Have you ever tasted HUSH PUPPIES? If you live in the south and order a fried seafood meal, chances are that you probably have. Hush Puppies are made from thick cornmeal batter, shaped into balls or other shapes and deep fried. They are crispy on the outside, soft and chewy on the inside and delicious.
How did Hush Puppies get their name? Nobody knows for sure but here are two of the myths and then possibly the true story.
- STOP BARKING: The most common explanation is that when hunters and fishermen took their dogs along with them and the dogs would bark or howl scaring the wildlife, the hunters and fishermen would fry up some dough and throw it to the dogs to hush them up.
- FROM THE WAR: It is said that when Confederate soldiers were making dinner around the campfire and they heard the Yankee soldiers approaching, they would toss their yapping dogs some fried cornmeal cakes and ordered the dogs to “hush puppies!”
- SOUTH CAROLINA: At least two decades before “hush puppy” appeared in print, South Carolinians were enjoying what they called “red horse bread.” It wasn’t red in color and it had nothing to do with horses. Red horse was one of the common species of fish that were caught in South Carolina rivers and served at fish fries along the banks.
- RED HORSE BREAD: In the early 1900’s, Romeo Govan lived on the banks of the Edisto River. There he operated his club house, a frame structure with a neatly swept yard where guests came almost every day during fishing season to feast on fish of every kind, prepared in every way and the once eaten, never-to-be-forgotten red horse bread.That red horse bread was made by simply mixing cornmeal with water, salt, and egg then dropped by a spoonful into hot lard in which fish have been fried. Govan may well have originated the name “red horse bread,” since its earliest appearances in print are almost always in descriptions of a fish fry that he cooked.
- ROMEO GOVAN was an African American man born into enslavement around 1845. At the end of the Civil War, he settled on a plot of land close to Cannon’s Bridge, where he remained the rest of his life. He hosted fish fries and other entertainments that were attended by the most prominent members of the white community and the tips he earned enabled him to buy the house and surrounding land. Govan’s talents made him known to every sportsman in South Carolina. Romeo Govan died in 1915, but the red horse bread he made famous lived on, and it eventually spread throughout most of South Carolina as the standard accompaniment for a fried fish supper.
- GEORGIA: South Carolina was not the only place where Southerners were frying gobs of cornmeal batter. In 1940, Earl DeLoach, the fishing columnist for the Augusta Chronicle, noted that Red Horse cornbread is often called Hush Puppies on the Georgia side of the Savannah River.” They had been calling it that since at least 1927, when the Macon Telegraph reported that the men’s bible class of First Methodist Church was holding a fish fry where chairman Roscoe Rouse would “cook the fish, hushpuppies and make the coffee.”
- FLORIDA: Hush puppies first got national attention thanks to a bunch of tourists fishing down in Florida. In 1934, Pennsylvania’s Harrisburg Sunday Courier ran a travel piece about central Florida, where the author fished at Mr. Joe Brown’s camp on Lake Harris near Orlando. “Brown can cook,” the writer declared, and his menu included fried fish, French fried potatoes and a delicious cornbread concoction which Brown called Hush Puppies.
- RECIPE: Dan Beard devoted one of his monthly magazine columns to his fishing trip to Key West. He published the famous recipe of Mrs. J. G. Cooper, an expert on hush puppies. It called for one quart of white water-ground cornmeal, two eggs, three teaspoons of baking powder, and one teaspoon of salt, which were mixed into a batter and cooked in the same pan as the fish. When a correspondent for Modern Beekeeping visited a fish fry, he noted, “Every visiting lady was soon busy with pencil and paper taking down the recipe. (The men were too.)”
Source: http://www.SeriousEats.com
Photo: AI WP
