[ Adrian Miller is a food writer, James Beard Award winner,
attorney, and certified barbecue judge. His third book, discussed
here, is Black Smoke: African Americans and the United States of
Barbecue.] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

SOUL FOOD: A CONVERSATION WITH ADRIAN E. MILLER  
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Sarah Cooke
December 17, 2020
Currant
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_ Adrian Miller is a food writer, James Beard Award winner, attorney,
and certified barbecue judge. His third book, discussed here, is Black
Smoke: African Americans and the United States of Barbecue. _

Adrian's bookshelf, Adrian Miller

 

Adrian Miller is a food writer, James Beard Award winner, attorney,
and certified barbecue judge who lives in Denver, Colorado. Miller’s
first book, Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisinee,
One Plate at a Time won the James Beard Foundation Award for
Scholarship and Reference in 2014. His second book, The President’s
Kitchen Cabinet: The Story of the African Americans Who Have Fed Our
First Families, From the Washingtons to the Obamas was published on
President’s Day 2017. It was a finalist for a 2018 NAACP Image Award
for “Outstanding Literary Work – Non-Fiction,” and the 2018
Colorado Book Award for History. Adrian’s third book, Black Smoke:
African Americans and the United States of Barbecue, will be published
spring 2021.

This interview, held on November 19, has been edited and condensed for
clarity. On the cutting room floor: the specifics of a certified
barbecue judge’s badge, Quaker cooking, and how long it takes to
trademark slogans (long).

Sarah: You describe yourself as “a recovering lawyer and
politico.” What were those past lives like for you?

My professional goal, really, was to be in the United States Senate
representing Colorado. I went to law school, but then when I practiced
law, I just hated it, and it got to the point where I was singing
spirituals in my office [Sarah laughs], so I figured I should do
something else.

I was going to open up a soul food restaurant. I’d always liked to
cook. But I got a fateful call from a friend who was working for
President Clinton on the Initiative for One America, which had the
bold and crazy idea that if we talked to one another and listened, we
might realize we got a lot more in common than what supposedly divides
us.

She reached out and asked if I had friends back in D.C. who might want
to work at the White House. When she explained the job to me, I said,
“I’ll take that.” I applied and got it, so I moved to D.C. to be
a part of it.

After the Clinton administration ended, I was trying to get back to
Colorado to start my political career, but the job market was really
slow. I was basically unemployed, watching a lot of daytime
television, and I said, “You know, I should read something.”
[Sarah laughs.] I went to a local bookstore, and I found this book on
the history of Southern food written by John Egerton. In that book,
Mr. Egerton wrote that the tribute to African American achievement and
cookery had yet to be written.

I reached out to him and asked if he thought that was still true (I
picked up the book in 2001), and he said, “For the most part,
nobody’s really taken on the full story.” So with no
qualifications at all, except for eating and cooking a lot of soul
food, that put me on a journey to write a book on the history of soul
food.

As you know, you don’t really live off writing, or a lot of us
don’t. I came back to Denver and had a job in a progressive think
tank, then I ended up working for Colorado’s governor. At the same
time, I worked on the book on weekends and after work.

After the governor decided not to run for re-election, I said,
“I’m just gonna go for it.” I knew otherwise that I would be
working on it on the side forever. I cashed in my retirement savings,
and I lived on that to write the book. The book came out in 2013, and
then I got my current job as the executive director of the Colorado
Council of Churches. It’s a part-time job, so I’m able to still do
writing and have a quote-un-quote day job.

I was reading your biography online, and there’s such a strong
throughline of religion and faith in your life. How does your faith
inform your approach to food?

My faith instructs that we should love one another, and that I should
love every person because they are an image of God. There’s
something good about everybody, even though they make it hard for you
to see that.

I hate to see discord, the amount of hatred and violence we see in our
world, and at least in the United States, the divisions are getting so
deep that we have fewer and fewer spaces where we can come together.
Food, I think, is one of those tools that can create an inviting
space, because we all have to eat.

Cooking is an act of love—basically, the cook is saying that they
care for your survival, even if the food is straight nasty. [Sarah
laughs.] It’s been my experience that when people sit down to eat,
you recognize the humanity of the other person. Often the food,
especially if it’s good, can facilitate conversation and start to
break down barriers.

For those who go to church, it’s one of the few spaces we have left
where people from all kinds of walks of life can come together in a
space on a regular basis.

I was raised Quaker, and a big thing in my Quaker meeting was
potlucks. I remember, though, that none of the food was that good.
[Sarah and Adrian laugh.]

I’m a little surprised the food wasn’t that good.

I was surprised as well. I was always hoping that by the next
iteration, someone would have picked up a cookbook or stepped up their
game, but it never happened. [Adrian laughs.]

Did you grow up in a family with a culture around food?

That was definitely my experience. My dad can cook, but my mom was the
primary cook, and she was a very good cook. Not only was she good at
making soul and Southern food, she was pretty good at making foods
from other ethnic genres, as well as Americana, so I grew up with a
really good cook. I got to learn some of what she did before she died,
so I feel really fortunate.

In an interview with Sankofa Farms, you said, “A lot of my work is
to look at our food, to celebrate it, but also to celebrate the
people, the African Americans who have done so much to contribute to
our foodways.” I looked up Sankofa and the Ghanian proverb it’s
associated with, which Wikipedia translated as: “It is not wrong to
go back for that which you have forgotten.” In your work, what do
you feel you’re going back for?

I’m going back for that connection to Africa. So much of African
American history has been forced dissociation from Africa by
whites—not only those who enslaved African Americans, but those who
were complicit in it.

When I was about 7 or 8, Roots was on TV. At school, our teachers
asked us to trace our roots. I just remember people going around the
room and they could say, “Oh I’m ⅛ Irish, ¼ Scottish,” and I
could not say that. All I could say was African American. I knew I was
from Africa, but I couldn’t tell you a country.

I think this is common with a lot of African American families, where
some people don’t want to talk about what happened in the past,
because there was rape, unacknowledged rape and other things. That
past is painful. That clearly was the case on my father’s side of
the family: Somewhere along the line, somebody raped someone, and
never acknowledged or owned up to what they did.

So in the tatters of what has been wrought because of the status of
Black people in this country, I’ve been very interested in finding
the clues of what we brought from Africa and what has been resilient
and still manifests itself today, even if it’s in a form we don’t
recognize because we’re just not familiar with it anymore.

I’ve been fascinated by making those connections—so, showing foods
from Africa that get embraced here in the United States and how they
play out, and maybe how they’re similar to dishes in Africa. You can
see there’s a cultural continuity.

Over the years you’ve been researching and publishing these books,
do you feel that that cultural conversation has strengthened? Do you
feel that people are coming to your work now with a little more
fluency, as it were?

I think one of the cool things that’s happened in the last few years
is that you have more people in the conversation now. I think
there’s much more interest in this idea of culinary history and what
maybe the past can tell us about current practices, and even maybe
where we can go in the future.

But my experience still is just that there’s a lot of people who are
unfamiliar with African Americans in this way. They’re still coming
to it fresh. And I feel like I’m still in a way just trying to teach
people.

If more people were part of cultural conversations, in this case about
African foodways translating into African American foodways in the
United States, do you think that would help prime those conversations
at the table?

Definitely. Here’s the trap in all of this: A lot of people are just
not careful, and they kind of make stuff up. I think that that could
really be damaging, because I think we all should be endeavoring to
find the truth, and I think seeking the truth about food and its
backstory may get to the point where we start eliminating long-held
beliefs that benefit our culture.

Every once in a while, you’ll see someone try to say definitively
that X food came from Y place, because of course, X food is delicious
and so that Y culture wants to claim it, right: “Yeah, we’re the
ones who did this first.” But a lot of this food history is just not
documented; we can make educated guesses, but to show a clear
provenance of something is usually very difficult to do.

I’ll take the example of fried chicken. It’s one thing to say
fried chicken is from West Africa, [but] my research indicates that
it’s probably from Western Europe, probably Scotland. But you know,
nobody knows for sure. But one thing we can do is look at how so many
different cultures around the world plug into this tradition and how
they make this dish. What we can learn about that? What does that tell
us about cultures? How can that bring us together?

I would love to learn a bit about your research process. I don’t
know if you are, quote-un-quote, allowed to share your process for the
book you’re currently working on? [Adrian laughs.] I don’t know! I
don’t know if there’s secrecy or something! [Adrian and Sarah
laugh.] Is there a general research process that you have?

I think the first thing that anybody has to do is see what’s already
out there. You have to look at books, go online, and see if
anybody’s already written on that subject, then see if it’s
persuasive to you or doesn’t ring true.

My speciality has been writing about stuff that’s never really been
covered before, or from angle that’s never been touched before.
There was certainly the work of Dr. Jessica B. Harris, but no one had
ever done a scholarly treatment of soul food. My second book, on
African American presidential chefs—no one has ever written about
them in a comprehensive way. And my book on African American barbecue
that’s forthcoming [Black Smoke: African Americans and the United
States of Barbecue]—no one’s ever written a book just on the
history of African American barbecue. There have been historical
treatments of barbecue that have mentioned African Americans quite a
bit, but nobody’s really said, “From an African American point of
view, this is how the story plays out.”

The boon for my research has always been digitized newspapers, because
newspapers were intended to capture the daily life of a community. The
next thing I do is look for any oral history, hopefully in the time
period that I’m looking at. But I love just talking to people about
what they think about food, and when you have those conversations, you
see where some long-held stuff springs up and endures.

Take chitlins: One of the enduring perceptions of chitlins is “Oh,
it’s the master’s trash, it’s the food that white people don’t
want.” Pig intestines were things that were going to spoil very
quickly, so you had to eat them right away. Often as a reward for all
the hard work of hog killing, the enslaver would give the enslaved
workforce chitlins to eat. That created the notion that this is the
stuff the master didn’t want.

But when you look at the historical record, you find that white people
were eating plenty of chitlins. I shared this during a radio interview
a couple weeks ago, and the host was fighting with me. I was like,
“I found this and this,” and he just didn’t want to believe me.

The last part [of research], which I love to do, is fieldwork. You
have to go to these restaurants, if you’re talking about restaurant
culture; if you’re talking about home cooks, you have to go see what
people are doing. That part is really hard, because I’ve never ever
had enough resources to adequately do it. I’ve always felt bad. I
felt like my books were informed, but I felt like they could always be
a little more informed, but I just never got the resources. I’ve
applied to scholarships and stuff to buttress the advance I got from
the publisher, but I’ve never received any kind of grant for that
work.

How has COVID affected your work on Black Smoke right now? Were you
able to get in field work before COVID?

I had made maybe 10 trips, but due to COVID, there were some trips I
just didn’t get to make. I had hoped to go back to Los Angeles and
San Francisco, and I wanted to go to Kansas City and St. Louis—St.
Louis moreso, because I’d eaten in Kansas City within the last
couple of years.

You mentioned as you go back through research and through documents,
you find evidence that contradicts some long held beliefs or myths.
Were there any times that things you learned rewrote a history for
you?

Basically, all the negative things I’d heard about soul food.
‘Soul food is the master’s leftovers, soul food is the food the
master didn’t want, soul food is inherently unhealthy.’ Think
about what the nutritionists are telling us to eat: more dark leafy
greens, more sweet potatoes, more fish, okra, hibiscus. All these
things are the building blocks of soul food.

Soul food is really celebration food. Most of the stuff we think
about, like barbecue, the glorious cakes and pies, fried chicken,
chitlins—people would eat that every once in a while, for special
occasions. You look at any culture, and if you eat those special
occasions foods on the regular, it’s not gonna be good for your
body.

Only 40 percent of slavery were those big plantations, like with Gone
with the Wind, where you had two teams of cooks: one for the big
house, one for the people working the fields. So for 60 percent of the
enslaved people, they were pretty much eating the same food as their
slavers, because they were either in an urban slavery context or they
were in a small farm, and in those contexts, it did not make sense to
have two separate teams of cooks making two different types of food.

That was eye-opening: to see how soul food spread, to see the rich
diversity of soul food. And then to find out that even in the South, a
lot of people don’t even use the term soul food; they just call it
home cooking or country cooking. All of those things were a
revelation.

My only two things that I had really known about soul food, other than
that it was my tradition, was, “We took something that was horrible
and made it delicious,”  and “Don’t eat too much of it, because
it’ll kill you.” My book was really to test what was fact and
fiction about those two ideologies.

I think that the more you put food into frame with the context of
geography, with the context of history and politics, it illuminates so
much more.

On a totally different note, I’m curious: What was the process for
becoming a certified barbecue judge?

I found out about a cooking competition for the Kansas City barbecue
society, and at that point in time, they were looking for judges. I
knew I was going to write about soul food, and so many soul food
joints have a barbecue menu option, so I thought I would learn a
little bit more about barbecue.

You come into this room, you sit down, and they go through the
categories, then tell you how to score each category. They bring out
samples and have you judge them, to make sure that you score
correctly. After that, you stand up and take a barbecue oath, which is
a sacred thing. I’m not going to repeat it right now. [Sarah
laughs.]

I respect the sacral nature.

Then you get your badge in the mail, and at that point you can go
judge any contest within that sanctioning body.

What are those hallmarks of barbecue that beat out the rest of the
competition?

The judging criteria is texture, taste, and appearance. You want to
have something that’s really tender, you want something that’s
very flavorful, and you want something that looks gorgeous. That’s
why competition barbecue is really not a reflection of reality,
because it’s perfectly manicured barbecue. I mean, do you know
people who have syringes in their kitchen so they inject stuff into
the food?

We had a very tiny syringe of medication for the cat. I think we still
have the syringe, but it’s not for cooking or baking. I kind of want
one, though. It feels really official.

My last question is about your slogan: “Dropping Knowledge Like Hot
Biscuits.”® [Adrian laughs.] It’s brilliant. How did you come up
with that slogan, and what led you to trademark it?

I’m very proud of that one. I had all these inspirations. I came up
with “soul food scholar,” and I was proud of that, but then I
thought I needed to have more of a hook, because I knew that the
scholar part could turn some people off, that it was kind of boring.

One day, I was thinking about different songs, and I thought about
Snoop Dogg’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot.” [Sarah bursts out
laughing] I was like, “Well that’s what I’m trying to do.” And
I thought, “What’s hot in soul food? Biscuits.”

There was one more step. In law school, there was this guy who I was
kind of giving a hard time, and he said, “Let me drop knowledge on
you like bombs.” I thought that was hilarious and that always stuck
me. So I was thinking about that phrase, and then I thought about
Snoop Dogg [Sarah laughs] and then I thought, “Okay, biscuits.”
That’s how it came together.

I started telling people that. I put it on my business card, and so
many people reacted to it. There are people who have my business card
on their fridge, just because they love it so much. Then I said,
“Okay, I need to trademark this.”

Sarah Cooke is a freelance writer whose work, including her weekly
newsletter Deliciously Intense, Surprisingly Balanced, explores the
intersection of food, culture, and power. She lives in Washington,
D.C.

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