BoomerGirl Diary

I never thought I would end up here, barefoot in my kitchen, humming to gospel music on a Sunday afternoon. My hands wrinkled from water. My belly pressed against the kitchen sink. I shift my weight and go between counter and refrigerator, moving around my kitchen with the confidence of womanhood, pulling out pans and cutting boards, imitating the women of my childhood.

Life is funny how it takes you back. Despite all the places you've been. Sometimes it stops you and reminds you of the lessons you were once taught. Tells you not to forget where you came from.

And you end up in the kitchen with your memories. And the water is running, and you are washing a chicken, the way Mother did. Dumping cups of flour in a brown bag, shaking in seasoning, salt and pepper, heating up oil in a cast-iron skillet. Waiting for the oil to get hot, the way Mother instructed. Dropping in just a touch of flour to watch it bubble. Coating the chicken with the flour and placing the chicken in the oil, tenderly, piece by piece. Jumping back from the oil as it leaps from the skillet, chasing you like it did when you were a little girl. And from a distance, you watch the chicken fry until it turns brown. Golden.

I scour the sink and take collard greens out of the bags. Wash each leaf meticulously, checking for ladybugs. Ha! I find one. It rides running water down the drain. I inspect more leaves. Scrub them with salt, the way Mother taught me. Cut each leaf and stem, placing them in a pot with salt and homegrown tomatoes, olive oil, sweet onion and garlic, and letting them steam.

I pull out the cornmeal, crack brown eggs and beat them, adding baking powder, salt, milk, oil. I heat the oven to 425. Sift the dry ingredients. Mix in the milk, the beaten eggs, folding them into the batter. I pour the batter into a skillet with grease at the bottom, the way Mother taught me.

I wash six yams and peel the skin carefully, so carefully, cutting around the eyes of the potatoes, slicing them. Boiling water. Covering the yams with brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, butter. Cooking until the sugar makes thick syrup like candy.

Then I add a little love, the way Mother did. Pray that it nourishes my family. Adding love means preparing the food with care, putting in just the right amount of spice. Food cooked with this kind of love is the best you can eat. You can't find it in a box or over a white tablecloth in a restaurant. It is an ingredient invisible, but necessary. Intangible, but required when cooking soul food; for without the love, you might as well get takeout from some greasy restaurant up the street, or a platter from the deli section of the organic food store. It may taste OK, but it won't be soul food.

Soul food is steeped in memory, coated in history. A food for healing. An art of taking a little of nothing and making it into a meal. Cooking with what you have. No recipe books. Cooking with what you were taught by the women in the family. While they talked, you listened, listened to stories as the food was prepared, not understanding the life they were talking about. Grown-up talk. Wisdom.

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"What you do in the dark will show in the light."

"Don't pay no attention to those fast girls up the street."

"Forget about those boys and get your education. No one can ever take that away from you."

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I watched the women move through their kitchens, moving around life's worries — small paychecks and large utility bills — and around the laughter, the anticipation of Sunday dinner. I watched and learned.

Then I grew up and left their kitchens, heading into the world, traveling to faraway places. I sat on pine carpets in Labrador while eating berries from a common pot with the Innu. I ate conch in the Virgin Islands, escargot in Monaco. I ate pasties in London and marveled at the power of the pound. Ate boiled cabbage in Prague and wondered where the Communists had gone. I ate goulash in Budapest because I thought I should.

In Greenland, I ate whale blubber and swallowed million-year-old water from a melting iceberg. I chewed seal meat in Iqaluit and dried caribou on Herschel Island, where it looked like I might fall off the melting world. I ate fish pulled from the waters of Haiti and watched the misery of the people.

I thought I had traveled so far from soul food. Become too worldly for it.

I am not sure of the moment that all changed. There was a yearning for something missing. And I grew tired of restaurant food, of airplane food, of the frozen-food section. Of the roasted whole chickens under plastic. I began putting sugar in my rice the way I did as a child. I ached for Grandmother's sweet potato pie. The peach cobbler. The homemade pancakes. The smell of bacon and grits on a Sunday morning. The laughter of family. The blues playing in the background.

Then one day the kid pushed his plate of rotisserie chicken away and asked, "Can't we have the kind of chicken Grandma Mildred cooked?"

A child had recognized what had been missing from the table.

This is a story about soul food and what it means. A journey through the childhoods of some, hoping to find what distinguishes it. To find out why soul food has survived, why it has transformed itself out of necessity, clinging all the while to where it came from. A food that is a descendant of slavery, simmered on plantations of the South, where women cooked what was left for them, making delicacies out of bits and pieces of nothing. Brewing pot liquor out of the stems of the greens. Finding a meal for every piece of a chicken, including the back and feet.

"They didn't realize it," Mother told me long ago. "But they were giving us the parts with the best nutrients. That way we became stronger."

At the National Black Family Reunion in September, I weave through the crowd in search of faces with wisdom, women who will talk about soul food, who will be able to explain its appeal, its survival.

Sharon Patten, 47, is sitting behind a table covered in white cloth, and I ask her. Her face lights up: "Oh, soul food means Grandma's greens, girl! And macaroni and cheese and roast beef and chicken and family reunions. Getting everybody together to eat. It's hard to get families together these days.

"But soul food is a food to do that. Soul food is a food for everybody. That food is healing food," Patten said. "All the ingredients are made with love. Whatever is ailing you, you are going to get healed. Maybe you are a little depressed. There is something about that soul food that is better than any medicine. When I was sick and my grandmother would cook a pot of chicken noodle soup, she would put all her soul in it."

Another ingredient identified. I move on.

There is Maria Morton, 53, sitting in a folding chair under a tent. "What does soul food mean to you?" She looks puzzled. Her face is blank. She indicates that she cannot hear. I write the question and immediately her face brightens. She smiles and begins talking rapidly, happily.

"It means good eating. Nothing but the truth," Morton says. She laughs. "It means fried chicken, collard greens, candied yams, black-eyed peas. Girl, don't get me started. It means corn pudding, barbecue ribs. Umph! Chitterlings and pig's feet. You are making me hungry."

How is soul food different from Southern food, I ask. "It's not," says Morton, who grew up in Manassas, Va. "Soul food is Southern food. It's just cooked with love."

Celestine Withey, dressed in black, is sitting at another table. She does not appear to be hot in the heat. Nor does she appear to be bent. She is 86. She has traveled from New York on a bus. And in a few minutes she will turn around and get back on the bus. I admire her strength.

"What is soul food?" she repeats. "Soul food is food your mother said was good for you. It was from fresh food, not canned. Not frozen." She laughs. Withey grew up in Harlem. Her mother was from Savannah. "There was no such thing as canned food in the '20s, '30s and '40s." She said her mother had regular soul food menus. "For breakfast, you would have grits, eggs, sausage, bacon, dried fish. Something left over from the night before," Withey said. "Lunch was not a big thing. Sometimes it would just be a piece of fruit. For dinner, you'd have collards, sweet potatoes, black-eyed peas, chicken and ribs."

She thinks soul food has become commercialized. "Now, you have a little bit of everybody eating it."

The memories of soul food may be different for each person. What my mother remembers and taught me was different from what my father remembers about eating soul food as a child. My father, a Baptist preacher, is working on his church under the hot sun. I ask him about soul food and he stops the work. He remembers his mother in the kitchen.

"Mama could just take a little bit of whatever and just create a meal enough to feed eight hungry kids. She could cook from scratch without a recipe. We always had breakfast and supper. In the summer, she would take fruit right off the tree and cook cobbler," he said. "When I was growing up, I didn't like beans, but I liked fried chicken and fried fish. My favorite was liver and rice and gravy smothered in onions, and homemade biscuits with butter and jelly or syrup, whatever you could find. You talk about something good!"

His mother, whom we called Mama Helen, was a pretty woman, with thick black hair and high cheekbones. She walked miles to her jobs and back to the house where my father grew up with four sisters and three brothers under a tin roof that made a kind of music when it rained.

"She would go pick berries on the side of the railroad track and she would cook one of those cobblers," he says. "You talk about something good. Sometimes she would take sausage. She would crumble the sausage and make gravy and pour it over the biscuits. Sometimes we'd have beans and corn bread. Sometimes we would have pig's feet. We ate a lot of kidneys. She'd cook greens. A long time ago there used to be wild greens, and she would make poke salad. It grew wild."

He remembers full meals from what seemed like nothing.

"Soul food to me," he says, "is food more or less cooked from scratch, and not only that, a lot of time we didn't have a whole lot. Not like now, where you go to the cabinet and you have this and that. A lot of times, she might have just a little meat. She would create some dish enough to feed eight children. And it would be good. That's what I call soul food creativity. Making something out of nothing.

"I remember Mama praying and going around the kitchen and taking whatever she could find. She always managed to make something to eat."

He pauses. The years passed, and they moved from the house with the tin roof to a red-brick house in the city. And she continued to cook, now from pantries stocked well over time. And her family grew large and rich. And her hair became silver. Mama Helen died last year. But I still remember from my summer visits her making soul food dinners, then cleaning the kitchen and placing the leftovers in a bowl and placing that bowl on the stove, and there it sat pretty, like a piece of art, waiting just in case someone stopped by. Someone would always stop by.

Now I cook my own soul food dinners, a variation of those by the women in my family, leaving out the pork, using olive oil instead of butter and bacon grease, frying chicken with just an eighth of the oil they used. I don't put ham hocks in my greens, steaming rather than boiling them. I have never tried cooking chitterlings or pig's feet, but I cook my version of soul food nonetheless. Pulling out pans, cutting, cleaning, scraping, humming to the radio. Moving around my own kitchen, serving my family food cooked with love. Then I clean my kitchen, wiping down the counters, sterilizing sinks, putting away pots and pans.

I put the leftover food in a bowl. I cover the food with a paper towel. And set the bowl in the center of the stove, waiting just in case someone hungry stops by.