20 Soul Food Meals Every Black Senior Can Make for Under $20 a Week

In the winter of 1938, my grandmother Odessa fed seven people for a week on a dollar and ten cents in Sunflower County, Mississippi. One pot. One skillet. A sack of meal. These are twenty of her suppers — the ones that quietly disappeared when a box on a shelf got easier than a lesson passed down. Neck bones and rice. Hot water cornbread. Greens and the potlikker everybody pours down the drain. Cornbread crumbled in a glass of cold buttermilk. Nobody came and took the pot away. We just stopped passing down the knowing. If you're cooking for one tonight and the grocery bill has turned cruel, pull up a chair. The pot's already on the stove. I'm not selling you fear and I'm not your doctor — talk to them about the salt and the sugar. Some weeks these will run more than twenty dollars, because I don't run the grocery store. The old prices come from the journal and from memory. Keep the old ways.