Martin Luther King at the table

In the African American South, the big meal is on Sunday, after church. It is not organized as starter-main-dessert but as a generous table set all at once: a star meat dish, a host of simmered vegetables and sides (the fixin's), cornbread, and a sweet dessert, all accompanied by an iced drink. You serve yourself, pass the dishes, and the table extends the fellowship of the church. This is "soul food": a cuisine born from the resourcefulness of freed slaves, transformed into an art of sharing.

Cornerstone of soul food: a smoked and salted pork piece that is long-simmered in the water of green vegetables. It infuses smoky depth and umami into a whole dish with very little meat — a direct legacy of the economy of making do, where maximum flavor was extracted from lowly cuts.