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Every culture has its soul food. Or so says Deborah VanTrece in her new book, The Twisted Soul Cookbook: Modern Soul Food with Global Flavors, out this week. The Atlanta chef grew up in Kansas City on her mother’s chitlins and stewed okra, canonical soul food dishes born of enslaved Africans in America making do with the ingredients they had. As an adult, she had the chance to travel internationally as a flight attendant—and it was through this experience that she realized there are more similarities than differences between what she ate growing up, and what is still served in homes around the world.
It’s those commonalities that formed the basis for her approach to cooking, her hit Atlanta restaurant, Twisted Soul Cookhouse and Pours which she opened in 2014, and, now, this cookbook. We sat down with VanTrece to talk about her more multicultural approach to soul food (red bean risotto!) and why she hopes that this kind of cooking will get more attention in the culinary world.
Your book is about soul food. How has your definition of soul food changed from when you were growing up in Kansas City to now?
When I was growing up, it was a very simplistic definition—it was the food that Black people eat. 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. Then I started traveling more when I became a flight attendant. I had a roommate out of flight training school whose grandmother lived in Arlington, Texas. 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. 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. 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.
What other examples of soul food from other cultures did you taste when you were a flight attendant?
The real blessing for me was getting to go to people’s homes and just dining [with them] at the drop of the hat—whatever they had on the table was what you were going to eat. In Spain, I had paella at someone’s home, but it was with macaroni noodles instead of rice. In France, I went to people’s homes and realized that having duck confit on a Tuesday was no big deal there. Even a ham and cheese baguette—watching kids walk down the street and eat it. That is all their soul food.
Despite being such a bedrock of cooking, soul food—and Black foodways in general—is not regularly taught about in culinary schools.
In culinary school, you go through regional cuisines of America, you go through cuisines of the world. African American cuisine, you spend a few hours on [in] one day. I had a couple of classes where the teacher would just refer to me, like, “You tell us some stuff about this.” But they couldn’t instruct us on how to prepare it, they couldn’t discuss the history of it, and more importantly, they couldn’t have cared less about it. It was a big void for me, and very disrespectful because I didn’t understand what made traditional African American soul food so disrespected in the culinary community. At the time that I was going through culinary school, southern food became a big deal, but there was never really the understanding of how much influence was from African Americans. It was just all of a sudden a bunch of white guys started cooking this food and they were the experts on it.
How did your travels inspire you to want to break that barrier, and focus on this type of cooking in your professional life?
When I was traveling, I came to understand that a lot of the foods that I grew up with, [which] were looked down upon in the U.S., were gourmet meals in other countries. One of the biggest ones that stood out was chitlins. The first place I saw [them] was a market in Spain, where they were braising and frying them. In France, I discovered them in a sausage. But in the U.S., people will turn their nose up at chitlins. I decided at that point that with traditional soul food, there is a bigger story there, and I am going to do what I can to start telling this story and telling it with pride—realizing the connection between soul food and the South, the connection between traditional soul food and the rest of the world.
I am so inspired by the multiculturalism of dishes in the book—collard green dumplings, Salisbury steak scallopini, meatloaf with sorghum mustard. How are you coming up with these?
I am always comparing the flavors of a dish to things that are familiar to me. Once I try somebody else’s [version of a dish], I think about how those flavor combinations compare to what I already have as my foundation, and then I think about how I can expound on that. For example, one thing I realized from traveling is that everybody’s got green sauces—chimichurri, persillade, chow chow, pistou. They are all a little bit different—you will see acid in some, heat in others—so I came up with the idea of taking green tomatoes and instead of making chow chow, turning them into a chimichurri.
What do you want to tell people about soul food with this book?
I want people to understand that soul food is, in my opinion, rooted in deep tradition. It is rooted in love, it is rooted in heart, it is rooted in family, and it came out of necessity. All over the world, we have to eat. So all over the world you find food that is rooted in that same place. The movement now to be more sustainable and understand whole animal eating and not be so wasteful is a practice that has been going on in other parts of the world and in African American homes for years, and is now becoming mainstream. I want people to see how beautiful [this] cuisine can be.
How do you expand the definition of soul food without losing its roots in Black history?
I have the utmost respect for the teacher, which, for me, is my mother. The food and the story behind it are my motivation and my foundation. It is always important, even when I am putting different things together. When I am talking to younger chefs, I put my culinary vision in words that come from my roots. Everything is based on some humble beginning.
How would you like the conversation around soul food to evolve in the future?
I think as long as the world continues to evolve, food is going to evolve, and soul food will evolve. We just have to learn more about each other, and about the foods that we eat and why. With soul food, and the impact that African American slaves had on the food of the U.S., I do hope that we start to understand that the impact is huge. These are the foods that defined America, and they are real important.