Sylvia Woods
“God is beneath my wings, and he puts it in here and he says to me I think, you know you go far, you give it all you got. And my mother always taught me, whatever you do, be the best. Great or small, you do it well or you don’t do it at all. So that’s me, whatever I do I wanna be the best at it.”
Illustration by Brittanie Mitchell for Seeds & Receipts.
(February 2nd, 1926 - July 19th, 2012)
Sylvia Woods was an incredible chef who was born and raised in South Carolina before moving to Harlem, New York as a teenager. With her culinary expertise she started a well-known restaurant in Harlem called Sylvia’s in the early 1960s with her husband. Sylvia’s became the hot spot for both local residents and musicians who loved the Southern fare that the restaurant served.
Alongside running the restaurant with her husband and children, Sylvia would go on to write two cookbooks, Sylvia’s Soul Food (1992) and Sylvia’s Family Soul Food: From Hemingway, South Carolina, to Harlem (1999); and form several other culinary enterprises including a catering company and food products before passing away in 2012.
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