Originally published in Real Health magazine

Cookbooks are offering healthier versions of the dishes we know and love. But do they taste good? Melissa Ewey Johnson and our picky team put the recipes to the test.

Soul food: Can’t you just smell it cooking? It’s always been there at our family reunions, made with love and handed down through generations. But the recipes, rich in fat, salt and calories, contribute to our soaring rates of diabetes, high blood pressure and other life-threatening health problems. Recently, cookbooks have offered healthier versions of classic dishes. But if you take the “soul” out of the food, how does it taste? We lured a group of soul-food lovers to a taste test to find out, enlisting a secret weapon—chef Zoraida Oliveira, owner of West Orange, N.J.–based Sumptuous Sweets—to choose the recipes and cook up the goods. “I was looking for recipes that tried to make up for the loss of fat with spices and other ingredients,” she says. Here’s how it went down:

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