What does “soul food” mean?

The Black Southern table, renamed in the 1960s as a claim rather than a leftover.

Entry · catalog no. 1283

soul food

/ /ˈsoʊl fud/ /SOHL food

noun · Coined in Northern Black cities; the cuisine itself Southern · 1960s

✓ Verified

The cooking carried out of the Black South — greens, chitlins, hocks, cornbread, yams, black-eyed peas — named as a cuisine belonging to Black Americans specifically.

“She fed us soul food every Sunday and never once called it Southern.”

Loosely, any food that carries the weight of home and belonging.

“Grits at midnight — that's soul food to me.”

Origin & Attribution

The cooking is old; the name is not. Soul food was coined in the early 1960s in Black urban America, built on the same "soul" that gave soul brother, soul sister, and soul music, and it entered print in 1964 in a New York column about a Harlem restaurant. The naming was proprietary — it separated this food from undifferentiated "Southern cooking" and placed it under Black ownership at the moment Black Power was making the same argument about everything else. Two errors persist: that the term is as old as the food, dating to slavery or Reconstruction, and that white food writers coined it. The 1968 New York Times Magazine piece is often cited as the origin; it postdates the vernacular by years.

1962

LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) publishes an essay titled "Soul Food" arguing the cuisine into recognition

1964

First verified print appearance, describing a Harlem restaurant serving soul food

1968

The New York Times Magazine runs "Cooking with Soul," carrying the term to a mass white readership

Region of origin

West

Midwest

N.East

South

Nationwide / diaspora

Coined in Northern Black cities; the cuisine itself Southern · 1960s

Spoken by

Black Americans generally; originating with 1960s Black cultural nationalists and urban Northerners

$SOULFOThe Record · cultural traction

▲ Steady

62 yrs

ahead of the mainstream

88/100

peak cultural energy

Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.

Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest

First used

1964

in the culture

Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.

Hear it spoken

By region — how it actually sounds

@auntiereg

Atlanta, GA

@deltasoul

Memphis, TN

Contribute your pronunciation

Citations & Sources

■

Earl Wilson — Earl Wilson's New York — book · 1964

p. 24; earliest verified print use, on a Harlem restaurant serving soul food. Cited in Green's Dictionary of Slang, labelled US Black

■

Craig Claiborne — "Cooking with Soul" — New York Times Magazine · 3 Nov 1968

Mass-market crossover, not the origin

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