Quote:
Originally Posted by Froide
Collards and cornbread are popular throughout the USA. Outside of the American South, those dishes can usually be found at restaurants that serve "soul food" or barbecue.
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Oh yeah, that's right. I had forgotten about that.
A lot of the traditional foods of the deep South come from Africa; the foods (and recipes) were brought here by the slaves. Some of the foods were (and I might be wrong about one or more of these) okra, yams, black-eyed peas, rice(!) . . . "collards" (I think). Too, they were pretty much forced to eat some foods that the whites considered undesirable, and they learned to make tasty dishes from them. The Southern whites also adopted many of those foods into their diets. When African-Americans had their diasporas (mainly north, for good jobs), they took with them their love for the food and their recipes. What became known as "soul food" restaurants popped up in all of the places where there was a significant population of Southern people of color (forgive me if I'm using any politically incorrect terms).
There may be some small inaccuracies in the information in the above paragraph, as I am not an expert by any means on the subject. But, the great majority of the information is correct.
You might find this funny. There have been some times when I considered jobs outside of the deep South and one of my concerns was about the availability of Southern food in the places. Not only are there not Southern restaurants, you can't even find most of the ingredients in the grocery stores to make it for yourself (this was in the pre-Internet/Amazon days in which you can now order just about anything that you could want)! I thought that soul food restaurants in or near some of those places might be my salvation.
I know that few people will find the above interesting, but I was feeling loquacious.