Soul Food in Japan, India, and the Middle East?

I may have mentioned in a previous post that the president of the UAB International Student Association and the graduate student association president converged upon my office in October 1990. They were both from India. They had read that I had a background in international relations. My position at UAB did not have direct responsibilities regarding international students, but any student who paid student service fees was a constituent.

We quickly developed a friendship. I hung out at the international house and frequented ISA (now the ISSA) events. One day some of the international students asked, "Bettina, when are you going to take us to a soul food restaurant?"

I had to think about it. My grandparents, mother and five great aunts lived in Alabama. Between their homes and my friends' mothers, I had NEVER eaten soul food at a restaurant. Plus, I lived my first 11 years out of the south so I was accustomed to eating soul food on special occassions and holidays. Sure. There were places that cooked southern food, but not what I call "hardcore" soul food dishes like chitterlings (pronounced chitllins) and other pork scraps, ox tails...My secretary told me to take the students to Family Reunion in West End.

Well, I get lost in Mountain Brook and West End. Birmingham and many surrounding communities are based upon a grid pattern. Those two communities are more complex. I had to get a navigator, my husband, to make sure I did not get lost.

When we got to Family Reunion, I ordered several dishes for the students including: chittlins, ox tails, neck bones, greens, candied yams, okra and I can't remember the rest. My husband and I ordered fish. We started off with a conversation about hot sauce and pepper sauce. One of the students had put pepper sauce on his chitllins and hot sauce on his greens. I would remember this incident when I traveled to Japan and my polite Japanese host family screamed, "no" as I covered my rice with soy sauce. Anyway, we shared that hot sauce was for the meat and pepper sauce for the greens.

Eventually, the students noticed that my husband and I were eating fish. They asked why we weren't eating the items we had ordered for them. I shared that I wasn't sure if they would like soul food so I didn't want to ask my relatives to cook for us due to the fact that most of the foods are labor intensive. However, both my husband and I were raised not to eat certain foods out unless we knew the cook and the condition of the kitchen. However, I didn't want to disappoint them and I had gotten really good references on this particular restaurant.

It didn't seem to matter to my Indian, Japanese, Middle Eastern and Western European students. They were excited to be in a predominately African American city and actually learning about African American culture. They also found commonalities. The Indian students taught me about bhindi masala (an okra based dish) and a Japanese student taught me about fried pig intestines. From that point on, the students made regular trips to Family Reunion.