The rhythms of the farm year permeate this book, where each season has its special dishes, from the first greens of spring to the first winter frost, or hog-killing time. There, you'll find instructions for killing your pig, cleaning the chitterlings, and making cracklins, cured ham, buttered hog maw, simmered pig ears, and hog-head souse. Soul food, however deep its Southern roots, has had to adapt to northern kitchen and modern times. This it has done surprisingly well, thanks to the integrity, talent, and character of the cooks who made it happen. One of the most appealing aspects of African-American cooking is its strong sense of kitchen solidarity.
Black women respect good cooks and give generous credit when using their recipes.
Kin and community join in to make this the soul food cookbook. Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor makes an appearance in this book, too. Her Vibration Cooking or the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl , first published over twenty years ago, has become an underground classic, treasured by blacks, feminists, rainbow coalitionists, and such white folk who can bear hearing a strong-minded black woman telling it like it is. For a young black woman in the fifties and sixties, the voyage to personal discovery meant encounters with virulent racism but also the excitement of traversing unexplored territory on her own. She tells of being twenty in Paris in 1959, seeing in a market on the Rue Monge a strangely familiar-looking vegetable, and asking a Senegalese woman how she prepared it.