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 and shatter-light. Eaten as a snack, scattered over greens, or — most canonically — broken into cornbread batter to make cracklin' bread, where the rendered fat, salt, and crunch are worked through the crumb. A yield-thinking dish: the byproduct of rendering lard becomes its own course.

See also: Cornbread, Yield thinking

See: Cracklin'. Cornbread baked with rendered cracklin's worked into the batter.

See also: Cracklin', Cornbread

A New Orleans–specific term for the scraps of roast beef that fall into the drippings during roasting, served over French bread as a po'boy. Yield thinking in a specific regional form.

See also: Yield thinking

A Louisiana dish of white rice cooked with chicken livers, gizzards, ground meat, the trinity, and seasoning until the rice takes on the brown color of the meat. One of the canonical expressions of yield thinking in the Louisiana kitchen.

See also: Yield thinking, The trinity

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

The direct ancestor of pickled shrimp. A technique of frying or curing protein and then pickling it in a vinegar-based brine with aromatics and vegetables. Traveled from West Africa through Spain through the Caribbean into the American South.

See also: Pepper vinegar

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

Fannie Lou Hamer's Freedom Farm Cooperative, founded 1969 in Sunflower County, Mississippi. Up to 700 acres, a 'pig bank' that loaned breeding sows to Black families, a vegetable cooperative, Head Start, and affordable housing. The model document for Black food sovereignty in the 20th century.

See also: The Migration / The Great Migration

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.

A West African one-pot rice dish cooked in a seasoned tomato and pepper base. The direct ancestor of Louisiana red rice and South Carolina red rice — one of the clearest lines of culinary continuity between West Africa and Black American cooking.

See also: Red rice, Carolina Gold

A Louisiana French and Creole term meaning 'a little something extra,' given by a merchant or cook as a gesture of generosity. Rooted in the Quechua word la yapa, and representing the hospitality value of Black and Creole Louisiana cooking.

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

A Louisiana smothered corn dish of Indigenous and Creole origin, made by scraping corn from the cob and cooking it down in its own milk with butter, onion, and sometimes shrimp or crab. One of the clearest examples of Indigenous technique retained in Creole cooking.

See also: Smothering

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

A Louisiana confection of sugar, butter, and pecans cooked to a soft candy. Distinct from the French praline it was named for; developed by Black confectioners in New Orleans who sold them on the streets of the French Quarter as one of the earliest examples of Black entrepreneurship in food.

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

The Black Southern practice of seasoning without measuring spoons. Salt thrown from the hand, hot sauce shaken until the color is right, vinegar splashed until the pot answers back. The recipe is in the wrist and the eye, taught by standing next to someone who has been cooking the dish for forty years. Not imprecise — calibrated by hundreds of repetitions.

See also: Mother's pinch, Sunday dinner

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

The small plot of land enslaved people were sometimes allowed to cultivate for themselves, in addition to the cash-crop fields. Where okra, peppers, sweet potatoes, gourds, and herbs were kept alive across generations. The kitchen garden of the unfree, and the seed bank of the cuisine that followed.

See also: Yield thinking

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.