soul food
7
3.7
- noun
- /soʊl fuːd/
- US
:
comida soul
- The restaurant specializes in soul food, featuring dishes like fried chicken and collard greens.
- soul food restaurant
- soul food cuisine
- soul food cooking
There's like soul food, Southern cooking restaurants on every single corner, right?
- There's like soul food, Southern cooking restaurants on every single corner, right?
- Denny's can't put soul food on the side because they ain't what you fitting to get.
Examples
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I had a really big family, so we ate what money could buy, all the ingredients for soul food.
Blog text (14) -
For dinner that night, I served up fried squirrel and waffles, my play on the old Southern soul food dish.
Blog text (14) -
Or I can cook, like, soul food.
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- But I love the soul food.
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I think they provided the music and soul food.
Blog text (29) -
There's no food like soul food,
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I was gonna try to cook some authentic soul food... but then I got afraid it wouldn't turn out all right.
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He opened a soul food restaurant with his old lady on Maxwell Street.
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"Soul food" has become commonplace in American cities, especially in the industrial Midwest.
Academic text (1999) -
We found a soul food restaurant in Selma and the food was good—the people there reminded us of our life in China, where everyone seems to stare at us like we are aliens.
Blog text (26)
How Comforting
Surface Forms
Morphology
The parts 'soul' + 'food' transparently signal food connected to 'soul' (i.e., emotional/cultural or music-related connotations), so a B1 learner could guess it denotes a particular kind of food. However, the expression refers to a culturally specific African‑American Southern cuisine whose precise social and historical meaning is not fully predictable from the constituents alone, so it is only partially transparent.
Etymology
Soul food may come from the word soul, used to mean 'spirit' and Black culture, and food for the warm, home-cooked meals that fed families and gave comfort. That's why soul food today means the traditional, hearty cooking of Black communities in the US South.