. A whole-animal-yield dish, divisive even within the tradition; loved hard by those who love it.

See also: Yield thinking

A pickled cabbage-and-vegetable relish, sweet-sour and slightly hot. Spooned over beans, peas, and pork.

Cornmeal, buttermilk, egg, fat, salt, leavening. Baked in a smoking-hot cast-iron skillet greased with bacon fat. Historically Black Southern cornbread is not sweet.

See also: Hoecake

Pork skin or fat fried until crisp. Eaten as a snack, broken into cornbread batter, or scattered over greens.

Cornbread with rendered cracklin's broken into the batter, fat, salt, and crunch worked through the crumb.

Heavy lidded pot, enameled or bare cast iron. The vessel of gumbo, braise, and bean.

Ground sassafras leaves. Stirred into gumbo off the heat at the very end. Boiling it makes the gumbo rope.

See also: Roux, Gumbo z'herbes

The descendants of West and Central Africans enslaved on the rice and indigo plantations of the Carolina and Georgia coast. A culture, a language (Geechee), and a kitchen that held.

A Lenten green gumbo of seven (or more, always odd) different greens, traditionally meatless, cooked down for hours. Leah Chase's version at Dooky Chase's is the canonical modern reference.

See also: Roux, The trinity

An unleavened cornmeal cake originally cooked on the blade of a hoe over a fire. The oldest form of Southern cornbread.

See also: Cornbread, Ash cake

See: the trinity. The Louisiana name for the onion-celery-bell-pepper aromatic base.

A Lowcountry New Year's dish of field peas (or black-eyed peas) and rice cooked together with smoked meat. For luck. For the record. For dinner.

See also: Lowcountry, Pot likker

Cornmeal, salt, and boiling water mixed and pan-fried in small cakes, the simplest, oldest, fastest cornbread, descended from hoecake.

Hoppin' John's cousin: okra and rice cooked together in one pot, often with bacon or smoked meat.

See also: Hoppin' John

The coastal region of South Carolina and Georgia, including the Sea Islands, where Gullah Geechee culture has held the clearest line of West African foodways in the United States.

A coastal South Carolina / Georgia one-pot of shrimp, smoked sausage, corn on the cob, and small potatoes boiled together with Old Bay or a Lowcountry seasoning, often dumped onto a paper-covered table.

See also: Lowcountry

Glass canning jar. The vessel of pot likker, stock, hot sauce, pickles, sweet tea, and the leftovers of the leftovers.

Pig stomach, cooked similarly to chitlins. Often cooked alongside them.

Seasoning by hand and by feel, without measuring. The gesture is the recipe; the recipe is in the gesture.

Pork or beef neck bones, slow-cooked to falling tenderness, high flavor, low cost, foundational.

Cross-cut sections of beef tail. Slow-braised until the meat falls and the bones give a gelatinous body to the gravy. The Sunday-dinner upgrade.

Distilled white vinegar bottled with whole hot peppers, used as a finishing acid on greens and beans. Often homemade.

The seasoned, smoked, slow-cooked liquid left at the bottom of a pot of greens, beans, or field peas. A foundation, not a byproduct. Drink it with cornbread; cook the next thing in it.

See also: Pot, Smothering

Preserving the harvest. To 'put up' tomatoes, peaches, peppers, or beans is to can, pickle, ferment, or freeze them for the months ahead. A whole season's work, often done in family teams.

See also: Chow-chow, Pepper vinegar

Lowcountry rice cooked with tomato, smoked sausage, and stock. The American cousin of West African jollof rice.

See also: Lowcountry, Carolina Gold

Equal weights of fat and flour cooked together until colored, from blond through peanut butter to mahogany. In Black Louisiana cooking, the dark roux is a flavor, not a thickener.

See also: The trinity, Gumbo

Smoked turkey wing or neck, smoked ham hock, salt pork, or smoked sausage used not as the main protein but as a flavor base for a pot of greens, beans, or peas.

See also: Pot likker

Almost always means cast iron in this tradition. Seasoned. Inherited if you're lucky.

See: smothering.

A low, lid-on, fat-and-onion-based braise where the protein and aromatics dissolve into one another. The opposite of searing and plating.

See also: The pot, Roux

A category named in the Black Power era of the late 1960s for the long-cooked Southern Black food eaten in family kitchens, churches, and Black-owned restaurants. Earlier called simply 'home cooking' or 'Sunday food.' Adrian Miller's Soul Food is the historian's account.

A custardy, almost soufflé-like cornmeal dish, often baked in a casserole and served with a spoon. Upper South refinement of the cornbread idea.

The midday or early-afternoon meal after church on Sunday. Multi-generational, multi-dish, slow-cooked through the morning. The most important meal of the Black American week historically and often still.

See also: Smothering, The pot

A cultural term, almost always given to a Black woman, for the cook with a natural gift for baking and sweet making. Recognized rather than learned. Names the pound-cake maker the family asks for at every funeral and every wedding, the praline cook whose candy never seizes, the tea-cake hand the church bake sale waits on. Honorific and technical at once.

See also: Sunday dinner

The global scattering of African peoples and their descendants. Used in food writing to mean the network of cuisines connecting West Africa, the Caribbean, the Black Americas, and Black Europe.

The movement of about six million Black Americans from the rural South to Northern, Midwestern, and Western cities between roughly 1910 and 1970. The defining event in modern Black American food history.

Used as a noun in this tradition: 'what's in the pot?' refers to the day's slow-cooked anchor, beans, greens, gumbo, or stew.

See also: Pot likker, Smothering

Diced yellow onion, celery, and green bell pepper in a 2:1:1 ratio. The Louisiana aromatic base, dropped into hot roux to begin a gumbo or étouffée.

See also: Roux, Gumbo

An old hymn-rooted phrase that names the table as a place of arrival and equality. Jessica B. Harris uses it as the title of one of her foundational books.

The practice of using every part of an ingredient, stems, bones, fat, scraps, broth, peels, across multiple meals. A philosophy of the kitchen as a closed system. George Washington Carver's contribution as much as any cook's.