Photographs by Caitlin Abrams
Chef Lachelle Cunningham
What is the quintessential Minneapolis or St. Paul soul food? Other cities can answer without thinking. It’s hot chicken in Nashville, shrimp and rice in Charleston, pork barbecue in most of America’s South. If you wanted to search for the great soul food of St. Paul, you would probably want to start in the African-American Rondo neighborhood. In the early 1950s, about 85 percent of St. Paul’s African-American community lay in Rondo, along with most of its small businesses. Then the state bought or seized much of the land to build Interstate 94. When the Minneapolis-St. Paul route opened in 1967, the old Rondo ceased to exist.
“What were the restaurants in Rondo?” Lachelle Cunningham said when we met at Breaking Bread Café, her north Minneapolis restaurant. “That’s what I’d like to know. That’s what everyone would like to know.”
Cunningham, 36, is the dynamo at the center of the Twin Cities’ African-American food scene. She’s chef for both Breaking Bread and Kindred Kitchen, a commercial kitchen and business incubator. Both initiatives stem from her work at Appetite for Change, a food-justice and social-entrepreneurship organization, which also runs the North Side farmers’ market. Away from work, Cunningham helps other African-American food pros with real estate or business connections through the Onyx Culinary Collective, a networking group she founded. For example, she has advised Gerard Klass of the pop-up Soul Bowl. And Cunningham consulted with the owners of the new black-owned restaurant—tentatively called Lola’s Cafe—opening in the former Tin Fish spot on Lake Calhoun/Bde Maka Ska.
Rondo’s food isn’t just a historical mystery to Cunningham. It’s a personal, family mystery, too. Cunningham’s mother came from an old Rondo family that still recalls when African Americans harvested wild rice within the city limits. Her father, Gary Cunningham, now married to former mayor Betsy Hodges and head of the Metropolitan Economic Development Association, comes from an old north Minneapolis family that traces its lineage to the Creek Freedmen. These were the enslaved Africans who walked the Trail of Tears with their Native American Creek masters. (The Creek had sided with the Confederacy and the slaves won emancipation at the end of the war.) If anyone, through heritage and work, could name the definitive Minnesota soul food, it ought to be Lachelle Cunningham.
And yet, that cuisine wasn’t the food of her childhood. At her dad’s house, she tried her hand with a fresh-pasta roller, and he taught her to make a pan-seared chicken breast with a nice green salad. At her grandmother’s house, where she spent most of her summers, she spooned up her grandma’s soups. A latchkey kid prone to kitchen experiments, she executed some big flops (a cotto salami and water soup) and some big wins (somehow, she taught herself Escoffier’s traditional French custard preparation for her banana-custard pie.)
Cunningham’s professional life as a chef began non-traditionally. First, she worked as an admin at places like Thrivent and United Way, paying her way through school and supporting herself as a young mother. Then she became an admin who hosted department potlucks that became famous throughout the company. Next, she headed up department parties and events. After being downsized, she tapped her severance package to pay her way through culinary school and launch a catering company—catering events for departments like the ones she’d just left.
Chef Lachelle Cunningham in Breaking Bread Kitchen
This whole time that Cunningham spent getting her food career off the ground, she remained haunted by the specter of this idea of Minnesota soul food. Clients kept asking for it, without any particular idea what it was. For some it was mac ’n’ cheese, for others it was bacon-wrapped jalapeño poppers. Cunningham invented a coconut cornbread that is delicious, and everyone seemed happy.
“Soul food, Southern food, it all came from one thing: the hands of the slaves that made it,” she explained when we met in her packed café. We sat near a painting of Barack Obama dressed as Superman, replete with cape, his arm draped around Michelle Obama wearing the stars and gold of Wonder Woman. “Before the 1960s, there was no ‘soul food.’ It became ‘soul food’ in the 1960s at the same time soul music got its name. Black food before that was what you would eat on a plantation. It was slave food: what was left or what you were allowed to eat, and then what commodity food you could afford sharecropping.”
She continued, “The earlier foods, foraged foods, healing and medicinal foods, West African foods, homegrown produce—they got left out of what people call ‘soul food.’ So what I see now is, ‘soul food’ boxes people in. It’s a narrative we need to change.”
“Foraged foods, healing and medicinal foods, West African foods, homegrown produce—they got left out of what people call ‘soul food.’”
- Chef Lachelle Cunningham
Instead, Cunningham changed the narrative by calling what she cooked “globally inspired comfort food,” then “soulful American fusion,” and, most lately, “soulful American cuisine.” She’s still finding her way to it. Though a pretty good example might be the black pea fritters she occasionally serves at Breaking Bread. It’s a high-fiber vegetarian dish, for one thing. Eating a plant-based diet, she believes, might do something to reverse the enormous health disparities that African Americans experience in the Twin Cities. The black community sees markedly higher rates of diabetes, obesity, and heart disease than their white counterparts. Black-eyed peas also are a food with a deep heritage in the African-American kitchen. Eaten for good luck on New Year’s, they originally came to North America as the provisions and seed stock of West African rice farmers who were captured, enslaved, and shipped across the Atlantic.
Cunningham serves the peas with a bright green cilantro and spicy tomato dipping sauce. Because it’s the year 2018, and that’s what a modern, herb-rich hot sauce by a good chef looks like. “I call them the ancestral hush puppy,” she said, contemplating the golf ball–sized puff with satisfaction.
“For black Americans, there’s a major identity crisis in food,” Cunningham explained. “There’s a culture that was stolen, through slavery and other systemic things like Jim Crow and redlining. And so we lost identity so many times. We end up gravitating towards black, which is a color, not a culture. A lot of Minnesotans can say, ‘I’m Irish,’ or, ‘I’m Mexican.’ When you say, ‘I’m African American,’ it really refers to the South a lot of the time, without saying so.”
But Lachelle Cunningham does not come from the South, or at least not recently. Her ancestry is global: mainly African, Filipino, Irish, Native American, and Caribbean. This global, outward-looking chef exists alongside a historically rooted community leader. Cunningham thinks a lot these days about a hero of hers. “The personal connection I have with Harriet Tubman, it runs deep,” she explained, with the particular look of self-amused passion she gets, with one eyebrow cocked and the other lowered, like Sherlock Holmes leading Dr. Watson on a most surprising journey.
“She was maimed as a child; I had some birth complications and had to wear a cast on my foot pretty much till I was 7. Then I chose a career where I’d be on my feet all day. She was a naturalist, she was deeply knowledgeable about nature and her whole ecosystem. She was a navigator. Think about what she knew about plants, using moss to tell direction, and foraging food and medicine for herself and the people she rescued. She was the great liberator. I want to liberate African-American communities from the health disparities and economic disparities of unhealthy food.”
Cunningham has two sons, now 11 and 14, and when they grow up and look back on Minnesota soul food, she’s pretty sure this is what they’ll recall: ancestral hush puppies, her vegan collard greens, medicinal teas, and the brilliant red hibiscus tea she serves in place of Kool-Aid.
Cunningham asked me a final question: Did I know that hibiscus, the red flower used for tea, also came to the New World with enslaved Africans, who distributed the plant throughout the Caribbean, sugar plantation by sugar plantation? I told her I had no idea. I’d always assumed it came from the Caribbean, as it’s often called “Jamaica.” How could something named “Jamaica” not come from Jamaica? She explained that not only is hibiscus African, it’s also an antioxidant-rich super food, probably brought over as part of a West African medicine bag.
That makes a pretty good case, I said, for it becoming a new Minnesota soul food, or Minnesota soulful food. It certainly gives it a historical edge over Kool-Aid.
“That’s what I am saying!” Cunningham exclaimed, with the exultant air of someone who has led another person onto the right path.
