In any household, the kitchen and the meals produced there form as much of its foundation as bricks and mortar. With our return home for the holidays imminent, this could not ring more true – the prospect of a home-cooked meal is an exciting one, and I for one will not miss College catering. When I think of home, I am reminded of the sense of place and inclusion more than the physical attributes of the suburban semi my bank statements are sent to. This inclusion often revolves around meals, and it may seem sickeningly twee to think of the concept of home as being centred on food rather than the place in question. However, throughout culinary history, food has been a lynchpin of belonging and identity in otherwise cold surroundings.

For many in the nineteenth and twentiethth centuries, the American Deep South was far from a welcoming place. Even after the passage of the thirteenth amendment, the legacy of slavery left an underclass of hundreds of thousands of black people who had systematically been denied their cultural heritage. Much modern African-American cuisine owes its roots to the harsh times when the kitchen provided what little was available - dishes such as turnip greens, hog jowls and pig’s feet all feature leftovers from the plantation owner’s table. Okra, a small vegetable in the mallow family, was supposedly smuggled over from Africa as seed caches in the ears of slaves and, despite resistance, became the signature ingredient in Louisiana Gumbo. Elements of Native American cuisine, the food of another dispossessed people, were also incorporated along with the saturated fats required by hard toil. Yet food is not merely fuel; these scraps were eventually transformed into staples of cultural identity. The laborious undertaking of putting heart and soul into dinner created dishes that persist to this day and transcend the boundaries that created them. It is telling that fried chicken, born from slavery and segregation, is now marketed worldwide under the smiling gaze of a bearded white gentleman.

Whilst soul food dealt with the necessities of hard labour, other ‘nomad’ cuisines have evolved to incorporate religious obligations. Jewish cuisine emerged through the lengthy travels of the Jewish diaspora. One of the major obstacles for a Jewish cook in medieval and renaissance Europe, aside from segregation and forced expulsion, was the ubiquity of pork products in the kitchens of the time. This forced it to develop separately from other European cuisines. The search for an alternative cooking fat by French Jews through the fattening of geese produced foie gras as a by-product which was in turn adopted by French high society. Such an exchange of culinary ideas was far from a one-way street, with modern dishes such as perogi, borsht, kreplach and even bagels having been adopted by Ashkenazi Jews from Polish and Russian kitchens. Celebratory foods, however, developed in complete isolation due to the divergent religious holidays of Christian and Jewish traditions - challah, fried latkes and matzo ball soup are as much emblems of Jewish culture as they are of cuisine.

Jamaican food was, for many Britons, the first taste of the ‘exotic’ alongside Indian food, following the influx of immigrants in the 1950s and 60s. Scotch Bonnets, allspice, fried plantains and callaloo would have seemed utterly alien to the British palate, yet have more familiar roots. Jamaican patties are a corruption of Cornish pasties and their forbearers. In many ways, Jamaican cuisine is as much a pidgin as the creole patois spoken on the trading crossroads. It rapidly incorporate influences from Indian and Chinese labourers with British, African and Native Arawak cooking alongside the rice, beans and salt fish typical of slave rations. The middle of the century saw imports of Afro-Caribbean and Indian food to Britain, demonstrating the importance of food as something that provides a sense of home in a foreign land; it becomes a centrepiece of cultural identity. The fact that these dishes have been embraced by the very communities who were originally hostile is a testament to the skill of the Jamaican and Bengali cooks.

Food is much more than the calories it contains, and the necessity and frequency of meals have marked them out as discrete units of cultural inheritance. With so much time devoted to its preparation and consumption, it seems only natural that it should be part of who we are. It can be easy to forget that food has history and importance, both within our lives and beyond them. The act of creating a dish for another person who you love, for no financial reparation, is the very definition of home and it is of no surprise that soul food is most prevalent amongst those who have been denied a place to call their own. Houses are buildings, yet homes are much more - they are family, memory and belonging.