The Soul of Food

Chef Carla Hall’s journey to renew respect for everyday foods of the South brings her back to her roots and updates soul-food favorites with tasty twists

BY TARA Q. THOMAS

When Carla Hall was going to culinary school, the last thing she wanted to cook was soul food. She had grown up in Nashville, home of “hot chicken” and the land of grits, in a respected family on “the good side of town.” Smart, beautiful and sophisticated, she graduated from Howard University in Washington, D.C., and flew to Europe to pursue a modeling career, making a name for herself among friends for the food she whipped up in her downtime.

But by the time she made it through Maryland’s L’Academie de Cuisine, she didn’t want to risk being confined by stereotypes. “I didn’t want to be the black girl who makes fried chicken,” Hall says over the phone one morning, explaining how she got from southern food to fancy French chef and back again with her latest book, “Carla Hall’s Soul Food.” After culinary school, she stopped frying chicken and braised it in red wine instead and she turned cornmeal into silky polentas rather than bread.

That approach catapulted her through the ranks of professional kitchens to earn the title of executive chef, and it got her into the kitchens of D.C.’s elite, who hired her as a private chef and engaged her company to cater their stylish fêtes. Then she landed a spot as a contestant on Bravo’s “Top Chef” reality competition cooking show.

As Hall tells it, that’s when she came back to soul food. “Here I am trying to do this thing, and there’s all this fancy food, to my left, to my right, all beautifully plated,” she remembers, thinking back to the pressures of the televised competition. “And I thought, ‘I have to do that.’” But in that moment of near-panic, she conjured up her grandmother’s advice: “It’s your job to be happy, not rich. If you do that, then everything else will follow.” Thinking of the dishes that her granny had made, she infused that spirit in her cooking and worked classic French techniques into the recipes.

The results made her an instant star. In one episode, Jacques Pépin is heard murmuring, “I could die happy with this dish,” as he tastes her buttered peas—a recipe inspired by the carrots-and-peas of her childhood, dressed up with lemon and tarragon, à la française.

And she cooked with such warmth and abandon, hollering her trademark “Hootie hoo!” that the fans loved her. She went two rounds on “Top Chef,” then was hired as a host on ABC’s “The Chew,” a position she held until its seventh and final season this year. “I don’t think I’d be here now if it wasn’t for ‘Top Chef,’” she muses.

The issue is, she explains, that people don’t have much respect for soul food. “I’ve done cooking shows where someone’s cooking Italian food, making pasta, and people are ooohing over it, saying, ‘Oh yeah, that’s their wheelhouse,’” she says. “Then you have someone cooking soul food, and they’re like, ‘Oh, just that?’” To many people in the U.S., soul food looks like everyday food; it’s so familiar they don’t give any thought to how it came about—to all the myriad cultural influences that have informed it, and the historical acts that shaped it.

We all want to be validated. I want to feel proud of this food—and I want other people to feel proud of it, too.

“That’s why I had to do this book,” Hall says. “We all want to be validated. I want to feel proud of this food—and I want other people to feel proud of it, too.”

But first, she says, she had to figure out what soul food is. “We already know the celebration foods—the fried chicken and mac-n-cheese, the saucy ribs—those are the foods that traveled well and have survived. But what about the everyday?” To find the answers, she started out in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a branch of the New York Public Library, and then ventured out on a road trip that wound through the South, stopping to talk to chefs and farmers along the way.

What she found was obvious but entirely forgotten in a world where fried chicken is never farther away than the nearest KFC. Soul food was farm-to-table cooking before that phrase had any cachet. Soul food was what the slaves made, working off the memory of their African culture and using whatever they could grow and gather in the New World. Black-eyed peas? Brought from West Africa, they were used to keep down weeds around the edges of the fields, and since they weren’t a cash crop, the slaves could take them to eat, Hall explains. The proverbial “mess of greens”? That wasn’t just collards—that was any green they could get, both purposefully planted (like collards and kale) and volunteer (dandelion greens).

Vegetable-based recipes are not only an integral part of soul food, but can be “so comforting they taste like big ol’ hugs.”

RECIPE FROM “CARLA HALL'S SOUL FOOD” BY CARLA HALL WITH GENEVIEVE KO ©2018 REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION OF HARPER COLLINS. PHOTOGRAPHY BY GABRIELE STABILE.

And forget about meat. Ham hock if you could get it, and you would stretch it by simmering it long and slow in something with plenty of liquid, which you could sop up with cornbread to make a filling meal. Chickens were kept for eggs, not legs.

But, as much as a slave’s diet was limited, it didn’t lack in flavor. Hall talks about “the trinity of sweet, heat and sour” as a soul food signature, and she works it in to everything from a black-eyed pea salad to a spicy kale pistou. But she also points out that since the ingredients were so fresh, food had flavor without even needing seasoning. “One of the dishes that surprised me was shrimp and grits,” Hall says. “It was at a Sunday dinner at B.J.’s” [B.J. Dennis, a Charleston chef whose roots in South Carolina’s coastal islands go back eight generations] “and we were talking with his mom about shrimp and grits. Here’s a dish that’s usually got gravy and lots of butter and maybe even cheese in the grits, but his mom said, ‘We had really good shrimp, and we wanted to have a dish to show them off. Grits were just the grits, maybe a bay leaf and some salt and pepper.’ Then it hit me—if you have great ingredients, if you have all this flavor, you don’t have to put in all this fat.” The shrimp-and-grits recipe she put into her book also eschews the milk and butter, letting the flavor of the shrimp shine through.

“At some level, farm-to-table cuisine is glorifying what always was,” Hall says. “Celebration foods—maybe you had them four times a year. But now that we’re more affluent, we can have them once a week, three times a week—not because we’re supposed to, but because we can. And in this, we forget the everyday foods.”

And, of course, we pay for it: in rising cholesterol rates, expanding waistlines and poorer bank accounts (because we aren’t frying the chicken ourselves; we’re stopping by Popeye’s or KFC to pick up a bucket on the way home from work). Not only is it historically important to recognize that there is more to soul food than a few widely known, gut-busting dishes, but it’s also important to regain our balance and discover, as Hall did, that vegetable-based recipes are not only an integral part of soul food, but can be, as she puts it, “so comforting they taste like big ol’ hugs.”

It’s also important to recognize that soul food isn’t some immutable cuisine that can’t change over time. That’s why Hall has included recipes like the “smashed beets” inspired by a recent meal she had at Nashville’s Rolf & Daughters, or the salad of peaches and tomatoes from chef Marvin Woods of Charleston, South Carolina. To her, the most important factor in soul food is who’s cooking it. “I make it simple and tell people that soul food is made by African-Americans,” Hall says. “It’s like a Negro spiritual versus a hymn.” There’s plenty of overlap with southern cooking, she points out; the difference is only in who holds the spoon. And therefore, it’s as alive and evolving as the people making it.

This realization was a defining point for her book, in fact. “You know that soup with the tomatoes and okra in the book? That was a turning point for the book,” she says. “I wanted to turn on the head people’s idea of soul food, but when Genevieve Ko, my cowriter, and I got into the kitchen with a bunch of ingredients, I was thinking, ‘How am I going to do this, what does this look like?’ And she said, ‘Just start cooking.’ ” The tomato part was easy for her, Hall says—she just approached it like she would any soup, sautéeing some onion and garlic in a pot, then adding aromatics and the tomatoes. It was the okra that was the sticking point. Traditionally, the soup is cooked long and slow to draw out okra’s viscous juices. But, Hall admits, “I don’t like slippery, slimy okra, and I’m determined to show people that it doesn’t have to be like that. So I thought, let’s just roast it.” Seared in a 400˚F oven, the okra got crunchy instead of slimy. “I put it into the soup for just a few minutes, and when we tasted it, we thought, ‘This is it!’” Hall says. It’s in essence an old soul-food favorite brought up-to-date.

“Long cooking made sense at the time,” Hall explains. “You weren’t present in the kitchen; you had to do passive cooking. You were out doing something else. And, a lot of these recipes were done in the summer. You didn’t want to be in the kitchen.” Times are different; you may have to get dinner on the table in only 30 minutes. And, hey, if you don’t like slimy okra, why cook it that way?

Hall uses her creativity to bring back old forgotten ingredients as well, like millet and sorghum. Both grains were staples brought over from Africa, where they were mainly made into hearty porridges. She uses millet as others might quinoa, in a quick pilaf with roasted cauliflower and raisins; the sorghum gets tossed with soft, sweet cubes of butternut squash and toasted pumpkin seeds for a dish that’s welcome on any holiday table. Would the slaves that brought the grains over on the Middle Passage recognize these dishes? Maybe not—but they’d recognize the resourcefulness that went into their creation.

So rather than stressing over what’s “authentic” and what’s not, Hall just asks you to honor soul food for what it is—a uniquely African-American cuisine that originated with the slaves brought over from Africa, and which continues to evolve to this day. It’s a cuisine born of frugality and resourcefulness, of careful attention and care paid to the land. It can be rich and opulent, like celebrationday chess pies and barbecued ribs, or it can be as simple as a bean salad tossed with whatever’s ripe in the garden that day.

To get you started, Hall offers this recipe for a black-eyed pea salad (at right), noting that if tomatoes are out of season, pickled vegetables add snap and brightness to the dish. “Choc chow, quick pickled turnips, any sort of pickled thing would be really nice.”

“On the show, when I’m a judge, I am a big one for telling people that it is so much better to go home being yourself than trying to be something else,” she says. “I’d rather be fired all day long for being authentic than to be something I’m not.”

Black-Eyed Pea Salad with Hot Sauce Vinaigrette

MAKES 4 SERVINGS

When I say black-eyed peas have a long history, I mean long. More than five thousand years ago, they were domesticated in West Africa. The crop spread throughout the continent, then traveled in slave ship holds to America. In the Carolinas, slaves planted black-eyed peas in the same way they had back home—along edges of fields to keep down weeds and enrich the soil. That’s why they’re sometimes called cowpeas and field peas. Originally eaten only by slaves, black-eyed peas became a part of all Southerners’ meals. But they hold a special significance in the heart of every African- American. We eat them for good luck on New Year’s in a rice dish known as hoppin’ John. That tradition comes from a long history of black-eyed peas symbolizing luck and prosperity in Africa, where they’re part of spiritual ceremonies, too. They’re a part of our culinary DNA. And they’re delicious. Black-eyed peas are tender, skin to center, and this helps them soak up sauces. Because they’re nice and mild, I drench them with a hot sauce dressing, honeyed yet sharp with garlic and mustard. In this salad, cucumbers and onion balance the peas’ creaminess with crunch, and tomatoes burst juiciness. Down South, we call this a sitting salad. It can sit on the summer picnic table without wilting, so it’s the perfect potluck dish. Get ready for this salad to become one of your favorites.

2 garlic cloves, grated on a Microplane

2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar

1 tablespoon yellow mustard

1 tablespoon hot sauce

1 teaspoon honey

¾ teaspoon kosher salt, divided

1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

6 tablespoons vegetable oil

1 (15-ounce) can black-eyed peas, rinsed and drained

2 mini cucumbers, cut into 1/2-inch dice

1/2 sweet onion, finely chopped

1 pint cherry tomatoes or grape tomatoes, halved

1/4 cup fresh dill

1. Whisk the garlic, vinegar, mustard, hot sauce, honey, 1/4 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon pepper in a large bowl until smooth. While whisking, add the oil in a slow, steady stream. Whisk until emulsified.

2. Add the peas, cucumbers, onion, tomatoes, dill and 1/2 teaspoon salt. Toss until well mixed. You can serve this right away or let it sit at room temperature for up to 1 hour. The salad can be made ahead and refrigerated for up to 1 day.