Hush, Puppies
Hush, Puppies
Nearly every Sunday dinner at our home features fish. Papa takes shrimp and wine down to the dock and fires up the brick barbecue. He carefully seasons the tilapia, always the same way: a generous dash of Montreal seasoning. Inside, a salad is tossed and the broccoli is steamed to tender-crisp perfection. Occasionally we’ll steep mango-peach tea to chill. A greater treat still is authentic deep-fried hushpuppies.
The following recipe comes from Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, a famous author and a good cook. She wrote Cross Creek Cookery, a lovely anecdote-filled cookbook featuring the cuisine of rural central Florida. You can’t have alligator-tail steak anymore, but Mrs. Rawlings raves about her mango ice cream and “Utterly Deadly Southern Pecan Pie.” And these hushpuppies, with their crispy exteriors and warm, soft interiors, certainly aren’t bad.
hushpuppies
Hush-puppies are in a class by themselves. They are a concomitant of the hunt, above all of the fishing trip. Fresh-caught fried fish without hush-puppies are as a man without a woman, a beautiful woman without kindness, law without a policeman. The story goes that they derived their name from old fishing and hunting expeditions, when the white folk ate to repletion, the Negro help ate beyond repletion, and the hunting dogs, already fed, smelled the delectable odors of human rations and howled for the things they scented. Negro cook or white sportsman tossed the remaining cornmeal patties to the dogs, calling, "Hush, puppies!"—and the dogs, devouring them, could ask no more of life, and hushed.
1 cup cornmeal
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 small to medium onion, minced
1 egg
1/4 cup milk or water
Mix together the dry ingredients and the finely cut onion. Break in the egg and beat vigorously. Add the liquid. Form into small patties, round or finger-shaped. Drop in the deep smoking fat in which the fish has been fried, until they are a deep brown. Serve hot and at once.
I have a strange recipe from St. Simon's Island, off the coast of Georgia, that adds a little sugar and a small can of corn to hush-puppies. Sugar is an anathema in any cornbread except the most delicate cornmeal muffins. It is more than inappropriate to the hearty honesty of hush-puppies. As to the canned corn, this is a free country and the experimenter may legally add it if he so wishes. He may not legally, however, then call the results hush-puppies.
From a rural correspondent I had passed on one of those flashes of genius that touch cooking at fortunate moments. His mother, he wrote, made hush-puppies in small round cakes about two inches in diameter, then with her finger poked a hole in the center, as for a doughnut. This gives twice the amount of crisp-crunchy crust, the very best part of the hush-puppy, and does away with any tendency to a heavy center. I recommend it earnestly.
I do not recommend a practice of some sportsmen, of using beer for the mixing fluid. By it, the sweet nutty flavor of the hush-puppy is a little soured, even when baking soda is used instead of baking powder. Devotees of this custom are likely to be so unbalanced by large quantities of the mixing fluid that they are in no condition to treat hush-puppies with the respect due them.
Friday, July 3, 2009