Soul food is the name for the traditional cooking of African Americans from the southern United States, dishes such as fried chicken, collard greens, cornbread and black-eyed peas that grew out of the food traditions of enslaved and later free Black communities. The phrase works both as a plain culinary label, naming a restaurant or a style of cooking, and as a marker of cultural pride, food that carries the weight of family and history along with its flavour.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘soul food’?
As a name for this cuisine, the phrase is first recorded in the 1960s, built on the jazz slang sense of “soul” that had emerged in the 1940s, where it described something characteristic of Black American life and culture, much as in soul music. By the time that sense of “soul” had become a wider badge of African American identity, cooks and writers reached for it to give a long-established body of Southern Black cooking a collective name of its own.
Wiktionary dates the culinary sense specifically to the mid-1960s, tying the coinage to this same broader use of “soul” to describe African American culture, and points to Malcolm X’s 1965 autobiography as an early documented use of the phrase. The timing fits: the same years gave English soul music and a wider “soul” vocabulary of Black pride, so the cooking took its name from the very moment the music did.
The words themselves carry an older idea than the dish: food that nourishes the soul rather than the body. The twentieth century coinage borrowed that idea and put it to a new, culturally specific purpose, naming a style of cooking that had existed for generations before it finally had a name everyone recognised.