Soul Food is Complex.
Soul food is fascinating.
I’m Australian, so I know nothing about it from personal experience. There are a few ‘soul food restaurants’ in Sydney and Melbourne, but they’re all just barbecue joints or Cajun-Creole restaurants … and that’s not the totality of soul food.
So, of course, I’ve had to do some research. To the point that I set my VPN to Chicago, then Kansas City, then Toledo, Ohio, and looked on DoorDash for soul food restaurants, so I could read the menus. And I gotta say, it’s fascinating.
According to Chat GPT, soul food is;
“The traditional, ethnic cuisine of African Americans, originating from the American South and deeply rooted in the history of slavery and the Great Migration”.
All good. But soul food seems to include a bunch of different cuisines, apart from Southern US food. It’s a wide-ranging cornucopia, which includes Cajun/Creole dishes, such as gumbo, jambalaya, and po-boy sandwiches, Caribbean dishes, like oxtail stew and pickled pigs’ feet, Middle American dishes, such as chicken wings, coleslaw, macaroni-cheese, and meatloaf, modern fusion dishes, including southern fried rice and soul food ramen, and West African ingredients, like chitlins, okra, and red peas. And that’s on top of the Southern US foods, including barbecue pork and ribs, bean soup, cornbread, country gravy, fried catfish, fried chicken, and grits.
A case in point; my parents-in-law, spent some time in Washington DC, in the early 1960’s. My FIL was working as a research physicist at Georgetown University, while my MIL was doing volunteer teaching, with underprivileged children. Through this teaching, she made friends with a number of African-American families, and because of this, she picked up some soul food recipes. One of these was hamburger gumbo, a truly delicious ragout of spiced beef mince, with onions, carrots, tomato, and a number of canned vegetables; green beans, red beans, corn, mushrooms. (I’ll do a post on it soon). Now this dish would seem to be derived from an Illinois recipe, called ‘Southern Illinois Chowder’ generally cooked by Southern Illinois rednecks. But this family in DC cooked it, changed it somewhat and felt it to be part of their cultural heritage. And so, it became a soul food dish.
But today, I’m talking about smothered pork chops. This is a Southern US dish, of highly spiced fried pork chops, simmered in onion-cream gravy.
Smothered Pork Chops
Ingredients
* 2 large brown onions, 4 Chinese-cut pork chops, season-all, salt, pepper, chilli powder, garlic powder, cornflour, cooking oil.
* 2 tbsp butter, 2 tbsp plain flour, 3 cups chicken broth, 2 tbsp sour cream, salt, pepper, chopped parsley.
Peel and slice the onions and put them aside. Flatten out the chops, pat them dry, and season them very heavily with the season-all, salt, pepper, chilli powder, and garlic powder, on both sides. Sprinkle the chops lightly with cornflour on each side and fry them in an oiled pan for two minutes per side. When they are browned, remove them from the pan and put them aside. Add the onions, with a little more oil and some salt and pepper, and gently fry them until they are completely transparent and slightly browned. Put the pan with the onions in it aside.
Next, make the gravy. Melt the butter in a non-stick saucepan. Stir in the flour and gently simmer the mixture for a few minutes, or until it thickens and looks brown, stirring it as it cooks. Add the pepper, cook it for a minute, then add two cups of broth, all at once. Let it simmer until it is thickened. Add the sour cream and stir it in. Transfer the gravy to the pan with the onions, stir it thoroughly and heat it. Add the extra cup of broth, and the chops, along with any juice they produced, reduce the heat, put a lid on the pan, and simmer it gently for twenty minutes or so. Taste the gravy and adjust the seasonings. Sprinkle the parsley over the top.
Serves two or four.
This is a soul food dish from the Southern USA. It’s lovely. As with most of these dishes, you can reduce the fat or make it full fat. You can also add mushrooms, along with the onions if you want.
