Hush puppies are a deep-fried or baked delicacy from the American South made with cornmeal, egg, butter, baking soda and different spices. But how did they get their identify? The web has many theories, together with one standard one which claims escaping slaves within the South used to throw them at monitoring dogs with a purpose to quieten them down.
A broadly shared Facebook publish from July 28, 2023, for instance, states: “Escaping slaves used to throw balls of fried cornmeal out to distract the hounds from tracking them. The hounds stopped barking and tracking thanks to the cornmeal which later adapted the name “hush puppies.””
This is just not the one supposed origin story for the dish. Another concept put ahead by chef Regina Charboneau in a 2010 story in The Atlantic linked the meals to the Civil War. In addition to the story of the slaves, she heard that Confederate troopers used it to “hush their dogs” when Union troops had been close by.
Charboneau additionally noted that if slaves had been certainly behind the dish, it was seemingly derived from the South African fried cornmeal dish known as “mealie pap.” She emphasized that quite a few Southern states took credit score for the meals, with Louisiana claiming that Ursuline nuns who got here to New Orleans within the 1700s made this dish utilizing native components to create “croquettes de maise,” or corn croquettes.
Britannica additionally echoed these tales: “One possible explanation for the name is that a simple version of the dish was first made by various people—such as Union soldiers during the Civil War, fishermen, or runaway slaves—to quiet howling dogs.”
The fishermen’s story, according to Robert F. Moss, a meals author and scholar, supposedly concerned anglers who returned from fishing expeditions to fry their catch over fires. Their dogs would begin barking and yapping from the aroma, so to quieten them down, the fishermen fried up bits of cornmeal and threw it on the dogs.
Moss, nevertheless, wrote a denial of the barking dogs concept on his private web site, together with most of the aforementioned “origin stories.” He argued that the hush puppy was initially a South Carolina delicacy known as “purple horse bread.” Moss wrote:
In the early years of the twentieth century, the undisputed king of the Edisto barbecue was an African American man named Romeo Govan. Born into slavery within the 1840s, Govan married a lady named Sylvia (or Silvy) Jennings shortly after Emancipation, they usually settled on a plot of land close to Cannon’s Bridge on the banks of the Edisto River, about 5 miles east of Bamberg. They lived there the remainder of their lives.
Initially, Govan leased the land and farmed it, however he quickly started supplementing his earnings by staging fish fries for native civic golf equipment and political organizations. By the flip of the twentieth century, he had constructed what he known as his “club house,” a body construction with a neatly swept yard the place visitors may come feast on “fish of every kind, prepared in every way.” As an accompaniment, he served what the Augusta Chronicle described in 1903 as “the once eaten, never-to-be-forgotten ‘red horse bread.’”
A couple of years later, a correspondent for the Bamberg Herald famous that Govan’s well-known bread was “made by simply mixing cornmeal with water, salt, and egg, and dropped by spoonfuls in the hot lard in which fish have been fried.” The components could have been easy, however the accounts of Govan’s purple horse bread clarify that his visitors alongside the riverside discovered them a outstanding delicacy, and one which was new to them, too.
“Red horse” referred to a sort of fish that was caught by South Carolinians and fried, in line with Moss. Moss argued that it’s “quite possible that Govan himself was the one who coined the name [red horse bread], since its earliest appearances in print are almost all connected with one of his fish fries.”
Moss found that in 1940, a columnist within the Augusta Chronicle noticed that, “‘Red Horse’ cornbread is often called ‘Hush Puppies’ on the Georgia side of the Savannah River.”
An early mention of “hush puppies,” Moss discovered, occurred within the Nineteen Twenties at a males’s Bible class barbecue in Macon, Georgia, and even these appeared in citation marks, indicating that the identify was not broadly identified. And by the Thirties, the time period was getting used to seek advice from the delicacy being served at political gatherings in Tallahassee.
Early mentions of the time period “hush puppies” in American newspapers from 1936 additionally categorical confusion about its origins. A response to a letter to the editor of The Atlanta Journal asking concerning the origins of hush puppies reached no definitive conclusion. With the title “Why are Hush Puppies?” the article posited various theories, together with those we shared above however with a further story that carries racist references to Black folks:
Still others insist that “hush puppies” is the veriest corruption. The correct identify is puffles—as a result of they’re dough fried in deep fats. Since they’re made from corn meal they had been appropriately known as mush-puffles, and the very best the early darkies may do with this was “hush puppies.”
Moss found one of many earliest conjectures concerning the identify in a 1933 article from The Associated Press on the arrival of the cotton harvest in Mississippi:
The author catalogs the chants and songs of African American laborers then closes by describing a post-harvest meal of fried fish, baked yams, and “hushpuppies.” These, the author explains, are “a step-child to a corn pone. Years ago when the hounds and the puppies would whine for food, the folks would toss them a bit of home-cook bread. The puppies would hush, so they called the bread ‘hushpuppies.’”
Subsequent writers, he added, “took this pretty mundane clarification and punched it up somewhat.” He noted that the phrase “hush puppy” was used lengthy earlier than it was connected to the deep fried cornmeal batter, the identical approach the dish was standard lengthy earlier than the identify “hush puppy” was connected to it:
Originally, “hush puppy” was a slang time period for silencing somebody or overlaying up misdeeds. A 1738 account in a London journal described crooked British port officers boarding a smuggler’s ship in colonial Ontario, the place they “played the Game of Hush-Puppy” by stopping off on the captain’s cabin to be “serenaded several Hours with the Captain’s Musick” whereas the crew hid the contraband beneath the ship’s ballast.
The time period was utilized in the same context till effectively into the twentieth century. Newspaper accounts of the Teapot Dome scandal within the Nineteen Twenties expressed outrage on the Harding administration’s “hush-puppy methods of permitting this scandal to breed and flourish” and insisted that “the Republicans won’t be able to hush puppy the oil deal.”
Fried cornbread wasn’t the primary meals to be known as “hush puppy,” both. The time period was used as a nickname for gravy or pot liquor as early as 1879, when the San Antonio Herald famous that the breakfast campfire of a band of Texas Rangers included a pan of “‘hush puppy’ gravy.” In 1899, a soldier within the Spanish-American battle described the troops’ breakfast fare as “scouse, slumgullion, hushpuppy, dope without milk, and all sorts of things.” A 1912 story within the Washington Evening Post described a western cowboy prepare dinner named Frosty who “could cook frijoles and hush-puppy, and make sinkers, or moss agates, or death balls, or whatever you call biscuits, as good as the best.”
Nobody claimed this gravy was given to dogs to hush them, however it was mentioned to quiet dogs of a special type. In 1915, Senator H. H. Casteel of Mississippi defined in a speech that “‘pot-liquor’ in his section was known as ‘hush-puppy’ because it kept the ‘houn’ dawgs’ from growling.” The hounds on this case appear to be the metaphorical ones growling in a diner’s abdomen, a a lot smarter use of pot liquor than throwing it to the dogs.
Balls of fried cornmeal batter would quiet the dogs in your abdomen, too, particularly whereas ready for the fish to fry. It appears much more prone to me that “hush puppy” originated as a intelligent euphemism for stopping a growling abdomen than it did for pacifying precise dogs. That’s nonetheless a conjecture, however it’s not completely absurd.
In a separate article for Serious Eats, Moss described using the time period in a extra disturbing context, increasing on the utilization he discovered within the 1879 San Antonio Herald story:
An 1879 account within the San Antonio Herald describes a person named Jim Gillet of Lampass Springs, who coated his revolver holster with a human scalp he had taken from a Native American he had helped homicide. Some months later, Gillet was “bending over a frying pan at breakfast” when “he trailed the lengthy hair into the ‘hush puppy’ gravy.”
Culinary historian Michael Twitty additionally disputed the connection to escaping slaves, writing on X in 2022: “As a historical interpreter of enslaved lives, this is social media disinformation. Hush puppies are a fritter with roots in Indigenous American and African Atlantic foodways. They were not known to be used by freedom seekers. […] If you saw those dogs it was too late. Getting a day or two ahead was your only hope.”
There isn’t any definitive reply concerning the origins of hush puppies, although many students have disputed its connection to the tales of escaping slaves. Moss points out that such tales emerge from “the reflexive instinct of food writers in the 20th century to cast every tale of Southern food in the Old South tropes of plantations or the Civil War.”
