By The Campfire

August 27, 2008

Once upon a time, Soul Food was pretty much all there was to eat in the South, at least at my house. If you have never smelled a gallon pot of greens boiling in water and lard with a hog jowl, forgive my overt pronouncement, but you are a suspect Southerner. Sometimes you have to call them as you cook them.

Wikipedia has this to say about Soul Food: “Impoverished whites and blacks in the South prepared many of the same dishes stemming from the soul tradition, but styles of preparation sometimes varied.”

Not to contradict the masters of Internet information, but my experience from those days – unlike the ugly politics of racism – leans in the direction that Soul Food didn’t care what color your skin was. Anything served with black-eyed peas was the great equalizer.

Since I didn’t order off the menu in proper dining venues growing up down where the humidity was thick enough to chew as a side dish and people could water ski on Christmas Day, it is no shame for me to admit that I am hardly shocked by pickled eggs, bologna and sardine sandwiches or the act of frying everything from catfish to fig tarts.

Soul Food meant just that, food for the soul, and if you need it explained further, you shouldn’t eat it. You’ll live longer, no doubt, but it will be a lesser life.

I know a man who was in amazing physical condition and was killed by a train while jogging. If he’d eaten more country sausage with biscuits, he might still be alive.

In the 1960’s through the 1990’s, if you went to the South side of Chicago or Kansas City or Philly or Washington D.C, you’d never be far from a plate of God-fearing, greasy, fried chicken wings and a pile of vinegary collard greens. I could find Soul Food in any city I visited. It was a Southern, “inside” thing, like being being in a fraternity or sorority. You didn’t even need the secret handshake, just listen for the accent and follow the smell.

Soul Food happened everywhere in the South, but it wasn’t Birmingham or Atlanta or Jackson that held the title of Soul Food Capital of the World; it was Harlem. Harlem was to Soul Food what Russia was to communism. Harlem was the Jesus-on-a-church-fan-epicurean-South transplanted far above the Gnat Line.

Then a few years ago, I began to hear murmuring about a decline in Soul Food popularity in Harlem from friends in New York and Brooklyn and Connecticut. Places got harder to find. People starting sporting 12-inch bypass scars and buckets of lard became tougher to find than teats on a bore hog.

I noticed changes on the menus in several Richmond, North Carolina and Alabama establishments. It’s not spoken about openly, but you notice it like the uncle in every family who is actually insane, yet no one admits it.

Subtle shifts sneak onto your plate while you’re admiring the crust on a well turned bird – a fresh salad here, an apple slice there, wheat bread soaking up your potlikker.

Then the New York Times’ Timothy Williams wrote the semi-obit for hard-core Soul Food in Harlem a few days ago. I read it with a hollow echo in my stomach like I’d swallowed some bad boiled cabbage. I haven’t felt the same since. I had hoped the rumors of the state of Soul Food were greatly exaggerated, but my beloved, deep-fried manna seems to be taking one in the culinary groin these days.

Healthier food is pushing pig’s feet, pig ears, hog maws, chitterlings, ox tails, butter-beans, greasy greens, neck bones, ham hocks, chicken livers and country fried steak off the menu. In some cases, entire restaurants are being scraped off the street faster than gravy used to be poured over just about everything at Singleton’s and Well’s Supper Club. I read that 22 West (Malcolm X used to broadcast from the pay phone in the back) is closed. So are Adel’s, Pan Pan, Wilson’s and Whimps. They are all gone now, even the famous Copeland’s.

I asked an old woman on Richmond’s east side about this trend.

“Hardening of the economic arteries,” she said with a wave of her wrinkled hand and a sigh that hinted strongly that she suffered from the malady personally. She looked into my misting eyes and we both understood the gravity of this situation.

(Excuse me. Give me a minute. I have to collect myself. For a guy raised with a chicken wing in one hand a fork-full of mustard greens in the other, this is hard stuff to type.)

Will syrupy sweet iced tea be replaced by $4 bottled water? Will turnips and collards cooked in pig fat or red velvet cake that could stand up to a beating from a 300-pound man be replaced by salads and fruit?

Just kill me now.

Soul Food used to be cheap food for working people. People associated it with African Americans but it was all my mother and grandmothers and aunts and uncles ever cooked. It was a cultural export from the South like Blues and Jazz and spread across the country like Elvis on tour. In the 1950’s and 1960’s when black and white people couldn’t agree on anything else, they agreed on Soul Food.

You could taste it when Etta James, Sam Cooke, Percy Sledge, James Brown, Otis Redding and Marvin Gaye sang. The O’Jays, Earth, Wind and Fire, Al Green, Stax Records, Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff served up Soul sounds like Sylvia Woods at her famous restaurant on Lenox Avenue. Papa Was A Rolling Stone (my long-time cell phone ringer) by The Temptations is as close to my favorite food (fried chicken) as a human can get and not confuse taste buds and eardrums.

Times may be tough north of Central Park, but Charles’s Southern Style Kitchen hung on. M&G Diner is still around. Sylvia’s sister’s place, Louise’s Family Restaurant, survives and serves up old school specialties like always. But fewer people show up to eat them according to the article in the Times.

Soul Food isn’t dead, however, it’s just adjusting. Mr. Williams writes that places like Miss Maude’s Spoon-bread Too,Melba’s, and Londel’s are still serving real soul. Other restaurants are twisting the old methods into new menus. It seems an oxymoron, but Soul Food is getting healthier. New places, like Raw Soul, Revival and Veg’s among others, plate up lighter fare based on the Soul tradition.

Maybe Soul Food is in a transitional mode. Times change and healthier is better. I know all of that and I understand the situation better than most people. I also know that somewhere, someone with a 100-year-old iron fryer is making country ham, butter-beans, greens and yams that will dam an artery and stop an eight-day clock while freeing your soul from pain and suffering at the end of a fork and spoon.

That’s why it was called Soul Food to begin with.

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