The person behind the recipes
Hi, I’m Angela. I cook soul food in a very British kitchen.
Angela
Founder · Easy Soul Food Recipes · Based in the UK
I’m a home cook based in the UK who fell completely down the soul food rabbit hole a few years ago and never really climbed back out. This blog is where I share everything I’ve learned — recipes, ingredient guides, and all the British substitutes I’ve figured out along the way.
It started with a recipe I had absolutely no business attempting
A few years ago I was scrolling through recipes online — as you do at some unreasonable hour when you should be asleep — and I came across a jambalaya recipe that stopped me completely. Not because it looked simple. It very much did not look simple. But something about it made me want to make it immediately, and that feeling didn’t go away.
I went to the supermarket the next day with a list of ingredients and promptly discovered that about a third of them either didn’t exist in the UK or went by completely different names. Andouille sausage? Not a thing at my local Tesco. File powder? I didn’t even know how to pronounce it, let alone where to find it. I made a version that was probably only loosely related to the original, and it was still one of the best things I’d ever eaten.
That was it. I was gone.
What I didn’t know could fill several cookbooks
The thing nobody tells you about learning to cook soul food as a complete outsider is that there’s a lot of unspoken knowledge baked into every recipe. Instructions that assume you already know what the holy trinity is, or that you’ve grown up eating collard greens and understand instinctively that rushing them is a mistake you only make once.
I made every mistake anyway. I rushed the collard greens. I used the wrong kind of sausage. I made cornbread that came out closer to cake. I once spent an entire afternoon on a gumbo roux that I let burn at the very last minute because I got distracted.
“I’m not from the South. I have no grandmother with a cast iron skillet full of family secrets. What I have is genuine curiosity, a willingness to get things wrong, and a kitchen in the UK where I’ve been slowly figuring this out.”
And that’s actually the point of this blog. Not to pretend I have some authority I don’t have, but to share what I’ve genuinely figured out — including all the British workarounds, the ingredient swaps that actually work, and the things I wish someone had told me before I started.
Why soul food, though?
Honestly? Because it’s some of the most satisfying food I’ve ever eaten. Soul food is cooking that prioritises flavour and comfort above everything else — it came from communities who had very little and turned what they had into something extraordinary. There’s a generosity to it, a richness, that you feel in every bite.
I also think there’s something in the fact that it’s not mainstream here. There are thousands of Italian recipes and endless French techniques available to a British home cook. Soul food is less trodden ground, which means every recipe I learn feels like a genuine discovery. That never gets old.
What you’ll find here
A few things I’ve learned that actually matter
- Most American soul food ingredients have a decent UK substitute — you just have to know what you’re looking for. Smoked sausage does a lot of what andouille does. Double cream is your friend when buttermilk isn’t to hand.
- Low and slow is not a suggestion. Collard greens, ribs, gumbo — the ones that taste best are the ones where you didn’t rush anything. This took me longer to accept than it should have.
- The holy trinity — onion, celery, and green bell pepper — turns up in more soul food and Cajun recipes than you’d believe. Once you understand what it does, a lot of other things click into place.
- Getting things wrong is part of it. The burnt roux, the too-sweet cornbread, the collard greens that still had bite after an hour — I’ve made all of them, and they taught me more than the recipes that worked first time.
Everything on this blog comes from genuinely making these recipes in a British kitchen, working out what to do when the original ingredient isn’t available, and being honest when something didn’t quite land the first time. If you’re also coming to soul food as an outsider — whether you’re British, or just someone who grew up nowhere near the American South — I hope you find this useful.
And if you’re from the South and you’ve somehow ended up here: I have enormous respect for this food and the people who made it what it is. I’m learning, not claiming.
Not sure where to start?
I’ve put together a beginner’s guide covering the basics — what the holy trinity is, the ingredients worth tracking down, and the first few recipes I’d recommend to anyone new to this kind of cooking.
Read the beginner’s guide →