Hopping John & Limping Kate (1884)

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   DARE's first citation of "limping Kate" is PADS, from 1950.  This food stuff is just that bad.
   I'm going through the Sunday food articles in the NEW YORK DAILY TRIBUNE (pre-Clementine Paddleford).  This long but wonderful article is from 25 May 1884, pg. 9, col. 6:

SOUTHERN FARE AS SEEN AT CHARLESTON:
   It is a pleasure to feast on "celestials," small figs that are purplish without and crimson and gold within, and it is amusing to eat "cooter's" or turtles' eggs, salting and sucking them through a small opening in their parchment-like shells.
   Hominy, "the staff of life" in the South, is the universal breakfast dish, and each well trained child is required to break its fast with it before eating anything else.  It is usually eaten with butter, but sometimes with milk, or gravy, or molasses, or sugar, or without anything, that is "dry."  Southern hominy when uncooked is known as grits.  It is ground fine and as it is made of flint corn (a kind into which all varieties are said to be changed on the islands near Charleston) it has a sweeter flavor than Northern hominy.
   Clabber in summer is thought by many families indispensable to breakfast, as the quickness with which milk sours in warm climates gives it a peculiarly grateful flavor.
   A popular soup with the people is turnip soup, which when well made (as well as cabbage and potato soup) is excellent.  The best soup is okra or true gumbo, which is eaten with the green pepper lying at each plate partly sliced into it, and sometimes with delicate flower-stamped wafers.  This soup in summer with the dessert forms the usual dinner of many of the first Carolina families.
   A favorite dish is the whiting, which, sold in silvery strings, is served in savory whiteness with drawn butter; and an unknown scarlet fish offered for sale in the fish market was called by the colored vender "Pompey's nose."
   June brings the shrimps, which are made with rice into shrimp pie, or served on toast, or more rarely, in primitive style, when their jackets are removed at the table and they are eaten with vinegar.
   Rice is usually boiled, but when fried with tomatoes is called "pilau," and described by a colored cook as "better than the tother side of nice."  Hominy is often eaten at dinner instead of rice, yet the "low country" colored servants scorn it, demanding the rice instead.  Cow peas are nice and spicily flavored, and are made into a nutritious soup against which there is a slight prejudice because it was a standard war dish.  When cooked with rice they form a favorite dish known as "hopping John"; and when boiled with hominy, an up-country dish called "limping Kate."
   During the year there are two crops of vegetables.  Okra appears in midsummer; it looks like a small, pale, green cucumber filled with rows of pearly seeds.  When cooked with butter it is an agreeable vegetable, and very nutritious from the mucilage it contains.
   String beans are known as snap-beans, lima beans as scabe-beans, giant egg-plants as Guinea squashes, and potatoes always mean sweet potatoes, the other kind being distinguished from them as Irish potatoes.  Sweet potatoes in their native clime are sometimes candied, when they are delicious.  They sometimes thus form a dessert, and one Southern divine always called it "God's pudding."
   Bread is bought by every family of the baker, and although the sight of the loaves through the wire netting of the baker-carts, as they pass over the dusty roads, is not appetizing, it is of superior quality.  Crackers are only known as biscuits, and "wigs" are rolls containing currants.
   Penny squares of gingerbread are called "Lafayette cakes"; ginger cookies, when large, gungas, and when small, rifle balls; but the Charlestonian cake for the people is "horse cake" or "horses," which is gingerbread or sugar cake cut by tin moulds into caricatures of horses and sold at the shops at the rate of fifty or a hundred a day.
   Brazilian nuts are only known as butternuts, and peanuts are almost invariably called ground-nuts, although sometimes pindars.  Ground-nut cakes each consist of a dozen or more ground-nuts fastened together with molasses, which is often flavored with orange-juice.  They are delicious and are sold for a penny apiece to everyone by the "mammas" (old colored women) at the street corners, or at the colored people's doors and stalls all over the State and in Georgia.  The coarse brown paper in which each one is wrapped keeps the fingers from contact while eating it.
   Sherbet is more popular than ice cream, and the ice used in their freezing is considered a dainty by Southern children.
   As less food is required in the South than in the North, "the virtue of the rich," of temperance (in eating) is the custom.