What is the story behind hush puppies? Get Your Pet Thinking

Red Horse Bread

Southerners have been eating tasty balls of fried cornmeal batter for quite some time, though they didnt call them hushpuppies at first. At least two decades before “hushpuppy” appeared in print, South Carolinians were enjoying what they called “red horse bread.” It wasnt red in color, and it had nothing to do with horses. Red horse was one of the common species of fish (along with bream, catfish, and trout) that were caught in South Carolina rivers and served at fish frys along the banks.

Red horse bread was part of the repertoire of Romeo Govan, whom the Augusta Chronicle described in 1903 as “a famous cook of the old regime.” Govan lived on the banks of the Edisto River near Cannons Bridge, about five miles from the town of Bamberg. 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, one newspaper captured, 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.” Govans 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.

“Romy” Govans, as he was familiarly known, was an African American man born into slavery around 1845. At the end of the Civil War, he settled on a plot of land close to Cannons Bridge, where he remained the rest of his life. He hosted fish frys 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.

Govans talents made him, to use the words of one newspaper, “known to every sportsman worthy of the name in South Carolina, he who has entertained governors, senators, and statesmen along these famous banks.” Thats a little different story than a kindly mammy taking Big House hand-me-downs and using them to quell dogs hunger pangs.

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.

From Red Horse to Hush Puppy

The Palmetto State 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 mens bible class of First Methodist Church was holding a fish fry where chairman Roscoe Rouse would “cook the fish and the hushpuppies and make the coffee.”

Hush puppies first got national attention thanks to a bunch of tourists fishing down in Florida. In 1934, Pennsylvanias Harrisburg Sunday Courier ran a travel piece about central Florida, where the author fished at Mr. Joe Browns 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.”

Before long, hushpuppies were popping up in American Cookery, American Legion Magazine, and Boys Life, where National Scout Commission Dan Beard devoted one of his monthly 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.

As we have seen with other Southern food origin myths, like that of chicken and dumplings, the cutesy tales often undersell the quality of old Southern dishes, treating them as examples of cooks taking inexpensive, humble ingredients and making the best of them. But early accounts of hushpuppies and red horse bread make clear that diners treated this new food not as a cheap substitute but rather as a luxury worthy of admiration.

One reporter who penned an account of the red horse bread at a Romeo Govan fish fry commented, “This was a new bread to the writer, and so delicious, that I beg lovers of the finny tribe to try some.” 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.)”

Balls of fried cornmeal batter would quiet the dogs in your stomach, too, especially while waiting for the fish to fry. It seems far more likely to me that “hush puppy” originated as a clever euphemism for stopping a growling stomach than it did for pacifying actual dogs. That’s still a conjecture, but it’s not totally absurd.

Not all Southern food authorities buy this story. A vocal camp insists that all Southern recipes must have their roots not in the Civil War but rather on cotton plantations back in the antebellum days. One account that has been cut-and-pasted onto any number of Internet sites (I can’t figure out who originally wrote it) asserts that thrifty cooks in plantation houses would send excess catfish dredging “down to the slave quarters.” Though cornmeal was in short supply, they apparently had plenty of dairy and other ingredients on hand, for “the women added a little milk, egg and onion and fried it up.”

By the 1940s, hushpuppies had crossed over from outdoor fish fries and become staples at the “fish houses” that served fried fish and steamed oysters up and down the Carolina coast. These operations catered to beachgoers at ocean resorts and tourists heading to Florida down U.S. Highway 17. Further inland, they became staples at “fish camps” along the rivers of the Piedmont, where mill workers and their families would fish in the afternoons and pay to have their catch cleaned and fried for dinner.

The older forms were pan fried—that is, cooked over a fire in a frying pan with a shallow layer of fat or grease in the bottom. The newer creations that so wowed guests at river-side fish fries were deep fried, meaning cooked in a vessel filled with enough hot oil or melted fat so that the orbs would float in the liquid and, effectively, be cooked on all sides at once.

The crisp fried cornmeal orbs are starting to be served in more and more barbecue joints outside the South, too. When I was out in Salt Lake City this summer, I was surprised when I ordered a platter of ribs and brisket at R&R Barbecue and discovered it came with two ping pong ball-sized hushpuppies nestled against the little plastic tub of mac ‘n cheese.

Hush Puppies! A 2 Minute History!

Growing up in the South, we used to head out to the “Catfish House” quite often. Funny that we would fry our own catfish as often as we would go out for it, but probably what kept us going back was not only the convenience of having someone bring you never-ending baskets of freshly fried catfish, but the hush puppies that came with it. When you sat down to order your first batch of catfish (it was usually “all you can eat”) for some odd reason the first batch would always take a long time, while the hush puppies would come out almost immediately. Of course, this wasn’t odd at all. As my uncle would say “That’s how they get ya!” You just could not sit there and not chow down on those irresistible balls of fried corn meal batter, potentially filling up before you “eat all the catfish you can eat.” After the first batch of catfish was consumed, the rest came out like clock-work. Funny how that works.

There is a lot of heated debate, or maybe not so heated, as to which Southern state originated hush puppies. Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky…who knows, and who really cares? All Southerners can lay claim to them, as well as to having the best recipe! As to how they got their name, there is one story that seems to be the most popular.