[Fwd: [Fwd: Fwd: Hopping John & Limping Kate (1884)]]

[Beverly Flanigan]

I'm forwarding a reply from my student's father, the "Florida cracker," on
the 1884 book on Southern cooking.  See his comments marked ***.  (I cited
this same father a year ago on the "you all" set.)

>...
>Sounds to me like a yankee trying to write about the quaint old south based
>on a short visit.
>
>Dad
>
>
>At 02:17 PM 3/11/02 -0500, you wrote:
> >What do you think of this stuff?  How many of these food names have you
> >heard of?
> >
> >Connie
> >
> >Connie, does this stuff from 1884 still resonate?  How do you define
> Hopping John and
> >Limping Kate? Is the latter for real?!  [B.F.]
> >
> >>X-Mailer: Unknown (No Version)
> >>Date:         Sun, 10 Mar 2002 22:23:45 EST
> >>Reply-To: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> >>Sender: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> >>From: Bapopik at AOL.COM
> >>Subject:      Hopping John & Limping Kate (1884)
> >>Comments: cc: ASMITH1946 at aol.com
> >>To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> >>
> >>    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,
>
>***Don't remember whether I've heard them called "celestials" or not.  But,
>sounds like a name that would be given to small figs.  We didn't have small
>purple figs.  Our purple ones were large and called Brown Turkey.  That's
>what Granddaddy has.  Our small figs were green with a white inside and
>were called sugar figs.
>
> >>and it is amusing to eat
> >> "cooter's" or turtles' eggs, salting and sucking them through a small
> >> opening in their parchment-like shells.
>
>***cooter's are small turtles.  We never ate turtles or their eggs but
>would give them to the men that worked for Uncle Henry and many of them
>would eat them.
>
>
> >>    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.
>
>***Hominy and hominy grits are two separate and distinct foods.  Hominy is
>white corn which has had the seed coat removed by soaking in lye.  It is a
>northern food.  No self-respecting southerner would ever make the mistake
>of confusing the two!  We sold some canned hominy in the store but didn't
>devote much shelf space.  No more than one row at a time.  Kept rest in
>warehouse.  Probably never sold more than one or two cases per year.
>
>A sure giveaway that a non-southerner is speaking is when you hear grits
>called hominy grits.  We sometimes called it hominy and sometimes called it
>grits but never bothered with the needless usage of both terms at once.  No
>self-respecting southerner is going to put milk on grits!!
>
>
> >>    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.
>
>***Cottage cheese is essentially cut up clabber.   When grandmother decided
>to make butter from our milk, she would set milk out in a pan to let the
>cream rise.  The cream would then be skimmed off and beaten until it turned
>into butter.  Once in a while she'd let the skim milk sit until it made
>clabber, but not often.  Usually she did that when some of our store
>customers would ask her to.  We'd just give them the clabber after it was
>made.  I don't remember eating clabber more than once or twice and then not
>much.
>
>
> >>    A popular soup with the people is turnip soup, which when well made
> >> (as well as cabbage and potato soup) is excellent.
>
>***Don't remember making soup with turnips, cabbage, etc.  I suspect a good
>many of our poorer customers did though.
>
>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.
>
>***Okra and tomatoes with a little onion but not okra by itself.
>
> >>    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."
>
>***Whiting, mullet, croaker, red bass, drum, sheepshead were all popular
>salt water fish.  Don't know what the scarlet fish may have been, maybe red
>snapper.
>
> >>    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.
>
>***Don't ruin good boiled shrimp by putting vinegar, cocktail sauce, etc.
>on them.  Now if they are not exactly fresh you may need to use some condiment
>to get them past your nose.  Us primitives are fond of making a meal of
>nothing but boiled shrimp and grandmother was not about to peel the shells
>off for us when we were perfectly capable of doing that for ourselves.
>
> >>    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."
>
>***"pilau" pronounced pur-low is any boiled rice dish with meat added.  The
>meat is boiled first and the stock is then used to provide the moisture for
>cooking the rice.  After the rice is cooked, the meat is added and the
>mixture is baked a little longer.  We had chicken pilau and shrimp pilau
>often.
>
>Hominy is often eaten at dinner instead of rice, yet the "low
> >> country" colored servants scorn it, demanding the rice instead.
>
>***We had grits for supper almost every night.  (Meals are breakfast,
>dinner and supper.  Nobody eats grits at dinner, only breakfast and supper.
>  Only yankees call the night meal dinner!!).  Seldom at breakfast because
>"quick" grits had not been developed yet.  Would take at least 45 minutes
>to cook a pot of grits and grandmother was not going to get up early enough
>to do that.  Didn't make biscuits for breakfast either.  Most who did have
>biscuits and grits for breakfast were farmers.  The women would cook the
>big breakfast while the men were out doing the morning chores like milking
>cows, feeding pigs, etc.  Breakfast was eaten after chores were completed.
>Some "low-country" coloreds moved to Yulee with the railroad.  They came
>from Carolina barrier islands where large rice plantations had existed.
>Rice was a three-times a day staple for them.  One of the women who was
>widowed with a houseful of children would have granddaddy buy rice in 100
>lb sacks for her
>
>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."
>
>***Cow peas, black-eye peas, purple-hull peas are all the same family.
>Usually were dried so you'd have to soak them overnight to rehydrate them
>enough to cook.  Don't know about "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.
>
>***Best when either cooked (steamed) on top of a pot of butter beans or fried.
>
> >>    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."
>
>***Have to always specify what you mean by potatoes.  White potatoes were
>always Irish potatoes.  Lots of ways to cook sweet potatoes and all of them
>good.  That is except when Aunt Jennie mixed peanut butter with her sweet
>potato souffle.  A waste of good sweet potatoes and good peanut butter.  My
>favorite meal as a teen ager was pork chops, turnip greens, sweet potatoes
>and corn bread.  Still right partial to it.
>
> >>    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.
>
>***Us country folk didn't know much about bakers.  Sometimes granddaddy
>would stop by the bakery when he went to town and bring back some rye bread
>or something else special we didn't keep in the store.
>
>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.
>
>***Don't know much about fancy cakes.  Mostly just knew about Aunt Louise's
>seven layer cake and her pound cake.
>
> >>    Brazilian nuts are only known as butternuts,
>
>***Never heard that.  In polite company they were Brazil nuts, in
>not-so-polite company they were nigger toes.
>
>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.
>
>***Peanuts and goobers.  First time I ever heard the term ground-nut was
>when I met Brahm Verma and he said that's what they called them in India.
>The candy sounds like peanut brittle.  Mostly could buy parched peanuts or
>boiled peanuts.  We couldn't go to a ballgame without some parched peanuts.
>  Granddaddy had a wood stove in the store.  He'd put some raw peanuts in
>the shell on the stove and parch them for us to take to nibble on during
>the game.  Could buy parched and boiled peanuts from street vendors in
>Jacksonville.
>
> >>    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.
>
>***Didn't require any less food, just couldn't afford to buy it!!!


_____________________________________________
Beverly Olson Flanigan         Department of Linguistics
Ohio University                     Athens, OH  45701
Ph.: (740) 593-4568              Fax: (740) 593-2967
http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm