Eating Like Soul Brothers

"White men are too much,"; says a Negro advertising copywriter in New York. "Here we are, trying to live the way they do, and what happens? They get themselves beads and shades (dark glasses) and go out and dance the boogaloo." Indeed, few Negroes can suppress a grin at the growing fascination among earnest whites for things black.

The most bewildering of all is the current hunger for black cookery. Soul food, Southern Negro cooking that was born in the slave quarters and is based on ingredients that the plantation owner ordinarily would not have on his table, has become a fad in U.S. dining.

For those who want it, of course, soul food has always been around. In Richard Wright's Native Son (1940), a Communist organizer tried to impress the black protagonist by eating soul food in a black restaurant in a black neighborhood. One of the reasons that Rodgers and Hart's lady was a tramp back in 1937 was that she wouldn't "go to Harlem in ermine and pearls."

In those days, the few white connoisseurs of ham hocks and black-eyed peas had to go to Watts or Chicago's South Side to get them. To supply today's faddists, soul food is moving out of the ghetto.

Two new soul-food cookbooks have just gone on the market, and every week or so soul-food restaurants open in white sections of Manhattan, Chicago, Los Angeles and cities in between.

King of Wings. At Manhattan's West Boondock, tor example, miniskirted waitresses ply the tables while a jazz combo plays softly in the background; there is a wine list, and Diners' Club or Carte Blanche cards are honored. The Player's Choice, a restaurant on Los Angeles' Sunset Strip that claims to be "strictly soul," is jammed to the rafters each night with customers--90% of them white-- dining with apparent gusto on such soul specialties as barbecued ribs and yams. Melvin's, a soul-food place in the heart of Boston's department-store district, is a popular luncheon spot for shoppers and a favorite meeting place for professional athletes, both black and white.

The Little Kitchen, an 18-seat restaurant on Manhattan's Lower East Side, got such good newspaper reviews that its Negro owner-cook, who calls herself "Princess Pamela," finally closed the place for three weeks last month to get a rest. In Detroit, Charlie Red, owner of a soul-food takeout business who is known locally as the "King of Wings," reports that orders from whites for his fried chicken wings in barbecue sauce have nearly quintupled in the past two months. The craze has even spread to Paris, where Leroy Haynes, an expatriate Chicagoan, serves Spanish yams and African okra in his restaurant near Pigalle. Last Thanksgiving, Liz and Richard Burton took 58 friends to dinner there and ran up a $2,000 tab.

Of the two new cookbooks, one is the work of Ruth Gaskins, a Negro from Alexandria, Va., who works as a federal clerk in Washington. Her A Good Heart and a Light Hand (Turnpike Press, $3) contains recipes for everything from possum casserole to potato wine, and is selling at the rate of 1,000 copies a month. The other, Soul Food Cookery, by a black public relations woman in Kansas City named Inez Kaiser (Pitman, $3.95), has 266 carefully indexed recipes that include "soul" sandwiches and "soul" TV snacks.

Marinated, Then Smothered. The big question is why soul food is so popular. It is cheap, simple fare that reflects the tawdry poverty of its origins. Forced to live on "discards from the big house on the hill," Negro slaves--as well as many poor white tenant farmers--learned to make edible meals out of the vegetables and meats that their masters regarded as waste. Turnips went up the hill; turnip greens stayed down. Whites slaughtered pigs for the ham, loin, bacon and spare ribs; Negroes made do with the pigs' feet ("trotters"), knuckles, tails, ears, snouts, neck, backbones, hocks, stomach (hog maw) and other innards. Today, as 200 years ago, the true "stone soul" dish is chitterlings, pronounced "chitlins." These are the small intestines of a pig, boiled, marinated, then smothered with "Louisiana hot sauce," served with turnip or collard greens, black-eyed peas and hot corn bread. The meal is traditionally topped off with a slice of sweet-potato pie, a delicacy regarded as soulful even by Southern aristocrats.

Chewing on a chitterling, even after it has been carefully cleaned and cooked, is rather like chewing on a football bladder. So soul-food restaurants that cater to whites rarely carry chitlins on their menus, instead stick to more conventional dishes, such as shrimp gumbo, "smothered" pork chops and ham hocks. Even those have little appeal to a gourmet palate. Soul food is often fatty, overcooked and underseasoned. Vegetables are boiled with fatback for so long that their taste and nutritional value go up in steam; meats have to be sprinkled liberally with salt and pepper to give the eater anything to remember them by. Considering the tastelessness of the cuisine, the soul-food fad seems certain to be fairly short-lived. For many Negroes, it is long since over; it ended, in fact, as soon as they could afford better food. "Let white folks eat hocks and collards," says a black Manhattan stockbroker. "I'll take a rare steak and French fries any time."

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