Drum Head Soup

Abstract

This chapter examines drum head soup, a variation on fish chowder prepared from the bones and head – and favoured in many African American households. Cuisine is experience and emotion, embodiment and immediacy, custom and invention, destiny and storytelling. It manifests itself in a constantly evolving style and synthesis of ingredients, recipes, preparations, and eating, from fancy holiday meals to workday lunches. When people speak about cuisine, they speak about themselves and the pleasures of the table and the company they keep. Cuisine not only entails the distinct flavors of place (terroir) but also evokes how place “flavors” people, speech, foodways, and the multitude of objects and actions that constitute the local.