What This Is Not

What this is not

• This is not a recipe blog.

  It is a framework. A canonical, technical, and historical structure that recipes can sit inside. The recipes themselves we link out to, to Black food writers, Black-authored cookbooks, and Black chefs and bloggers who have done the recipe-writing work. We do not duplicate their effort.

• This is not a definitive list of correct dishes.

  Black American cooking is regional, generational, denominational, and personal. Two grandmothers in the same town will disagree on greens. The framework names systems and lineages. It does not declare a single right way to make any given dish.

• This is not African cuisine.

  Black American cuisine descends from West and Central African foodways but is not the same as them. It was built in North America, under specific historical conditions, in conversation with Indigenous and forced European influences. To call jollof and red rice the same dish is to miss the second of those words.

• This is not a closed circuit.

  Black food is diasporic. The framework focuses on the Black American canon while pointing throughout to Caribbean, West African, and Black European lineages. Specificity is not separatism. We are precise about Black American so that the diaspora can be discussed accurately.

• This is not nostalgia.

  We are not trying to freeze the cuisine in 1949 or 1976. The point of writing the canon down is so that the next generation can extend it. A koji-cured Southern ham, a plant-based pot likker, a Carolina Gold rice risotto. All of these are inside this framework.

• This is not a soul-food site, only.

  Soul food is a category named in the late 1960s for one expression of Black American cooking. It is part of this canon, not the whole of it. Lowcountry Gullah Geechee cooking, Louisiana Creole, Upper South Appalachian-edge cooking, and Bryant Terry's plant-forward West Coast work all live here.

• This is not, and will not be, gatekeeping.

  The framework names lineages and credits cooks. It does not exist to police who is allowed to cook this food. It exists to make it harder to cook it without naming where it came from.

Distinctions worth keeping

Black American cuisine vs. African cuisine

African cuisines are a continent of distinct national and regional traditions. Senegalese, Ghanaian, Nigerian, Ethiopian, Congolese, and dozens more. Black American cuisine is the North American descendant of West and Central African foodways, fused under enslavement with Indigenous and European technique. It is one node in the diaspora. It is not a substitute name for African food.

Soul food (the slur) vs. soul food (the tradition)

'Soul' became a Black self-claim in the late 1960s. 'Soul food' was named in that moment for the long-cooked Black Southern food of family kitchens, churches, and Black-owned restaurants, a tradition that was already a hundred years old by then. It has, at various times since, been used as a slur or as code for unhealthy or unrefined eating. We use it here in its original sense: a category Black cooks named for themselves.

Soul food vs. Black American cuisine

Soul food is one category inside Black American cuisine. Lowcountry Gullah Geechee, Louisiana Creole, Upper South, Northern migration cooking, and West Coast plant-forward Black cooking are also inside it. To call all Black American cooking 'soul food' is to flatten the regional record.

Appropriation vs. expansion

Expansion is innovation that names its lineage, credits its sources, and pays them. A non-Black cook who learns this canon, cites the cookbook authors who taught them, pays Black consultants when consulting, and tells their staff and their customers where the dish came from is expanding the canon. A cook or company who erases that lineage, or who profits from it without naming or paying anyone, is appropriating. The line is honesty and compensation, not skin color.

'Authentic' vs. accurate

'Authenticity' is a word the framework tries to avoid. It is often used to freeze cuisines into a marketable past. We prefer 'accurate', meaning truthful about lineage, technique, and source. An accurate Black American kitchen can be experimental. An 'authentic' one is sometimes just a museum.