Drive down the streets of any city, and you’ll see restaurant signs proclaiming specialties in Mexican, Chinese, Italian, or just good old American home cooking.

But it’s rare to see a restaurant advertising soul food cooking.

Nevertheless, over the years, home cooks have kept the tradition of soul food alive – a tradition hearkening to African roots, tempered with the flavors of such other influences as Cajun culture, using whatever ingredients were available in good times and hard.

June is National Soul Food Month, and the markets are abounding in such fresh products as greens. So if you can’t go out to get some soul food, get out the pot and try to fix some in your kitchen.

The Web site soulfoodonline.net quotes Bob Jeffries, a culinary historian, in “The Soul Food Cookbook,” as writing that he had been cooking soul food for 40 years, although he hadn’t called it that. Jeffries said all soul food is southern, but not all southern food is soul.

He called it an example of how southern black cooks used the ingredients available, from those considered “high on the hog” to the more humble ones, such as chitlins.

“Mississippi: A Guide to the Magnolia State,” one of many published by the Works Progress Administration during the Depression, stated the diet of African-Americans had not changed significantly since slavery, according to soulfoodonline.net.

Blacks were allotted “a peck of corn meal, 3 pounds of salt meat, 2 pounds of sugar, 1 pound of coffee, 1 gallon molasses,” plus one plug of chewing tobacco for a week.

Cooks used these ingredients, plus whatever produce they came up with, to feed their families.

Lois Ross of Tahlequah has traveled widely, but still eats soul food “every day, I guess,” she said.

She likes to dine on mustard greens, collard greens, candied yams, okra.

“I prefer fried okra,” she said. “I eat fried chicken, baked chicken. Most of the meat we eat here in the house is fish and chicken.”

She also enjoys barbecued chicken.

Ross grew up in Winfield, La. She said there wasn’t much Cajun cooking in her area.

“We had gumbo, though, and just good food,” she said.