On the season finale of My Family Recipe, host Arati Menon welcomes Adrian Miller, AKA “The Soul Food Scholar.” Not many people can boast their accomplishments as a food writer, James Beard award winner, attorney and certified barbecue judge; but Adrian Miller is one-in-a-million. Adrian talks about the dishes and characters who populated his childhood and his church community in Denver, Colorado. He tells us the story of the perfect cornbread and how this recipe represents so much more history and love than its simplicity might suggest.
On the season finale of My Family Recipe, host Arati Menon welcomes Adrian Miller, AKA “The Soul Food Scholar.” Not many people can boast their accomplishments as a food writer, James Beard award winner, attorney and certified barbecue judge; but Adrian Miller is one-in-a-million. Adrian talks about the dishes and characters who populated his childhood and his church community in Denver, Colorado. He tells us the story of the perfect cornbread and how this recipe represents so much more history and love than its simplicity might suggest.
If you’re hungry for more of this story, you can read the original essay “The No Fail Cornbread That's Slightly Sweet and Very Divine,” published by Food52.
My Family Recipe is created by the Food52 Podcast Network and Heritage Radio Network, inspired by the eponymous Food52 column.
My Family Recipe: Cornbread and the Soul of African-American Cuisine with Adrian Miller
ADRIAN MILLER: The cornbreads had various hues (from light yellow to a deep golden brown), shapes (circles, squares and triangles), and textures (gummy to crumbly). Yet Minnie Utsey's cornbread stood out from the rest. It follows a classic soul food formula, particularly with the use of yellow cornmeal and sugar.
ARATI MENON, HOST: Welcome to My Family Recipe. Presented by Food52 and Heritage Radio Network. I'm your host, Arati Menon. I'm also the lead editor of the original essay series on Food52. Thank you for joining us as we explore some much loved heirloom recipes and the delicious stories behind them. Today, we are absolutely thrilled to welcome a food writer, James Beard award winner, attorney and certified barbecue judge. There are not many people who can claim all of those monikers. But Adrian Miller does just that. A few years ago, Adrian wrote an essay for the My Family Recipe column called "The No Fail Cornbread That's Slightly Sweet and Very Divine." He goes into the dishes and characters who populated his childhood and his church community in Denver, Colorado. Adrian, welcome. This is such a pleasure.
MILLER: Oh, so good to be with you.
MENON: Thank you for joining. So in your essay, Adrian, you say, and I quote “some joke that the AME, an acronym for the African Methodist Episcopal Church, actually stands for always meet and eat.” Can you talk to us a little bit about the history of the AME and its relationship with food?
MILLER: Yeah, so the African Methodist Episcopal Church is one of the oldest Black churches in the United States, was started in the late seventeen hundreds by a guy named Richard Allen and some others. And it really was birthed out of racism.
MENON: Hmm.
MILLER: So the white Methodist Church that they belonged to in Philadelphia segregated seating.
MENON: Hmm.
MILLER: And wouldn't allow African-Americans, whether free or enslaved, to participate in certain things like going in, to the altar and other rituals in an integrated way. So they, they agitated and advocated and tried to get the church to change their ways, but they ultimately didn't. So one day they just protested and left the service and went down the street to a blacksmith's shop and started their first service. So that's why the symbol for the AME Church is an anvil with the cross in it, because it was, the anvil served as the first altar.
MENON: Wow.
MILLER: And so the other thing went on to found a church that's now, has a presence around the world.
MENON: And what was the role that your family's church played in your, in your childhood in Denver and your, and your memories around food growing up?
MILLER: Yeah. So, well my parents moved from central Denver to the southern suburbs when I was a little kid, about eight years old. And one thing I'm eternally grateful to them for, including several other things, is the fact that they maintained this tie to this Black church that they went to. So even though we lived in the suburbs, we would make the trek into the city for choir rehearsals, for events and also for the church service, to be part of that Black church. And I love the Black faith tradition, the Black worship style and so that, that was a great part of my childhood and also kept me tethered to Black culture in so many ways. And anybody who's been part of a church community knows that one aspect of successfully building community is to have social events marked by incredible, incredibly good food.
MENON: Mmhmm.
MILLER: And my mom, my late mother, was a very good cook and so, people in church culture will understand this, whenever there was some kind of communal potluck event, people would ask what my mom made. And that would determine what they ate. So that just tells you how much my mom threw down when she cooked.
MENON: Wow. What are some of your richest memories around, around things that she made?
MILLER: Oh yeah. So one thing was this lemon icebox pie. And if you've never had a lemon icebox pie,
MENON: I haven't.
MILLER: Essentially. Yeah, it's like you have, you have, have you ever had a key lime pie?
MENON: Yes.
MILLER: So imagine a key lime pie, except instead of a graham cracker crust, you had crushed vanilla wafers glued together with melted butter.
MENON: Whoa.
MILLER: Yeah. A lemon custard and then lemon meringue.
MENON: Oh my goodness.
MILLER: And she was also known for her dressing. So for those, for the uninitiated, southerners, African-Americans, people tied to southern food culture, we call, we don't say stuffing. We call it dressing because we cook it in a separate dish and not in the animal. But she had a very good recipe for that. I remember one of my pastors growing up just made a special request for that recipe. But you know, there's just other stuff, her greens, you know, so many other things that she made, were just really rock solid. But those are the two things that I remember people commenting on quite frequently.
MENON: And tell us about Minnie Utsey, the baker of your favorite cornbread and very much like your mother, her friend, a church mother herself. Can you paint a picture of her for us?
MILLER: Minnie Utsey was a very kind woman, and she was from Arkansas, along with her husband. They moved out to Denver in, I want to say, the early sixties. May have been a little bit earlier than that, but she was just a stalwart of the church. You know, she was somebody who was part of different clubs, definitely could count on her to help events happen. And she, she had several kids. One of her, her only son was one of my best friends growing up.
MENON: Mmm.
MILLER: So just had a lot of connections, but a very nice woman. And I remember one of the last things she said to me before she died is, you know, I was working on this, my soul food book.
MENON: Right.
MILLER: And authors understand this, writing a book takes a long time. And I remember one Sunday, she said, 'You need to hurry up and finish that book so I can read it before I die.'
MENON: Aww.
MILLER: And I actually did not finish it by that time. But you know, her, her family, especially her daughters, were so grateful that I gave her a shout out in my book, and I'm thankful that they let me use that recipe.
MENON: Yeah, because she, I can imagine, was a , was a source and resource for you.
MILLER: Yeah.
MENON: Your mother and her friend, Minnie, were both featured in your church's Hospitality Club cookbook.
MILLER: Yes.
MENON: Can you tell us a little bit about the significance of these community documents in preserving and passing down family recipes?
MILLER: The endeavor of writing a cookbook is, is difficult. And we know in our, looking at the publishing history of our country, African-Americans were not often afforded the opportunity to publish books that got out to a wide audience.
MENON: Hmm.
MILLER: I mean, in the early days, some of the earliest cookbooks, you'll see a preface where the African-American author is basically asking for permission or giving reasons why they were allowed to make this book, you know. So it just, it talks about the racism that African-American authors have had. But these community cookbooks are a moment in time that celebrate long standing traditions, and so it's a literary feast. I always think of it as a literary potluck, right. You just imagine this table with everyone bringing their best show-off dish.
MENON: Yeah.
MILLER: Because you're not going to put a lame dish, you know, you're not going to put a dish that doesn't taste good into a cookbook. You're going to do something that you know really shows off
MENON: It's gonna be a no-fail, no-fail show off dish.
MILLER: Right. Yeah, you want something that shows off your virtuosity as a cook. So it's the very best being compiled in a volume, and it stands the test of time. And you look at these names, you're like, 'Oh, yeah, I remember her. She was such a nice woman.'.
MENON: Yeah.
MILLER: And then you're like, yeah, 'I remember that dish, too. That was slamming.'
MENON: Do you still have your mom's edition of it? Like well thumbed and oil stained and -
MILLER: Yeah, I had to, I had to staple the cover back to the front page because that had fallen off and I have my little notations in there and everything. Yeah. So I have that addition and then I also have several new ones, just in case.
MENON: And speaking of Minnie Utsey, can you describe the no-fail cornbread that you write about in your essay?
MILLER: So one of the reasons why I love this recipe is because I was looking for a fairly standard cornbread that's soulful, and I'll explain what that means in a moment, and I thought one that cooks could manage. And the reason why I say it's soulful is because most African-American cooks put sugar in their cornbread.
MENON: Yeah.
MILLER: Now this is a big dividing line in southern culture. Most white southerners that I've met are steadfastly against that, and they say, 'look, if you put sugar in cornbread, it's cake.' But I gotta tell you most African-American cookbooks that I've read, the recipes for cornbread include some kind of sugar. So, you know, it's something where, if you're making it, it has the appearance of a thick cornbread batter, sorry, thick pancake batter.
MENON: Mm hmm.
MILLER: That's kind of what it looks like. That's the consistency you want. I think the part that really trips people up is the melted shortening. So, because I find there are people who will make the recipe and they'll use just regular vegetable oil.
MENON: Yeah.
MILLER: Or something. And then they write me and tell me how the recipe failed. And the first question I ask is like, 'did you use shortening?' They're like, 'uh, no. I mean, it's just oil, right?' That's, you know, I was like, 'Yeah, but there's a reason why you have to use the shortening.'.
MENON: Yeah.
MILLER: So, but yeah, yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a crumbly cornbread, but still holds up well together. You can use it in a variety of ways. I usually do a skillet, grease a skillet and cook it that way so you get a nice wedge.
MENON: So Adrian, you've devoted a great deal of your life to researching and documenting the history of soul food, can you talk to us about when and how your love for African-American food grew from an appreciation to a subject study?
MILLER: Yes, so the short answer is unemployment. So I was working in the Clinton White House on a racial reconciliation initiative, and when the Clinton administration came to a close, my plan was, to follow the plan I had had for at least 10 years to that point, was going back to Colorado and starting my political career because I wanted to be, ultimately, the U.S. senator from Colorado.
MENON: Mm-Hmm.
MILLER: But the job market was really slow. I was watching a lot of daytime television, I'm not even going to tell you what shows. And in the depth of my depravity, I said, 'you know, I should read something.' So I went to the bookstore and I'd always liked to cook. So I was just in the cookbook section and I came across John Egerton's Southern Food: At Home, On the Road, In History. He wrote that book in the late '80s, I'm reading it in 2001, and early in that book, he wrote that the tribute to Black achievement in American Cookery has yet to be written. I thought that was really interesting. So I emailed him cold, I think maybe even the next day, and just asked him, 'Hey, you know, you wrote this 14 years ago, do you still think this is true?' And he said, 'You know, for the most part, nobody's really taken on the full subject. People have written about parts of it, but nobody's taken on the full subject and there's always room for another voice, so why not yours?' So that's really what launched me on the journey. And I reached out to other food writers and African-American food writers just to verify that. And they said, 'yeah, nobody's really done it.' And then the other thing those writers told me, was like, 'Look, this country is racist, so you're just not going to find that much. So it's going to be a real challenge to write this book. So, you know, get what you can, cobble it together and, you know, put out the book.' And I was like, 'OK,' so I went into the project, the endeavor of writing a book, thinking I was going to have a hard time finding enough to substantiate the story. But a lot of these writers that I spoke to didn't know about this newfangled thing called the internet. And when I got on the internet, you know, in, in not too much time, I had enough to write five books.
MENON: Wow.
MILLER: So I wrote about soul food because I thought, 'Well, this is the most recognizable aspect of African-American cooking, cookery, and let me write about that and see if that leads to other things.'
MENON: Okay. So, we're going to take a very quick break, but when we come back, I'm excited to speak to Adrian in much more detail about the evolution of soul food in the United States.
BREAK
MENON: Welcome back to My Family Recipe. Our guest today, Adrian Miller, is known best by his nickname ‘the soul food scholar,’ so we couldn't let him go without getting a walk through the history of soul food that he spent so much time exploring.
MENON: How would you define soul food, Adrian?
MILLER: Soul food is the food of Black migrants who left the American South and settled in other parts of the country. So I think soul food is distinct from southern food. And the reason why I pin it to migration is because when, when people leave one place and go to another, if they can recreate home like they did before, you know, they'll do it. But often you have to find different, substitute different ingredients. You're encountering new people and sometimes you may borrow from them. And then, you know, often times when you're in a new place, you just can't get everything that you got back home.
MENON: Yeah.
MILLER: So, you know, for example in soul food, it's the difference between having fresh peach cobbler and peach cobbler made from canned peaches.
MENON: Mm-Hmm.
MILLER: It's a, it's a limited number of greens because of, the plentiful greens that grow in the South are not going to grow in a more temperate or arid climate like you would find in other places, like in a place like Denver. So we see a narrowing of the southern food menu when it comes to soul food and then, and then some variation. So I tell people it's really that precisely, and it's just one of the African heritage cuisines in the United States, related to Creole cooking and Lowcountry cooking and other types of cooking. But I think it's different.
MENON: And because we're airing this episode, you know, in the most wonderful season of all, holiday season, I wanted to touch upon a little bit how inextricable holiday food is from soul food, or the food of the, the rural South. Can we, can we talk a little bit about that?
MILLER: Soul food is a mix of celebration food and, kind of, everyday food. And so again, when you think of migrants, especially in the United States, what we often think of the migrant's everyday food is usually the celebration food of the old home, or the old country. Because when people leave a place and go to a new place, they're usually poor and they struggle. But once they get their footing and start to prosper, they remember the good times food of the old country or back home. And so they eat that on a more regular basis because it's a sign of status, right.
MENON: Yeah.
MILLER: It's a, it's a way to feel good. So a lot of the things we think about when we think about soul food, the things like fried chicken, barbecue, the glorious pies, biscuits, things like that, those were things that, in terms of ingredients -
MENON: Yeah.
MILLER: Enslaved people only got access to on weekends when the work schedule slowed, which allowed this kind of cooking and on special occasions.
MENON: Yeah.
MILLER: Because a lot of the things that made up those dishes, things like refined sugar, white flour, were prestige ingredients, and African-Americans were not conferred the status in society to have regular access to those ingredients. So the day in and day out food of African-Americans -
MENON: Yeah.
MILLER: - is very close to what we call vegan today. Because slaveholders were doing everything on the cheap. So, five pounds of some starch, cornmeal, rice, sweet potatoes, a couple of pounds of smoked, salted, dried or pickled meat, usually pork, and a jug of molasses. So enslaved people had to figure out how to supplement their diet with those meager rations. So when you move to a new place and settle in the new place, often within, you know, within a few years, once people prosper, the celebration foods become a regular part of the diet, so much so that people think that that's just the everyday food.
MENON: Yeah. And corn, or maize, of course, is an ingredient of unique importance in the Americas, and it grew from a staple for many Native American communities to becoming eventually a commodity crop for white farmers and in between, cornmeal derived cornbread became especially present on African-American tables and plates. Can you go into cornbread significance for Blacks living in, the in the rural South, and it's, sort of, place in the history of soul food.
MILLER: Right. So all of us are, in the United States, are indebted to the indigenous people here who were raising maize and turning it into all kinds of foods. And literally cornbread was the staff of life. In fact, because cornbread was so plentiful and could be grown so easily because remember, European colonists had a really tough time growing wheat in the early years of colonization. And so cornbread was the staff of life.
MENON: Yeah.
MILLER: In fact, if you look at some narrative of the enslaved, enslaved people, wheat bread had the nickname Johnny Seldom and cornbread had the nickname Johnny Constant. So there's all kinds of cornbreads that get developed, so the earliest one was called a pone. And that's, that's a approximation of an indigenous word for, kind of a very simple corn cake. Where it was corn, maybe some salt and then something that, some kind of liquid that bound it together. And then it could be cooked in the ashes of a fire and it became ash cake. Or it could be cooked on a griddle where it was called, it was called pone or Johnny cake. You know, there's various names for these things.
MENON: Right.
MILLER: Or it could be fried, and then you're getting to hush puppies. And then as milk and eggs and other ingredients get added, then that becomes the more familiar cornbread that we know today. But all kinds of cornbreads were developed in the South, and enslaved people relied heavily on them for sustenance.
MENON: Let's talk a little bit about the release of your latest book earlier this year. Congratulations on that. This is your third and for listeners who are not familiar, it's called Black Smoke: African-Americans and the United States of Barbecue. What was one of the most, sort of exciting or surprising discoveries that you made while researching and writing this, Adrian?
MILLER: I think to really see the depth of the Native American contribution to barbecue.
MENON: Mm-Hmm.
MILLER: Because the way that barbecue's early history is often told is, yeah, some Europeans show up in the Caribbean, they see indigenous people cooking in a way they really hadn't seen before on this raised platform, there were fish, iguanas, vegetables being slowly smoked, and then the Europeans took this to the American South, added their own animals and created barbecue. So, you know, that didn't mesh with me for a lot of reasons. One is the way that barbecue develops in the American South is different than the raised platform technique seen in the Caribbean. So there's something else going on. And I really wanted to see what was the mix of African-Americans, Native Americans and Europeans that really give rise to barbecue. And what I found in looking at the travel diaries of white colonists and what they'd observed is that while Native Americans were cooking in a certain way, and it's clear that at some point Europeans altered the way that Native Americans were cooking and that alteration, and throwing in African, enslaved African labor and seasoning methods and all of those things, that puts us on the road to southern barbecue. So that was surprising to me. Another was to see the deep legacy of women in Black barbecue, because barbecue was often presented as dude food.
MENON: Yeah.
MILLER: And it's really presented as white dude food, for the most part. And so I found the story of Mary John, who in the 1840s was what we would call a pitmaster today.
MENON: Yeah.
MILLER: An enslaved woman who was doing barbecue. So imagine that, 1840s.
MENON: Wow.
MILLER: Enslaved Black woman telling dudes what to do when it came to barbecue. And she ends up buying her freedom, after being hired out to do barbecues. So those, those things were just really rich. And the other part, I guess, you know, it seems like a duh moment now, I had no idea how much African-Americans had dominated barbecue. I had known that it was a very important part of African-American food culture and that, you know, Black barbecues are, but I had a very multicultural view of barbecue contributions. And to go back and look at these newspapers from the late 1700s and early 1800s basically saying, 'Hey, you know, barbecue is made by Black men, usually an older Black man doing this, just shows the dominance that African-Americans had in the shaping of our, of American barbecue culture. And I guess the third thing is finding that barbecue was whole animal cooking until the early 20th century, and it was the transition of barbecue from a rural context to an urban context that we started to get these regional barbecue styles developing. Focused on smaller cuts of meat. So these things that we argue about intensely today, they're only about, like 100 years old. But we act like they're taught from time immemorial.
MENON: Yeah. I love being reminded that so much of what happens in the barbecue scene today wouldn't be there without the influence of some amazing women.
MILLER: Mmmhmm.
MENON: So thank you sharing that anecdote. Was, was it really hard to find others like her?
MILLER: It was from that time period. When you get to the 20th century, Black women are all over the place. And if they're not explicitly named, you've got a lot of Black men running barbecue restaurants say, 'Oh yeah, I got that sauce recipe from my grandmother, or my mother taught me how to do this or that.' So, and the restaurant's named after their mothers. In fact, in my own family, my late mother, Johnetta Miller, she was the griller-in-chief in my family.
MENON: Yeah. That's amazing. I love that.
MILLER: So, yeah. For Black people, that's, that, you know, Black women at the grill is not a big, it's so commonplace is not even a big deal.
MENON: Is there anything else that you're working on that our listeners should know about?
MILLER: So I'm always thinking about the next project. So there's a few things swimming in my head right now. So one is a meal based guide to difficult conversations. So how, how could you create a series of meals that bring people together. Because there are fewer and fewer spaces in our society to really have a chance to talk, to sit down, talk to somebody and hear them out and get another perspective, and I think the table is one of the few places left. Because I've been doing racial reconciliation work for a couple of decades now and -
MENON: Yeah.
MILLER: - my experience is, you got to be a special kind of cat to sign up for an indefinite dialog about something.
MENON: Definitely.
MILLER: And the real challenge is, how do you, how do you get that person who doesn't want to talk about the issue or doesn't know anything about the issue, how do you get them into a space where they feel invited, they feel welcome and you can really talk some out. And the people who disagree with them are not jumping all over them.
MENON: Yeah, yeah. I love that. I think there's, there's a great need for all of us to feel comfortable enough and not be afraid of stepping out of our little echo chambers.
MENON: Thank you for listening to My Family Recipe. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the show. And don’t forget to leave us a rating and review to let us know what you think of our amazing guests and their delicious stories. This was in fact the last episode of the debut season of the podcast—we have so appreciated your company through this journey. This is also a great time to return to some of the older episodes that you may have missed along the way. Something to keep your hearts, and bellies, full until we return with another set of amazing guests, their cherished family recipes, and delicious stories. Special thanks for this episode to Adrian Miller. You can find a link to Adrian’s original essay and Minnie Utsey’s No-Fail Cornbread recipe in the show notes. My Family Recipe is produced by Dylan Heuer and Hannah Fordin. Our Julia Child Foundation Fellow is Kelly Spivey and our audio engineer is Matt Patterson. Coral Lee is Food52 Podcast Network's Producer. Our theme song is Bittoral by Aeronot. This show is a collaboration between Food52 and Heritage Radio Network. There is plenty more to read and listen to. Find even more stories at Food52.com and HeritageRadioNetwork.org
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