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Fun facts about the South

Where did hushpuppies really come from?

There are lots of stories floating through the country about where the delicious hushpuppy originated. No doubt you’ve heard some of them. Most are built around actually keeping the dogs quiet in the kitchen or on the hunting trail or even in war as the enemy approached. But the facts don’t back any of these up.

The fact is, Southerners have been eating tasty balls of fried cornmeal batter for quite some time, though they didn’t 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 wasn’t 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.  Govan lived on the banks of the Edisto River near Cannon’s Bridge, about five miles from the town of Bamberg, SC. 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.'”

Red horse 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. 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” Govan’s talents made him known to every sportsman in South Carolina. He entertained governors, senators, and statesmen along the famous banks.

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 BREAD TO HUSHPUPPY

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 ‘hushpuppies’ 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 and the ‘hushpuppies’ and make the coffee.”

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.)”

Now you know where hushpuppies really originated. But the best news of all is Dixie Lily makes it easy to enjoy delicious hushpuppies whenever the mood strikes!