Hush Puppies

We all use colorful words and phrases which if we stop and think about, don’t make much sense or fit into their present context. Much of our language is a product of our colonial past, coming from a time when life was focused on the more fundamental tasks of finding food, clothing and a place to sleep.

Hush Puppy

A hushpuppy is a little round ball of fried dough, often served with seafood or Southern cooking. It doesn’t resemble a puppy and it certainly isn’t talkative, so why do we call this particular food item such an unusual name? One explanation is that in the early days of America (especially in the South), kitchens were built as separate buildings away from the main house, so if the kitchen caught fire it wouldn’t burn the house down too. Separating the two buildings also kept the heat from the kitchen out of the house during the hot summer months. After the food was cooked, a slave or servant had to carry it from the kitchen to the main house where the dining room was. Dogs would often swarm around that person to beg for food by barking and jumping up. In order to satisfy these dogs, the cook made up little balls of cooked dough to be thrown to them by the person carrying the food. As the dough was thrown, the person would say. “Hush, puppy.” Another sadder story says that in the South after the Civil War there was so little food that both children and dogs cried from hunger. Mothers fried little balls of cornmeal, all they had for them. As they fed them the little balls, they would say, “Hush, babies, hush puppies.”