A More Perfect Plate Dispatch #2: Juneteenth & Soul Food

Food is almost always at the center of a celebration for my family and me. For a birthday, we make the guest of honor's favorite meal. Thanksgiving is built around the turkey, Christmas is some kind of beef roast, New Year's Eve is tenderloin and champagne, and so on down the calendar.

The food is half the fun, and it's what makes the memories stick. The head falling off my Grandma's lamb cake one Easter? We'll never forget it, even if she wishes we would. The Thanksgiving my mom's dinner rolls refused to rise? She still gets requests to bring those back.

Those celebrations are wonderful. But none of them is necessarily life-changing. Can you imagine the food you'd cook for a celebration that actually changed your life forever?

That's what I want to get at today as we talk about the story of Juneteenth, the food that became part of that celebration, and how what we know as "soul food" today became a staple of American cuisine.

If you don't know the story of Juneteenth, it's one of the most powerful stories in American history. The short version is that on June 19, 1865, a Union general named Gordon Granger rode into Galveston, Texas, and read an order announcing that the enslaved people of Texas were free. It had been two and a half years since the Emancipation Proclamation, but in Texas, slavery had continued until Union troops arrived to enforce freedom. That day became celebrated as Juneteenth and, in 2021, it was made a federal holiday.

Could you imagine receiving news like that? After years of slavery, after a war fought over slavery, to finally hear that slavery is over... what would you do?

I know what I'd do. I'd call my friends to celebrate and start cooking something to share!

Now, I'm a white Wisconsin butcher. I don't celebrate Juneteenth as part of my family's history, and I'm not an African American history expert. Almost everything in this piece comes from what I've learned from books I've read as I've tried to learn more about this subject. My top three suggestions to learn more about soul food and African American culinary history:

•       High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America by Dr. Jessica B. Harris

Note - this book was also used as the basis for an excellent Netflix series!

•       The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South by Michael W. Twitty

•       Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time by Adrian Miller

These three are James Beard Award winners in this area of history, and I'm just passing along what I learned from them and others.

Alright, let's dig in with the most important thing: just what was on the table that first Juneteenth?

Honestly, nobody wrote down the menu on June 19, 1865, so we don't know. We can guess that folks got together and celebrated with the best food they had available, but we can't be sure what actually went down.

What we do have a pretty good idea of is what the early anniversary celebrations looked like and how they shaped future celebrations and traditions.

In very new research by Caleb McDaniel of Rice University, it appears that Houston may have been the site of the first recorded Juneteenth celebration. On June 19, 1866, two Black ministers, Elias Dibble and Sandy Parker, led a procession that ended in a barbecue at a grove outside town.

And the food at those early celebrations? We know barbecue for sure, and accounts of later celebrations add greens and garden vegetables, sweets, and red everything.

Why those foods?

Two reasons, one practical and one deeper.

The practical one: barbecue is how you feed a whole community at once. Early Juneteenth gatherings dug long trenches, filled them with coals, and slow-roasted big cuts of meat, enough to serve thousands. When the whole point of the day is having everybody together, you cook the way that feeds everybody!

The deeper one is the color. Go to a Juneteenth cookout today, and you'll still see it: red velvet cake, red soda, red punch, watermelon, and above all, the "red drink."

People give two explanations about why red is the color of Juneteenth, and from what I've read, it seems both meanings hold true. One says the red honors the bloodshed and the resilience of enslaved ancestors. The other traces it back to West African red drinks made from hibiscus and the kola nut, a drink that survived the Atlantic crossing and became part of African American food here.

Have these foods always been an important part of Juneteenth?

Yes, they have, but they've evolved a bit, and they tell the story of what happened to Black Americans after the Civil War.

Watermelon is now a big part of Juneteenth celebrations, and I knew watermelon was heavily associated with Black cuisine in America, but I never knew why until I was researching this Dispatch.

I learned that after emancipation, it was common for freed Black families to grow and sell watermelon as a cash crop, and the big, juicy, delicious melons became a visible symbol of economic freedom and self-reliance. That independence rattled a lot of white Southerners, who decided to turn the fruit into a slur. You'd soon see unflattering, racist images of Black Americans eating watermelon across postcards and cartoons, painting them as lazy and unfit for freedom. What should have been a symbol of pride and hard work was deliberately turned into a punchline that still lingers today.

Fried chicken is another staple of modern Juneteenth celebrations, and it has a story right alongside watermelon.

It's important to once again say that historical documentation is sparse on many of these stories and traditions, but I believe if we have good documentation that a practice was happening in one town, we can safely infer it was probably happening elsewhere. 

With that said, let's tell the story of the Gordonsville Waiter Carriers, a well-documented example of the importance of fried chicken in Black American cuisine.

In the days before trains routinely had dining cars, Black women, many of them formerly enslaved, would wait outside stations with platters of fried chicken, biscuits, and pies. They'd sell this food to hungry passengers through the open windows while the train was parked at a station. Gordonsville, Virginia, was one example of a railway town where this practice was common, and the women who sold the food were known as "waiter carriers."

So many trains came through Gordonsville, and the chicken must have been so good that in the latter half of the 1800s, the town became known as the "Fried Chicken Capital of the World." The passenger trains would eventually stop coming, but Gordonsville still has an annual fried chicken contest, and you can read more about Gordonsville's waiter carriers in this NPR article.

This 19th-century version of a food truck was one of the few paths to economic independence open to these women. But the same ugly racism that came for watermelon came for fried chicken, too. Minstrel shows and cheap postcards used fried chicken as a way to caricature Black Americans, and the infamous but highly influential 1915 film The Birth of a Nation cemented the stereotype.

In this technically groundbreaking epic film, the KKK is portrayed as the good guys who protect white women and white supremacy. In the film, a particularly noteworthy scene depicts Black legislators (the actors were white men in blackface) eating fried chicken, acting quite inappropriately while conducting government business.

The film was a huge commercial hit (it was the highest-grossing film of all time until Gone with the Wind came out in 1939), and this scene and the stereotype it portrayed stuck with many people. Once again, a delicious food made with honest hard work got turned into a negative portrayal. 

It would take decades, but eventually these foods, so important to the community and then unfairly used to caricature it, would be reclaimed as staples of soul food.

That's part of why serving fried chicken at a Juneteenth picnic means something: a dish that once helped Black women cook their way to economic freedom, eaten proudly at a celebration of freedom itself.

OK, but what exactly is "soul food"?

We hear "soul food" and think, "yeah, that sounds good." I mean, it just sounds stick-to-your-ribs yummy, and who doesn't want that? But beyond it sounding good, I bet most of us would have a hard time actually narrowing down what soul food is.

Soul food is the cuisine African Americans created in the South: West African ingredients and techniques, adapted under slavery, refined through generations of home cooking. It's important to make it clear that not all Southern food is soul food. The two overlap plenty, but soul food is specifically the African American tradition within Southern cooking.

The dishes that make up the greatest hits of soul food will sound familiar to anyone who loves down-South food: fried chicken, collard greens, black-eyed peas, candied yams, macaroni and cheese, cornbread, catfish, barbecue, chitlins, red velvet cake, and a sweet red drink.

While this food originated in the South, it's obviously now all over the nation, as it moved with the roughly six million Black Americans who left the rural South for the cities of the North, Midwest, and West between 1916 and 1970, in what we now call the Great Migration.

They carried the food into the kitchens of Chicago, Detroit, Harlem, and Oakland, and the food was so good that their Southern home cooking became comfort food the whole country loves.

So how did it become "soul food"?

I thought this was an old-school term, but surprisingly, it's relatively modern!

The phrase "soul food" first shows up in print around 1964, in the era of soul music and Black Pride, when "soul" was the word for the heart of Black American culture. We aren't sure exactly when it was coined, or who coined it, but we do know one of its early appearances is actually in The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

Like so many of the cultural stories and traditions we've talked about in this Dispatch, the term "soul food" and the celebration of soul food spread organically until they became part of the popular culture. The cooking may have been centuries old by then, but as the Black community sought to reassert ownership over their recipes and their culinary traditions, it became important to put a name and a style to their food. 

I'm not Black. I'm not Southern. But I want to honor the struggles and triumphs that brought soul food to our tables today. How can I respectfully do that?

This is always a tricky discussion because cultural appropriation is a real thing, and most people don't want to offend others by trying to take something away from them. I'm not a food historian, and I'm not in charge of what people can and can't eat, but I do produce food every day for people of all sorts of backgrounds.

When I talk to people and they share their recipes and traditions with me, and I share mine with them, we get excited to try new things and incorporate each other's ideas into what we already do. I think what's important is this:

Food traditions are meant to be shared and enjoyed. If you want to cook someone else's food, that's great, just do it respectfully! Do some research to understand the context of the food, the ingredients, and the techniques, then go for it. 

Don't claim to be an expert. Don't claim to have improved it. Just enjoy the food and appreciate the diversity of delicious food in the world. 

If you want to cook real, authentic soul food at home, Adrian Miller's book Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine One Plate at a Time pairs the history with recipes, and Nicole Taylor's Watermelon & Red Birds is a whole cookbook built for Juneteenth celebrations. Brew a red drink (hibiscus tea, sweetened, over ice), and get ready to enjoy some fantastic fun.

And if you really want to dive in to authentic soul food, go to a Juneteenth celebration to take part in the fun, and support the local food vendors there.

If you're local to Lake Geneva, the great news is that you don't even have to leave Wisconsin to celebrate. Milwaukee has held a Juneteenth Day celebration every year since 1971 (one of the oldest and largest in the country), with a parade, music, and food drawing tens of thousands.

Time to wrap up.

I started by telling you about my family's celebrations: the lamb cake, the rolls that wouldn't rise, the food that makes the memories stick. Those are good memories, and I wouldn't trade them for all the fluffy, perfectly risen rolls in the world.

From my purely happy memories, we moved to the more complicated memories of others: people born into slavery who still found joy in food and built traditions around it. Those traditions would eventually be used against the Black community, then come back around, reclaimed as soul food and put front and center in joyous modern-day Juneteenth celebrations.

So this Juneteenth, if you find yourself near a slice of red velvet cake, a piece of fried chicken, a cold wedge of watermelon, or a glass of red drink, don’t treat it as just another picnic plate. Eat gratefully, eat in good company, and eat with some awareness of the history that brought those foods to the table.

That is what this whole series is about: food is never just food. Sometimes it is memory. Sometimes it is survival. Sometimes it is joy after suffering. And sometimes, as with Juneteenth, it is one of the most American meals there is.

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