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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."