Soul Food Love

Healthy Recipes Inspired by One Hundred Years of Cooking in a Black Family

Soul Food Love is a family history as much as it is a cookbook, and it intrigued me to learn more about soul food cuisine. Mother/daughter authors Alice Randall and Caroline Randall Williams share what “the strong black kitchen looks like in the twenty-first century” though this book that is both a tribute to the past and a marriage of the past with the present in the recipes from their family.

In my southern roots, much of our family life revolves around food. Sunday dinners, family buffets, and picnics. We gather to eat for funerals, weddings, and baby showers. Family birthday dinners are a cause for celebration, and food is the center of family life. I can relate to so many parts of Soul Food Love and have seen similar traditions passed down from great grandmother to grandmother to mother to daughter in my own family.

Alice Randall and Caroline Randall Williams acknowledge the beauty and importance of the family table, but they also acknowledge that there is a need to rethink the legacy of battered and fried and recreate the recipes so lovingly passed down. Soul Food Love contains healthy versions of familiar comfort foods that are accessible, affordable, and still delicious. And, they promise that you don’t have to have access to a gourmet market to recreate them.

Some of my favorites include Chicken Roasted with Lemon and Onion, Spicy Pepper Chicken, Broccoli with Peanuts and Raisins, Fiery Green Beans, and Chocolate Communion. Many of the recipes feature full page photographs, and the commentary that accompanies each recipe is priceless. Soul Food Love is as much fun and as meaningful to read as it is to cook from.

The publisher provided a review copy of Soul Food Love.