What the pot remembers

Soul food as ancestral practice and wellbeing

There’s a moment in every pot where the greens have given all they can give. The heat has worked its slow magic. What’s left at the bottom is dark, rich and alive. Some folks pour it out and call it water because they do not understand the transformation that just took place. They don’t know they’re throwing away the teacher.

That liquid is called pot likker: the nutrient-rich broth that is left behind after simmering greens, traditionally collards, turnip greens, or mustard greens, with smoked pork like ham hocks or neck bones. It may not look like much, but when greens cook low and slow, their cell walls break down and release vitamins A, C and K, along with iron, calcium and potassium, directly into the water. 

The greens aren’t fading; they’re distilling themselves into the richest, most nutrient-dense essence of the pot, a deep, soulful flavor that carries you back in time with a single bite. Pot likker is the epitome of culture in a pot, everything that was poured into us, simmered down. 

When I cook greens, I am not just feeding people at the table. I am honoring the hands that taught me, the hands that didn’t need measuring cups because they carried the knowledge in their bodies. My hands just know. That is muscle memory and it is ancestral memory.

Black History Month asks us to remember public figures. The kitchen asks us to remember private ones: the grandmothers, the aunties, the cooks whose names may never appear in books but whose practices kept families alive.

Soul food has been misnamed for generations. It has been called heavy, gluttonous,unhealthy, as if our ancestors were cooking for indulgence instead of survival; as if people denied land, wages and access were somehow overeating luxury. They called our food unhealthy while stripping our neighborhoods of grocery stores.

What our ancestors were doing was extracting nourishment from what they were given. Using the neck, the innards, the drippings, that is not desperation. That is alchemy. That is an agricultural intelligence meeting constraint. That is people who understood that the parts others discard often hold the deepest sustenance and flavor.

Before anyone called it “soul food,” before anyone put it on a menu, this was Black ancestral knowledge passed down from generation to generation. It fed the sick. It strengthened nursing mothers. 

It warmed bodies in winters that did not care about plantation lines or public opinion. It traveled through Reconstruction and the Great Migration. It arrived in Northern cities and colder climates and adapted without losing itself.

That is what our food does. It survives.

Cooking greens is not just culinary practice. It is ritual.

You wash each leaf with care. You strip the stems. You layer smoke, heat and time. You do not rush it. You wait. You taste. You adjust. That patience is reverence. That attention is legacy in motion.

The kitchen is not separate from history. It is where history breathes.

Here in Minnesota, when I teach young people how to cook greens, I am not only teaching technique. I am teaching continuity. I am teaching that what was framed as “poor food” but was, in truth, medicine. I am teaching that our bodies still recognize what sustained our bloodlines.

We are literally the ones who made it. Many bloodlines did not survive to pass anything down. So when we simmer greens in February during Black History Month, we are not recreating nostalgia. We are practicing sovereignty. We are honoring people whose names may not be recorded but whose knowledge is still active in our kitchens.

Greens thrive in cold soil. They endure frost. They grow sweeter under pressure. We know something about that.

And when the pot is done, what remains at the bottom is not waste. It is the inheritance. 

This Black History Month, reconsider what you have been taught to discard. Do not pour out the broth. Taste it. Consume the nutrients and feel the healing within.

Let it remind you that strength often settles quietly. That transformation takes time. That legacy is not only spoken in speeches or written in textbooks: It is simmered, stirred, and passed hand to hand.

Potlikker does not announce itself.

It waits.

Be someone who recognizes that.

Chef Lachelle is a transformative force in the Twin Cities food scene, redefining comfort cuisine through global flavors and unapologetic cultural pride.

Since founding Chelles’ Kitchen in 2012 and later leading Breaking Bread Cafe in North Minneapolis as its inaugural executive chef, she has paired culinary excellence with a powerful commitment to community and justice.