Debunking "Soul Food"

An 1800s cookbook by a black woman proves that black folks all along have been cooking and eating foods of complexity and variety, not merely "Southern poverty cooking."

From today's NYT:
The black liberation movement of the 1960’s had celebrated “soul food”: dishes with a debt to Africa, like black-eyed peas, greens, gumbo and fried chicken. Neither the activists nor the scholars who later devoted themselves to black studies intended those dishes to be seen as the food on the stove of every black cook in America. But that is exactly what happened, historians say.