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In culinary school, you go through regional cuisines of America, you go through cuisines of the world.

That is all their soul food.ĭespite being such a bedrock of cooking, soul food-and Black foodways in general-is not regularly taught about in culinary schools. Even a ham and cheese baguette-watching kids walk down the street and eat it. In France, I went to people’s homes and realized that having duck confit on a Tuesday was no big deal there. In Spain, I had paella at someone’s home, but it was with macaroni noodles instead of rice. The real blessing for me was getting to go to people’s homes and just dining at the drop of the hat-whatever they had on the table was what you were going to eat. It made me understand that being able to take the most basic ingredients and make something beautiful out of them, in any culture, is soul food.

It was a lightbulb moment that made me hunger to find out: Where is all of this coming from? What really does define soul food? Then as I traveled the world and had the opportunities to live in different countries, I would go to these markets and see these high-end items that, in America, were just cast-offs. I remember going to his grandma’s house, and the spread on the table was black-eyed peas, rice, stewed okra-things that were familiar to me but not anyone else I knew in the Midwest. I had a roommate out of flight training school whose grandmother lived in Arlington, Texas.

Then I started traveling more when I became a flight attendant. I grew up in the Midwest not really understanding that my grandparents and great grandparents came from the South and this food traveled with them. When I was growing up, it was a very simplistic definition-it was the food that Black people eat.