Soul Fusion Natchez

At the Natchez Heritage School of Cooking, Chef and Founder Jarita Frazier-King is building community around food

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The signature dish of Natchez chef and community activist Jarita Frazier-King—black eyed pea and collard green fritters topped with a sweet and spicy chili sauce—contains much more than its pan-fried cornmeal contents. It’s also a story, a memory, resilience and struggle.

Southern soul food is built on dishes like this, what Frazier-King describes as “hard times food,” cheap and filling and borne out of necessity and her ancestors’ ingenuity. Through the Natchez Heritage School of Cooking, which Frazier-King founded in 2017, she shares the story of a place and her own within it, providing layered and little-known historical context on the origins of traditional Southern foodways. Frazier-King focuses on the African diaspora, including the enslaved people who worked on the plantations in Natchez and throughout the South, which is inextricably tied to her own family history. “We teach people about the roots and history of soul food dishes, particularly what we call ‘classic cuts’ of soul food,” said Frazier-King, “and how the African Americans and Native Americans influenced most of the food that we eat here in the South, the same food we eat today.” This cuisine is known for its down-home authenticity, generational legacy, and above all, objective classification as “comfort food,” and beloved for all the same reasons.

“We teach people about the roots and history of soul food dishes, particularly what we call ‘classic cuts’ of soul food,'” said Frazier-King, “and how the African Americans and Native Americans influenced most of the food that we eat here in the South, the same food we eat today.”

Frazier-King was raised in the kitchen, having spent the majority of her formative years watching her mother and grandmother cook for anyone and everyone who came through their front door—learning the ways in which feeding people was its own kind of love language. When her time came, she would prepare food in just the same way. Her grandmother, Beulah Fitzgerald, was born one of fourteen children, so Frazier-King grew up around a dinner table crowded with cousins. “I’ve been standing up on a stool cooking since I was five years old,” she said. Frazier-King’s family roots run deep in Natchez, the oldest documented settlement on the Mississippi River. An eighth-generation Natchez matriarch, the mother of three can trace her lineage all the way back to the original union that spurred countless Creole descendants. In fact, Frazier-King’s family tree is on display at the Natchez Museum of African American History and Culture. The museum preserves the cultural and historical contributions of African Americans to the growth of Natchez, from its inception to present day.

[Read about Managing Editor Jordan LaHaye Fontenot's first trip to Natchez here.]

“I like to say, it’s like stories on a plate, because it’s a more meaningful experience,” said Frazier-King. “I want everybody to share the same experience I had growing up whenever they come here.” The heritage school is wholly a family endeavor—Frazier-King works almost exclusively with immediate and extended family members to help put on the week’s workshops and heritage tours, fulfill catering orders for private events, and serve local customers at their burgeoning pop-up restaurant, Soul Food Fusion Natchez.

“I like to say, it’s like stories on a plate, because it’s a more meaningful experience,” said Frazier-King. “I want everybody to share the same experience I had growing up whenever they come here.”

Upon earning both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Alcorn State, the historically Black university in nearby Lorman, Mississippi, Frazier-King went back to work for her alma mater managing its community outreach nutrition program. While visiting dozens of counties across the state, she would strike up conversations with community elders and church women about how they prepared their own recipes. She realized the health issues in Mississippi aren’t about the ways that we eat; they’re about the ways that we prepare our food. The heritage school was the result of digging deeper into her inheritance, asking why we do things a certain way, how certain dishes came to occupy a place on their table. “It was difficult for them to modify those meals. And it was because that’s all that they knew, that’s the way they were taught and that’s the way it’s always been done. I realized that was a part of our culture. So I said, you don’t have to just treat them for the health component of it, we had to treat the culture.”

To Frazier-King, the solution seemed obvious; it’s the reason why her heritage cooking classes follow a nontraditional format: storytelling. Through a series of sample dishes and demonstrations followed by a sit-down meal, she tells the story of Southern and African-American food, along with her family’s own African-American and Native American culinary heritage. She traces the oral history of foods like black-eyed peas and collard greens, corn bread, and red beans from the motherland to the mainland, and examines how they became staples of what is considered classic Southern cuisine, and how that differs from their historical use in Black kitchens. Frazier-King concludes the class by sending each participant home with a wooden spoon and an endearing request—to pass down their own traditions.

[Read about Tate Taylor's efforts to develop Natchez as a premiere film destination here.]

The Soul Food Fusion Festival grew out of this philosophy, of strengthening community around Mississippi’s culinary traditions and their Black origins. Frazier-King organized the inaugural festival in 2019 to provide a culinary and cultural experience that celebrates the culinary heritage of Natchez, the origins of traditional soul food, and the Bluff City’s rich diversity. Held in downtown Natchez, the festival invites people from all walks of life to sit and dine together at a block-long white linen communal table. This year’s festivities will take place on June 17–19, with three distinct events–Blues, Brews, and BBQ; White Linen Night; and Lazy Magnolia Brunch. Proceeds from the festival benefit the Southwest Wellness Association of Mississippi, which Frazier-King founded in 2018. The nonprofit organization focuses on community health outreach and economic resource development, and provides meals to seniors in need, as well as community wellness checks and food safety and hospitality training to at-risk youth, re-entry adults, and recovering addicts—helping them secure positions in the workforce.

The Soul Food Fusion Fest and Heritage School of Cooking, along with the occasional catering gig, are under the Soul Fusion Natchez umbrella, which Frazier-King has recently expanded to include a patio bar and grill. Soul Fusion Natchez operates out of the same building as her cooking classes, open for dinner and late nights on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

It’s not just the Natchez community which has noticed the impact of Frazier-King’s efforts. She has been recognized by the James Beard Foundation for her vision of uniting Mississippians through food, as well as the Museum of Food and Drink in New York City, where she was selected to be part of the museum’s Legacy Quilt Project, a facet of its current exhibition African/American: Making the Nation’s Table, which explores the impact of African American contributions to America’s culinary identity. Frazier-King was also part of a short documentary film produced by Southern Foodway Alliances, Soul of the Kitchen, which takes the viewer into the kitchens of three generations of Black women in Natchez amid preparations for the annual Juneteenth celebration. 

Keep up with Frazier-King’s projects and upcoming programming through the Natchez Heritage School of Cooking on Facebook. And find tickets to the 2022 Soul Food Fusion Festival at bontempstix.com.