when West Africans were forcibly positioned for labor in the american south, their diets changed to a skimpy ration of salt pork, cornmeal, rice, lard, molasses, and greens (collard, mustard). these foods, low in nutritional value and often the scraps of the plantation, were transformed by those same Africans into what is now given the misnomer “southern food.” the shining feature in this cuisine being: fat.
because of this history, fat is inextricably tied to the history of america’s cuisine as much as turkey and apple pie, yet it is also as Black as Cookouts and Sunday Dinner at the main table. for me, a Louisiana native, fat is an absolute essential for food. fat is the soft, flabby skin under my grandmother’s arms, who taught me to wait for butter to soften before I cream it with sugar for cinnamon roll dough. it is my father boiling ham hocks into red beans, and my mother adding buttermilk to Jiffy cornbread mix and handmade biscuits. it is thick cut bacon and eggs on grits, which have been simmered with heavy whipping cream and butter; it is raw chicken wings fried in a hot bath of canola oil. it can season, it can cream, and it can bake.
how fat is perceived, especially in “southern food,” has all to do with who cooks with it — the difference returning back to race. because the Africans, who had to adapt their own palates to the food they were forced to eat, used fat (lard, pork, oil) to do this. and generations later, the descendants of these same people are boxed into the trope of being unhealthy and malnourished, while also creating some of the defining dishes of american cuisine.
Logan Frances (she/they) is a designer, dj (under alias SHEBA), and writer, currently based in Brooklyn, NY.