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By Root 484 0

of the period confirms the enormous impact that the term had on the minds and indeed the palates of many. Most African American cookbooks published prior to the 1960s and in the early part of the decade referenced the plantation South or the historic aspect of the recipes with titles like Plantation Recipes, The Melrose Plantation Cookbook (to which folk artist Clementine Hunter made numerous contributions), and the National Council of Negro Women’s Historical Cookbook of the American Negro. Others invoked the name of a well-known local cook or caterer, like Bess Grant’s Cook Book, published in Culver City, California, and Lena Richard’s eponymous cookbook, published in New Orleans, Louisiana. The trend continued through the early 1960s, with such works as His Finest Party Recipes Based on a Lifetime of Successful Catering, by Frank Bellamy of Roswell, Georgia, and A Good Heart and a Light Hand: Ruth L. Gaskins’ Collection of Traditional Negro Recipes, published in Annandale, Virginia.

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, soul food had gained a powerful allure, and a tidal wave of cookbooks with “soul food” in the title was unleashed, including Bob Jeffries’s Soul Food Cookbook, Hattie Rinehart Griffin’s Soul-Food Cookbook, and Jim Harwood and Ed Callahan’s Soul Food Cookbook—all published in 1969. The same year also saw the publication of Princess Pamela’s Soul Food Cookbook, by the owner of an East Village restaurant in New York City that had become a mecca for whites who wanted a taste of “authentic” African American cooking.

If the period of the Civil Rights movement began with traditional African American cookbooks extolling the virtues of greens, macaroni and cheese, neckbones, chitterlings, and fried chicken, it ended with a transformation of the diet of many African Americans. By the end of the decade and throughout the 1970s, brown rice, smoked turkey wings, tahini, and tofu also appeared on urban African American tables as signs of gastronomic protest against the traditional diet and its perceived limitations to health and well-being, both real or imagined. One of the reasons was the resurgence of the Nation of Islam.

The Nation of Islam (NOI) originated in the early part of the twentieth century but came to national prominence in the 1960s under the leadership of Elijah Muhammad, who preached that peaceful confrontation was not the only way. In Chicago, Detroit, and other large urban areas, the Nation of Islam offered an alternative to the Civil Rights Movement’s civil disobedience, which many felt was unnecessarily docile. It preached an Afro-centric variation of traditional Islam and provided a family-centered culture in which gender roles were clearly defined. Food always played an important role in the work of the Nation. As early as 1945, the NOI had recognized the need for land ownership and also for economic independence and had purchased 145 acres in Michigan. Two years later, it opened a grocery store, a restaurant, and a bakery in Chicago. One of the major tenets of the religion was the eschewing of the behaviors that had been imposed by whites, who were regarded as “blue-eyed devils.” Followers abjured their “slave name,” frequently taking an X in its place and adopted a strictly regimented way of life that included giving up eating the traditional foods that were fed to the enslaved in the South.

NOI leader Elijah Muhammad was extremely concerned about the dietary habits of African Americans and in 1967 published a dietary manual for his followers titled How to Eat to Live; in 1972 he published another, How to Eat to Live, Book 2. As with much about the Nation of Islam, there is considerable contention about Muhammad’s ideas and precepts, which are a combination of traditional Islamic proscriptions with an idiosyncratic admixture of prohibitions that seem personally biased. He vehemently opposed the traditional African American diet, or “slave diet,” as he called it. Alcohol and tobacco were forbidden to Nation of Islam members and pork, in particular, was anathema. Elijah Muhammad enjoined his followers: