Become a Southern Food Connoisseur, Soul Food Too

A Southern food connoisseur knows that Southern cooking is a blend of Native American, European and West African traditions, and that soul food is its own story within it. Mosey has a Southern badge and a Soul Food badge, and each counts the different places you have rated.

What does a Southern food connoisseur understand?

The first lesson is where the dishes come from. Southern cooking draws on three streams. Native American cooks gave grits, hominy, cornbread, the Three Sisters of beans, maize and squash, and smoking meat over hickory. European settlers added livestock, olive oil, ham, battered fried chicken traditions, potato salad and the French roux of Louisiana. West African cooks brought okra, black-eyed peas, sesame, collard greens, one-pot rice dishes and techniques of frying and seasoning.

So a plate of fried chicken, greens and cornbread is not a single heritage. It is a conversation between all three.

How do Lowcountry and Appalachian cooking differ?

Southern food splits by geography. Coastal South Carolina and Georgia, the Lowcountry, favor seafood, rice and grits, and the rice knowledge of Gullah Geechee people shaped dishes such as Charleston red rice and Hoppin' John. Appalachian cooking brings ramps, wild game, butter, apples and buttermilk biscuits with sausage gravy.

Elsewhere, think of beef in Texas and Oklahoma, pork across much of the rest of the South, crawfish and gumbo in Louisiana, peaches, pecans, peanuts and Vidalia onions in Georgia, and burgoo, beer cheese and the Hot Brown in Kentucky. Mississippi and Alabama grow most of the country's catfish.

What is soul food, and where does it come from?

Soul food is the cuisine of Black Americans, originating in the American South from the cooking of enslaved Africans. The term became popular in the 1960s and 1970s during the Black Power movement, when "soul" was a common word for Black American culture, and one of its earliest written uses appears in The Autobiography of Malcolm X in 1965.

During the Great Migration, people who moved to northern cities found soul food a reminder of the home and family they had left. Black-owned soul food restaurants became neighborhood gathering places, and during the civil rights movement some served as meeting places for activists. The historian Adrian Miller describes soul food as more intensely seasoned than other Southern food, with a wider variety of meats, and cookbook author Bob Jeffries put the relationship neatly: all soul food is Southern food, but not all Southern food is soul.

Why do Southern barbecue sauces matter to a connoisseur?

Barbecue is where Southern regions argue in public. Pit barbecue is widespread, and Alabama is known for a mayonnaise-based white sauce, South Carolina for a mustard-based yellow sauce and eastern North Carolina for vinegar-based sauces. Kentucky and some Memphis establishments use dry rubs. Trying each style is a lesson in how one technique changes with a county line.

How do you order at a Southern table?

Many Southern places serve a plate with one meat and several sides, so the sides carry as much of the story as the main. Ask which vegetables are cooked fresh that day, whether the greens are seasoned with smoked pork, and how the cornbread is made. Cornbread is a staple across the South, and sugar in it is a point of friendly argument between cooks.

Leave room for dessert. Sweet potato pie is a traditional Thanksgiving and Christmas dessert in soul food, and a good one tells you a great deal about a kitchen.

What should you write in a Southern or soul food rating?

Name each part of the plate you ate, not only the star. "Crisp fried chicken, tender greens, cornbread a little sweet" is a rating a stranger can use. Say who you ate with, since these are meals meant for sharing, and add the tag so the place counts on your ladder.

How do you rate Southern and soul food places on Mosey?

Southern and Soul Food are separate cuisine families, and each has four levels at five, ten, twenty and fifty different places: Sampler, Taster, Expert and Connoisseur. A level is never taken away, and rating one favorite repeatedly counts once.

A plan to cover ground:

1. Rate a meat-and-three or a Sunday-style plate, naming the sides.
2. Rate a seafood and rice place from the coast.
3. Rate a barbecue place and write down the sauce style.
4. Add the Southern or Soul Food tag, and say what made the cornbread, greens or fried chicken stand out.

A badge is not a reward. It sits beside your name on a rating so another diner knows you have rated many places of the same kind.

Lists, friends and a fair deal for local kitchens

Mosey is a food app for finding, rating and sharing places to eat. It is free for a place to list, with no hidden fees and affordable tools, which matters to the family-run kitchens that carry much of this tradition. Rating by the dish tells the next diner what to order.

Make a list such as "Sunday plates I would drive for" and write a line on why each belongs. Invite someone who grew up eating this food to add their own, and follow people whose taste you trust.

For local guides, try soul food in Harlem, Sunday dinner in Atlanta and Bronzeville in Chicago. The food badges page sets out the ladder, and the US food guides list more.

A neighboring tradition is Cajun and Creole food.

Get the Mosey app, rate your next Southern plate by the dish and add the tag, then count five different kitchens as the first goal.