African and American cuisine meet in soul food.
"Soul food" is a category of food specific to African-Americans. Africans transported from their homeland to the colonial South brought some of their native foods with them, according to Sally Bernstein. African slaves who cooked for their masters learned combine their native foods with traditional Southern cuisine to create a whole new variety of food. Today, creating African-American cuisine is considered an art and new twists on traditional soul food recipes appear every day. Traditionally, soul food meals are hearty, rich in flavor and relatively easy to make.
Barbecue
According to Sally Bernstein, the word "barbecue" is derived from the West Indies word "barbacoa," which refers to a certain way of roasting meat. It is likely that African slaves transported from the West Indies to the South learned this word from West Indians and translated it into their own style of cuisine. In the South, African slaves began roasting their meats on a spit and painting sauces and flavorings directly onto the meat instead of serving the sauce on the side as was traditional among white Americans at the time. Africans brought the custom of basting the meat while it cooks with them from Africa. Though the barbecue usually means some kind of pork in modern African-American cuisine, when it was first invented, it referred to any kind of meat cooked over a fire and basted with sauce.
Yams
Yams, or sweet potatoes, are not native to North America. According to Sally Bernstein, Africans introduced these brightly colored, sweet roots to the Americas. They are very popular in Caribbean cuisine and play a large part in African-American food today. From the yam came dishes like candied yams, a warm dish with butter and caramelized brown sugar served over the sautéed roots. Sweet potato pie is a popular dessert in the world of soul food; in this dish, sweet potatoes are mashed until smooth and mixed with brown sugar and other ingredients before being baked in a pie crust. The resulting dish is similar in color and flavor to pumpkin pie.
According to AfricanFoods.com.uk, the introduction of the yam in to American diets may have some health benefits, including protection against developing diabetes and helping to lower insulin resistance.
Collard Greens
While collard greens themselves were not introduced into American diets by Africans, they appear in a lot of African-American dishes in modern America. Soul food instructs chefs to prepare these dark, leafy vegetables with traditional African methods. According to Sally Bernstein, frying leafy vegetables in oil and spices to create hot veggie dishes is an African tradition, not European. Europeans typically ate plant leaves raw in salads or by themselves until Africans incorporated things like collard greens into the American diet.
According to AfricanFoods.com.uk, collard greens contain a lot of magnesium and other vitamins the human body needs to stay healthy.
Tags: Sally Bernstein, soul food, African slaves, from West, According AfricanFoods