Author: Craig LaBan

The parade of soup bowls that perfumed the air of chef Shola Olunloyo’s South Philadelphia home kitchen with spice and heady broth could not have been more different. A buttery brown stew enriched with veal and bacon. An ethereal orange purée of squash that harbored habanero heat and delicate shellfish. A modernist collage of deconstructed elements — oxtail, pork belly, and frilly tripe dabbed with a gingery green mince of Caribbean herbs — artfully posed over a shallow splash of dark broth. But each one answered to the same name: pepper pot.

“Pepper pot! Smoking hot!”

So went the chant of the colonial-era vendors whose pepper pot cauldrons simmered on street corners across Philadelphia, America’s first capital city, with a “pleasant feast” made from an improvised variety of inexpensive cuts of meats, often including ox foot, tripe, and “a great portion of spice.” This iconic soup, largely produced by Black women from the West Indies, was immortalized as a city staple in an early 19th-century booklet chronicling the street cries of Philadelphia, a painting of an 1811 market scene painting by John Lewis Krimmel that hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and, more than 150 years later, Andy Warhol’s Pop Art series of Campbell’s soup can prints.

Over time, pepper pot evolved into a broad diversity of styles, hinted at by the starkly different interpretations on the table at Olunloyo’s home. Olunloyo, a culinary consultant and the chef of Studio Kitchen, had gathered a small group of Black chefs there for a pepper pot summit — to taste and compare recipes, reflect on its legacy, and, perhaps, spark a local resurgence.

“I was excited to learn that Philadelphia had a distinct dish that was not just cheesesteaks or pretzels, and to be a part of understanding what cemented Philadelphia’s culinary reputation,” says chef Omar Tate, who served us a test run of a pepper pot he plans to add to the menu at Honeysuckle this fall.

Chef Chad Williams, who was unable to attend the June gathering, is planning to serve a version of pepper pot on the tasting menu soon at his Michelin-starred Friday Saturday Sunday. He’s starting his process with the flavor memories of a pepper pot his grandpa Chester once made in West Philadelphia, along with other variations Williams cooked earlier in his career, then “working our way backwards.”

“We’ve got to put it on restaurant menus again because if we don’t cook it, it dies,” says Angela Brown, a private chef and former culinary director for Rex at the Royal, who led off the lunchtime event with a hearty rendition of the dish she learned from her great-grandmother. “This new generation of cooks doesn’t know anything about pepper pot, so it’s nice to bring it back.” (The meal was also documented for radio by NPR reporter Justin Kramon for WHYY’s The Pulse.)

The rise and fall of pepper pot

The effort can’t come soon enough. In 2026, pepper pot as we once knew it has become nearly extinct. Campbell’s stopped producing it in 2010, coinciding with a dwindling appetite for tripe. History-minded chef Adam Diltz still produces it occasionally at Elwood. There have been efforts by local food historians and home cooks to keep its memory alive. The last local restaurant to regularly serve pepper pot was City Tavern (although chef Walter Staib’s West Indies version was without tripe), before the replica of the historic tavern closed in 2020.

The timing of this pepper pot party is not a coincidence. Reflections on history have been at the forefront of this year’s celebration of America’s 250th anniversary. Food historian William Woys Weaver, among the tasters at Olunloyo’s house, argues in his forthcoming Pepperpot City that no proto-Philadephia dish may be as meaningful — or elusive — to grasp.

Weaver unearths a stunning array of pepper pots in the book, due out in October, from the humblest market-stall versions to those ladled from the gilded tureens of society’s hautest tables: There are myriad variations of meats, seafood, seasonal produce, dumplings, and numerous cultural influences. The breadth of iterations makes it impossible to define Philadelphia’s pepper pot as one specific thing, aside from the inclusion of tripe (usually, but not always) and the presence of spice. It was a way of life and cooking more than a particular bowl of soup.

“What’s pepper pot? It’s whatever you had there right in front of you,” says Weaver. “These chefs did not live by written recipes, but oral traditions they learned from a mentor. That’s why there were so many different kinds. Each person cooked from their soul.”

The ever-morphing nature of the soup became emblematic of colonial Philadelphia as a focal point for the New World melting pot, he says, where the confluence of Black, white, and Creole foodways began to define this newly founded country’s culinary personality.

“The City of Brotherly Love helped create a singular identity that helped shape what we know today as American cuisine,” writes Weaver. “Especially when winnowed through the hands of Black cooks.”

Diverse foodways, all in one dish

Philadelphia’s pepper pot shares Afro-Caribbean roots with a number of soups that go by the same name in the Caribbean and South America, although they’re distinctly different, since many are flavored with the caramelized cassava juice known as cassareep. It is also cousins with the callaloos and pepper soups of West Africa, as well as New Orleans gumbo and Haitian soup joumou. Pepper pot reflects Philadelphia’s unique status as a haven for free Black communities who had access to the tropical foodstuffs — allspice, habaneros, sea turtles, and pumpkins — arriving at its vibrant port on ships that also supplied the West Indies slave trade.

For this reason, many, including Weaver and food historian Jessica B. Harris, have come to regard early Philadelphia as the northernmost Creole city.

“Nowhere is this connection more apparent than in Philadelphia’s pepperpot soup,” Harris writes in her book Beyond Gumbo. In a recent interview, she elaborated: “You’ve got a port bringing foods from other places and people also who are coming in from all over, enslaved and free. This kind of urban polyglot mix — that is the matrix of Philadelphia. And then you start getting their food. You know women of West Indian origin are going to make use of their skills and call on their memories to make something palatable to the people in this new place. All those things come together in pepper pot.”

That lineage was especially resonant for Angela Brown, whose deeply flavored and nuanced stew of veal, bacon, and tripe took on a buttery texture from a dark roux and delivered just a gentle glow of peppercorn spice.

“As a Black woman, when I think about all those women in the 1700s out there on the wharfs cooking soup to sell for the day and praying they get enough money, I feel sort of sad that my ancestors had to work that hard,” she says.

Yet cooking pepper pot also brought her joy, because it conjured warm memories of Brown’s childhood in Mount Airy. She’d walk to the neighborhood butcher for a pound of tripe, then closely watch her great-grandmother, Carrie Smithers, make it, beginning by sizzling the holy trinity of celery, bell peppers, and onions in rendered bacon fat and veal drippings.

“That’s the reason I knew how to layer it,” says Brown. “I was very close to my great-grandmother, and she would be so proud that I made it delicious. I might have even made it better than hers.”

Brown’s soup was the closest we’d taste that day to the thick, meaty tripe stew from Campbell’s that stamped pepper pot as a Philadelphia specialty, along with a version popularized nationwide on the dining cars of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

“But there never really was a single ‘Philadelphia-style’ pepper pot. It was a marketing device, because this was a diverse city and pepper pot changed with every neighborhood,” says Weaver, who documents several 19th-century soup halls known as “pepperpot hotels” across the city, along with recipes that range from Esther Levy’s Jewish beef-and-mutton pepper pot from 1871 to pepper pot with crab, asparagus tips, and dumplings from a culinary instructor named Aunt Matilda in 1879. “Every Philadelphia recipe I’ve seen is different.”

A recipe published for the Philadelphia World’s Fair in an 1876 cookbook from the Women’s Centennial Exhibition Committee featured two kinds of tripe in a veal knuckle broth studded with veal dumplings. Another completely different pepper pot called gingambo au potiron — with sea turtle broth, seafood, and a Brazilian pumpkin — emerged from the émigré Creole neighborhood called Hamiltonville, on the Woodlands estate southwest of the University of Pennsylvania campus.

A soup that unlocks memories

Coincidentally, Olunloyo served us a variation of that same seafood-pumpkin pepper pot, a dish he grew fond of making regularly when he launched his career at Deux Cheminées. The late chef-owner there, Fritz Blank, had amassed a legendary cookbook collection and befriended both Weaver and Harris, who published Blank’s recipe in Beyond Gumbo.

Olunloyo’s soup skipped the turtle broth for rich fish stock and swapped out pumpkin for butternut squash. The froth of its silky orange puree — enriched with vermouth, cream, and leeks — sparks with Scotch bonnet, ginger, and a scant pinch of aromatic mace. Sweet little bay scallops, added to the bowl raw, cook in its warmth alongside mussels and other shellfish. It was an elegant reminder of the refinements that European-trained French chefs gave to the high-society kitchens of early Philadelphia, one of “two separate strands” — the vernacular creativity of its street foods being the other — that shaped the city’s culinary evolution, says Weaver. Ever-evolving pepper pot existed in both spheres.

For Olunloyo, whose career as a consultant and supper club chef has been most influential in its advocacy of modern methods and cutting-edge technology, diving back into pepper pot has been a reminder of his formative years as a cook and the enduring value of classic techniques.

The dish transports him even farther back to his childhood in West Africa and the pepper soups he grew up eating in Nigeria. In addition to his seafood-squash pepper pot, he served the group a boldly spiced version of that pepper soup — a rustic, bone-in stew of goat, beef neck, and tripe flavored with a blend of Nigerian seeds and dried chilies, with an extra hit of habanero and fresh green shiso he snips over each bowl to replicate hard-to-find African scent leaves. The connection to the West African roots of pepper pot’s creators could not have been more obvious.

“Taste is not linear,” observed Omar Tate. “It is kind of like a spiral, the memory is trying to circle back home at every point when you pick up an ingredient.”

The importance of historical Black dishes in 2026

For Tate, whose pepper pot efforts sit squarely within the provocative explorations of the Black American foodways Honeysuckle is known for, the point of the exercise for him was not to recreate history — “I’m not interested in copy-and-paste tradition” — but to modernize it for today’s tastes. His rendition with oxtail, pork belly, and honeycomb tripe was partly inspired by the Krimmel painting of a woman serving a market crowd of early 18th-century Philadelphians. But Tate’s deconstructed presentation, with each element suspended above locally raised vegetables and a puddle of intensely flavored broth spiced with fish peppers from Honeysuckle partner Plowshare Farms, looks like the melting pot in reverse. (Seeds for the fish pepper, an heirloom chile used by Black caterers in Baltimore in the 1800s, were publicly reintroduced by Weaver in 1995.)

“I’ve never been able to fully sit in the idea of what tradition is because of my relationship to Black history in America, and realizing that the strongest, most consistent Black tradition is being uprooted constantly all the time,” he says. “Yes, we are preserving culture and honoring the past, but I’m constantly trying to disrupt what I know about that, because it helps understand how people navigated change.”

In this respect, the timing could not be more keen for a pepper pot tribute and the conversations it starts about the important role Black chefs played in shaping the nation’s cuisine. Keeping history front and center through food remains a powerful act, especially after the administration of President Donald Trump abruptly altered displays at the President’s House on Independence Mall to sanitize George Washington’s role there as an enslaver of nine people, including the seminal chef Hercules Posey.

“We tried to honor their history and make sure tradition was preserved, but now that’s been disrupted and they have to be reimagined,” said Tate of the enslaved individuals previously commemorated at the President’s House, where the changes, he said, have deeply affected him. “That can only come through the possibility of taste and oral history.”

Chad Williams agrees.

“You have to cook it to keep it alive. Much of what makes dishes truly great is difficult to put into a recipe — the flavor, the experience of the dish, and making sure that gets pushed forward into the future by cooking it hand-to-hand. It can’t always come from a book.”

Pepper pot keeps evolving

The beauty of Philadelphia’s pepper pot is that it has proven to be less of a specific recipe than a culinary approach tied to this city, a resourceful way to coax tender sustenance and comfort in a stew flared with spice and the memories of a faraway land using whatever was locally available. As Tate and others at the tasting noted, such dishes have, in fact, continued to thrive with the arrival of new waves of immigrant communities, even if their fiery tripe-laced soups go by other names.

Vietnamese bún bò Huế. Mexican menudo. Mauritanian tripe and cow skin gravy over Jollof rice. Spicy Korean beef gopchang-jeongol. Polish flaki. Italian trippa alla Romana. Excellent versions of all these and more can be found here, which, in the context of Pepperpot City, means they, too, could be considered as part of a grand centuries-old Philadelphia tradition that’s not quite ready to fade away.

“They’re all pepper pots,” insists William Woys Weaver. “That’s our local word for it, you know! Let’s stop pretending that pepper pot is one thing. Pepper pot is Philadelphia’s soul soup.”