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Last week, I cooked up a traditional "soul food" dinner for my family's stop in Mississippi. Soul food is steeped in the culture of the Southeast, and it is rooted in the culture of slavery (not a coincidence that Mississippi's state flag still has the "Stars and Bars" so prominently featured). Slaves were given limited rations of food, and the recipes and cooking methods that one associates with soul food stem from those limitations. Thus, you see many fried foods and cooked greens in traditional soul food recipes.
Soul food encompasses so many different foods and recipes that I was hard to narrow down what to fix. I finally picked out a couple of my favorites and got to work.
Fried Catfish with Comeback Sauce
2lbs catfish nuggets (frozen then thawed)
2 cups buttermilk
salt and pepper to taste
1 1/2 cups cornmeal
1/2 cup flour (I used chickpea flour)
1 teaspoon "Soul Food" seasoning
2 cups vegetable oil for frying
For the sauce
1 cup mayonnaise
2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
1 tablespoon hot sauce
2 tablespoons ketchup
Juice from 1 lemon, squeezed
1 tablespoon smoked paprika
This was a day long process (a lot of these meals have required a bit more planning than I typically do for dinner!). First, I put the catfish nuggets in a baking dish and poured the butter milk over them. I let them soak in the refrigerator for 8 hours.
The sauce was super easy, and it's known as a "kissing cousin" to a roumalade. Just mix everything together until it's well blended, then let it set in the fridge for a few hours until you're ready to serve.
When it was time for frying, I took the catfish out of the refrigerator. I mixed all of the dry ingredients together (salt and pepper to "seasoning") in a bowl, and I heated up the oil in my electric skillet.
I dredged the nuggets through the dry mixture, coating them well, and then popped them into the oil to fry. I did so until they were golden brown.
Black-Eyed Peas
1 lb. dried black eyed peas
Pork Fatback
4 Bay Leaves
Another all day affair, I first soaked the beans overnight. Then, I used something that I hadn't cooked with before...
That's fatback, and it's a seasoning "meat" (I mean, it's just fat, right?). I put the fatback into the pot and brought it to a boil. I then added the beans and the bay leaves, brought the water back to a simmer, and let it all go for an hour and a half.
Collard Greens
4 collard green stalks, chopped
Pork Fatback (chopped)
The second use of fatback for this dinner, this time around I chopped up the fatback and put it into a cast iron skillet. After sauteing it for a few minutes, I added the chopped greens.
Corn bread
1 cup corn meal (I use House-Autry)
1 cup chickpea flour
1 tablespoon sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
2 eggs
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 1/4 cups milk
1 can creamed style corn
Sliced jalapenos
First, preheat the oven to 425 degrees. I mixed all of the dry ingredients together, and in a separate bowl I beat the eggs, milk, and oil together.
I added the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients, slowly and continuously mixing while I did. I poured the batter into a baking dish, and put the sliced jalapenos on top of half of the mixture.
The result of all of this...
...was deeeeeelicious. The comeback sauce was spicy but not overpowering, and the cornbread turned out well. I'd had problems using gluten-free flour for baking in the past, but this go around it worked.
The star of all of this was the black eyed peas. I'd never prepared them this way, relying instead on the canned version. They were salty and came out tasting better than any black eyed peas I've ever had. I'll need to stick with this preparation method from here on out. I hope that I did "soul food" justice with this meal. It was my first time with most of these recipes, and I'll definitely be coming back to them to try to make them better the next go around.
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