Soul Food

I never knew my dad’s father; he died when I was two. My dad’s mother lived a thousand miles away and I knew her only from the occasional visit. So when I talk about my grandparents I mean my mother’s parents.

My grandfather was born in 1884 and my grandmother was born in 1890, not very long after the Civil War. My grandfather’s parents were born in 1855 and 1860. My grandmother’s parents were born in 1838 and 1855. So, a mere three generations ago my ancestors (all white, I should note, lest you miss the point of this blog) were born before the Civil War. They were born at a time when it was legal for people to buy and sell other people in this country. Sometimes when I think about it, I’m amazed that only two generations of family stand between me and ancestors who were born at a time when slavery was an institution.

My great-grandparents grew up on farms. They ate what country people of their time ate: healthy food they grew themselves. They passed on to their children – my grandparents – their notion of what constituted proper food.

Every Sunday my parents took my brother and me to my grandparents’ house for dinner (as the midday meal was then called). To my eyes it was a feast, although I’m sure to my grandparents it was just Sunday dinner. Dinner consisted of kale, collard greens, spinach, black-eyed peas and butter beans (each cooked with a ham hock or bacon), buttered and salted corn on the cob (but not yellow corn; country people considered yellow corn fit only for livestock; we dined on Silver Queen), sliced tomatoes, mashed potatoes and gravy, sweet potatoes with butter and cinnamon, pickled beets, sliced cucumber in vinegar, rolls or biscuits, corn bread (and sometimes “spoon bread”), fried chicken and country ham.

To me, this was ordinary food. It was what ordinary people ate. Didn’t everyone buy a bushel of butter beans at the farmer’s market and sit on the front porch while shelling them? Didn’t everyone buy snap beans and take them home to snap and “string”? (Most snap beans today don’t have this tough, fibrous “string” that has to be removed.) Didn’t everyone flavor their vegetables with ham or bacon?

Sometimes an evening would find me with my grandparents in their living room, and someone would produce a jar of pickled pigs feet. I was no more than five years old and I absolutely loved pickled pigs feet. It was the best tasting thing ever!

I grew up and went off to college where my meals were prepared by the university’s cafeteria. I ate most of my meals in the cafeteria because I had purchased a meal ticket, meaning I had paid the university up front for three meals a day whether or not I ate them. But sometimes a body has to take a break from institutional food, and I would escape the university and buy a BLT or a grilled cheese sandwich at a downtown lunch counter. None of it was the wholesome food my grandparents knew, but it kept me alive.

The summer between my second and third years of college found me working in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I found a really cheap place to live there. That place was Mrs. Yokum’s boarding house. Mrs. Yokum looked to be in her sixties or seventies. She owned an old three story house filled with boarders, mostly young males. Each room was occupied by two boarders. I shared a third floor room that was under the metal roof and above a kitchen, and on summer evenings it was sweltering. There was no air conditioning. One bathroom on each floor served all the boarders on that floor. It sounds dismal, but she provided a room and 3 meals a day for $15 a week.

Breakfast at Mrs. Yokum’s house was standard fare: eggs, bacon, sausage, grits. Maybe pan cakes, too. But lunch and dinner were special: country style cooking prepared by Mrs. Yokum and her helper, an elderly black man. This was summer and behind the house there were barrels of fresh vegetables purchased from local farms.

If you were not one of Mrs. Yokum’s boarders and you wanted to eat in her dining room, you could do that. The price of a meal was 90 cents. You paid your 90 cents and sat down at one of several round tables with a half dozen other diners at the table. Freshly prepared food was brought from the kitchen and placed in the center of the table. There was no menu, but there was plenty to choose from. Always, there were 3 or 4 meats (fried chicken and ham seemed to be always available), lots of country style vegetables, dinner rolls and biscuits, and several desserts to choose from. And, of course, iced tea came with the meal at no extra charge. You could eat as much as you wanted for 90 cents. If you ate everything on the table, they would bring more food out for you. When mealtime came, there were no empty seats in Mrs. Yokum’s dining room.

I don’t know what became of Mrs. Yokum and her boarding house. Needless to say, she did not get wealthy. She had an old car and one day she asked me to look at it. Until then, North Carolina had not required cars to be inspected, but the law had just changed. Now Mrs. Yokum had to have her car inspected and she wanted my opinion: would it pass inspection? I looked at the car and knew immediately that her old car would never pass inspection without repairs. I shook my head and wondered how Mrs. Yokum would be able to keep running her boarding house.

Another time, her kitchen sink developed a leak. I doubted she could afford to hire a plumber, so I went to a plumbing store and bought a tailpiece, trap, washers, and plumber’s putty. I replaced the old, leaking parts on the sink. It wasn’t a big deal. It was a small thing I could do to help an elderly lady who was supplying me with a place to sleep and three great meals a day.

Years later when I was describing life at the boarding house to someone, that person told me I had been eating “soul food”. Soul food? I don’t think so. I ate the kind of food that my parents and grandparents ate. I ate the kind of food that Mrs. Yokum’s parents and grandparents ate. It is called Southern cooking. It is widely known that Southern cooking is delicious due to its three major food groups: fat, cholesterol, and sodium. I don’t know about soul food.