Adrian Miller, Soul Food, and the Receipts Behind Barbecue

Who Miller is

Adrian Miller is a lawyer, a James Beard winner, and the closest thing American food has to a court historian on Black contributions to the table. Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time (2013) and Black Smoke: African Americans and the United States of Barbecue (2021) are his two main books.

What Soul Food does

The book traces a dozen canonical "soul food" dishes — fried chicken, collard greens, hoppin' John, sweet potato pie, chitterlings, mac and cheese, candied yams, cornbread, hot sauce, watermelon, ham, red drinks — and asks where each one actually comes from.

Most answers are not what the food-media version implies. Mac and cheese, for instance, has a documented line through James Hemings, Thomas Jefferson's enslaved chef, who trained in France and brought the pasta-and-cheese gratin technique to Monticello. Miller names Hemings. He names the kitchen. He names the cook who almost certainly cooked it in Jefferson's house.

What Black Smoke does

American barbecue media — the magazine spreads, the pitmaster TV shows — disproportionately centers white pitmasters in Texas and the Carolinas. Miller's Black Smoke documents the Black pitmasters whose work is the basis of the entire tradition, naming generations who got written out.

The book is structured as biography. Each chapter centers a person. The cumulative effect is that you cannot read American barbecue history the old way after finishing it.

How to use the books

If you cook American food at all, Soul Food is closer to required reading than optional. Keep it next to the cookbook shelf, not the history shelf. When you make collards, look up his chapter on collards. When you fry chicken, look up his chapter on fried chicken.

Black Smoke is the one to read if you're getting into barbecue. Before you buy a smoker, before you write a brisket post, read Miller.

Related

• Stephen Satterfield's podcast Point of Origin covers a lot of the same ground in conversation form.
• Michael Twitty's The Cooking Gene is the memoir-genealogy alongside Miller's history-as-history.

Why Miller's method matters

Adrian Miller is one of the few American food historians who treats
attribution as a discipline rather than an ornament. His method:
trace each dish back through the documentary record (cookbooks,
account ledgers, plantation diaries, federal slave narratives from
the 1930s WPA project), name every cook he can identify, and
include the citations in the footnotes.

The discipline matters because food media tends toward soft
attribution. "This dish has Southern roots" is a sentence that
hides whose Southern; "this dish was cooked by Lucinda, enslaved
at Monticello, who learned it from her mother" is a sentence that
takes work to write but that reorganizes the entire history.

The Black Smoke argument in more detail

Black Smoke (2021) is the more recent of Miller's two main books.
The argument: American barbecue is a Black tradition that was
gradually retold as a white Texan tradition over the 20th century.
The mechanism was the same as the cookbook mechanism in
Tipton-Martin's work: Black pitmasters cooked at restaurants and
roadside stands across the South for generations; food media
profiled white pitmasters in the post-WWII era; the standard
American barbecue narrative crystallized around the latter.

Miller restores names: Henry Perry (Kansas City), the Williams
family (Memphis), generations of pitmasters in the Carolinas
whose work shaped the regional sauces and techniques that now
get credited to white "originators."

The Soul Food argument

Soul Food (2013) walks through 12 canonical dishes — fried
chicken, collards, sweet potato pie, mac and cheese, candied
yams, cornbread, hot sauce, ham, watermelon, chitterlings, red
drinks, hoppin' John — and asks where each came from. The
findings reorganize the standard "soul food origin" story:

• Mac and cheese. Documented through James Hemings, Jefferson's
  enslaved chef trained in Paris. The dish is French in technique,
  American in introduction via Hemings.
• Fried chicken. The brine-and-fry technique traces through
  West African palm-oil frying via the Lowcountry rice plantations.
• Watermelon. Originally African; brought across the Atlantic
  and grown extensively by enslaved gardeners.
• Hot sauce. The American hot-sauce tradition has West African
  roots in pepper-and-vinegar condiments brought into the South
  during the slave trade.

The cumulative effect is similar to Twitty's Cooking Gene: once
you have read it, you cannot read American cooking history the
same way.

Where Miller is being extended

Miller has been one of the most-cited contemporary American
food historians; his work is now standard reference in graduate
food-studies programs. The extensions:

• Chefs like BJ Dennis and Pierre Thiam draw on Miller for
  attribution language on their menus.
• Whetstone Magazine and Cherry Bombe podcasts cite Miller
  routinely in episodes on American food history.
• Cookbook editorial standards at major publishers have begun
  requiring African-origin attribution as default for dishes with
  documented African lineage — a shift Miller helped drive.

How to use the books

Both Soul Food and Black Smoke are reference texts. Keep them
on the cookbook shelf, not the history shelf. When you cook a
dish with American Black lineage, look up the chapter on it,
read the documented history, then cook. The attribution that
comes out of your mouth at the table will be different from the
attribution that would have come out without the reading.

Further reading

• Michael W. Twitty, The Cooking Gene (2017).
• Toni Tipton-Martin, The Jemima Code (2015) and Jubilee (2019).
• Jessica B. Harris, High on the Hog (2011).
• Stephen Satterfield's podcast Point of Origin — covers similar
  ground in interview form.
• Bryant Terry (ed.), Black Food (2021).

Miller is the historian of record on American Black food. Read
him before the next time you fry a chicken.