![]() He called them "red horse bread” (not for color, not because horses were used to make them, but because he served them along with red horse fish). "It’s downright distressing the extent to which food writers blithely repeat these stories without any effort to determine their veracity,” it goes on, and I would add that same thing about Facebook posters.Īccording to Moss, a food historian, hush puppies may actually be traced to a South Carolina guy named Romeo Gavin. " Apparently they had to scrimp on cornmeal but had plenty of milk and eggs lying around ,” it jokes, and notes about the whole slave connection thing, " As long as you're making up stuff about the South, why not throw in a few offensive African American stereotypes? On the slave end, it mentions old Mammies receiving the cornmeal left over from frying catfish at the plantation mansion who then added milk and eggs to make it more palatable. It also notes a popular origin tale in which fishermen threw the same cornmeal with which they were baiting hooks to quiet their dogs, then wonders why on earth these fishermen had all these barking dogs around. "There’s an enduring impulse when writing about Southern food to connect everything to the Civil War,” it notes while relating a tale that Confederate soldiers threw it to their barking dogs to make them quiet when they knew Yankees were approaching. It never mentions this fleeing-slave tale, but it brings up plenty of others and has a good time mocking most: And if that slave is close enough to the dogs to throw hushpuppies at them, then he’s as good as caught and those adrenalin-bathed dogs aren’t going to notice lumps of fried dough flying their way.Ī Robert Moss article in Southern Eats ( here) looks into the origin of hush puppies. More likely dog hushers because that is how we usually speak.īesides, a dog trained to track people isn’t very likely to be put off for more than a second by hush puppies (puppy-hushers?) lying around. ![]() Hush puppies: If slaves were tossing them around to drive off the dogs that were trained to track them – often vicious dogs who would tree them and cause serious damage to them when they found them (and, yes, masters were often okay with that because it ‘taught them a lesson’), I’m not so sure they’d be using "puppy” in the name. They irk me – for a long time I tried to ignore them and leave people to their "astonishing” (a word that frequently appears in them – "Here’s an astonishing fact!”) mis-facts and peace, but as both a historian and an advocate of the language it just eats away at me until I finally respond. I wish those Facebook fact-checkers who drool over the chance of arguing every conservative meme would also legitimize themselves by calling these silly "amazing fact” memes once in awhile. ![]() The hound stopped barking and tracking thanks to the cornmeal which later adopted the name "hush puppies.” We know this is true because it’s popping up all over Facebook, right? So, escaping slaves used to throw balls of fried cornmeal out to distract the hounds from tracking them.
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