The food most Americans identify as distinctly American — barbecue, gumbo, jambalaya, collard greens, cornbread, fried chicken, black-eyed peas, rice dishes — has roots that run through Africa and through the hands of enslaved people who made those ingredients and techniques the foundation of American cooking. Okra arrived in America with enslaved Africans who had grown and eaten it in West and Central Africa; it became the defining ingredient in gumbo, which itself is an adaptation of West African stew traditions. Jambalaya shares a structure with Jolof rice, the West African rice and meat dish that remains central to Senegalese and Ghanaian cooking. The peanut — called a 'goober' from the Kikongo word 'nguba' — was brought by enslaved Africans and became one of the American South's most economically significant crops. The routes of the transatlantic slave trade are also the routes of American food culture.

Hercules was an enslaved man who served as George Washington's personal chef in Philadelphia, where Washington was required by Pennsylvania law to rotate his enslaved workers back to Virginia every six months to prevent them from legally petitioning for freedom. Washington complied — including with Hercules, who had become one of the most skilled and technically accomplished cooks in early America. Visitors to Washington's table wrote descriptions of the food with the same reverence typically reserved for the finest European dining. Hercules escaped in 1797. James Hemings was enslaved by Thomas Jefferson and accompanied him to Paris, where Jefferson — who was there as U.S. Minister to France — had Hemings trained in French cuisine. Hemings became the first American to learn classical French cooking technique. He brought it back to Monticello. He was legally freed in 1796 on the condition that he teach his cooking techniques to another enslaved person. He died in 1801. Jefferson never publicly credited him for the food Monticello was famous for.

After emancipation, newly freed Black Americans who entered the workforce legally found that cooking was one of the few occupations available to them. They worked as cooks, caterers, and domestic workers — often for wealthy white families — and their culinary skills built those families' social reputations. The Pullman porters who served on railroad dining cars from the 1860s onward were largely Black, and the dining car experience — considered a luxury marker of American rail travel — was built on Black labor and Black culinary skill. Thomas Downing, a free Black man, ran the most celebrated oyster cellar in 19th-century New York, catering to the city's elite and building significant wealth. His name is not in most histories of New York food culture.

The term 'soul food' emerged in the 1960s as Black Americans explicitly claimed ownership of a culinary tradition that had long been credited to white Southern cooking. The dishes — chitlins, pig's feet, black-eyed peas, collard greens, cornbread, yams, fried chicken — had origins in the resourcefulness of enslaved people who were given the parts of animals and crops that enslavers didn't want. They transformed those ingredients into food with complex flavor, technique, and cultural meaning. Soul food restaurants in Northern cities during and after the Great Migration became community anchors — places where Black Americans could eat food that tasted like home, that connected them to their Southern roots, and that were insulated from segregation's reach. The Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture opened the Sweet Home Café in 2016 specifically to honor and contextualize this tradition at a national institutional level.

Michael Twitty's 2017 book The Cooking Gene is the most comprehensive recent account of what is owed and what has been obscured. Twitty, a culinary historian and chef, retraced the Southern cooking landscape while simultaneously researching his own genealogy — he is descended from enslaved people, from enslavers, and from Native Americans — and documented the specific West African culinary traditions that became American food. His conclusion is direct: American food culture, particularly Southern food, is African American food culture, and the credit line has been systematically redirected away from its origins. Edna Lewis, who died in 2006, was the first Black chef to be credited in mainstream food media with building the canon of American Southern cooking — and she received that credit in the 1970s, more than a century after the food she was cooking had been developed.