Ode To The Hushpuppy

Gene Crabtree is participating in the perfect by-product of a fishing trip. He's overseeing the crackle of cooking oil as morsels coated in cornmeal fry to tastebud ready wellness. I'm attending the annual fish fry at the Liberty Baptist Church in Fulton County. While not exactly the bustle of Fancy Farm and its yearly cookout, revered all the same by the local Baptist and other denominations that find out there's free food up the two lane.

There used to be more shade trees on the church grounds. Now down to just one, and underneath the usual splay of unmatched lawn chairs and tailgates loosed for a constructed seating arrangement. The elders stand watch over the fry duty. Women, per tradition, perhaps, in the fellowship hall readying sweet tea and ice cubes for a wash down later.

I love a good fish fry mainly because I grew up eating creek caught fare with my Dad and his Dad before. If it wasn't deer-something, it was fish tonight, after night, after night. But it's the fixings, as called, that I'd like to ponder for a moment. Everything tastes the same at a good fish fry. The fish taste like the fries, which taste like the onion rings, and especially the dollops of cornmeal themselves just cooked and eaten alongside as if the coating on the fish wasn't breading enough. Therein lies the South's fascination with the hushpuppy.

We have our favorites. It became entree alone. You ate the rest of the meal not to look like a person just eating hushpuppies. A good one is fluffy, greasy, and good in bunches eaten much like potato chips dipped in too much ketchup.

The term dates back to 1899, but hushpuppies were perhaps named such during the Civil War. Soldiers making cornbread would tear off a little piece and toss to the Confederate dogs to "Hush the puppies." Now we've stuck with the name, and better such, the side item.

So synonymous with seafood now that it almost seems like it was caught in the water just as well. Think about it. We never hear of hushpuppies served with hamburgers or BBQ. Not with any other major food group except the fish group. And so it seems that at one point in its life span that the cornmeal nugget was a bottom feeder in a creek with legs and fins sort of like a crawdad or similar. I could picture my Granddaddy pulling into the driveway and calling to Grandmamma in the kitchen, "Marthann (her name is Martha Ann, but was always shortened), get the stuff. Got fifteen crappie, a couple catfish, and we caught 25 hushpuppies near this one stump." Hushpuppies caught on a cane pole? He could have done it, cornmeal or not.

Well, I've now sat here and written an entire column on hushpuppies, and what's worse is you just read an entire column on hushpuppies. Time to find another church having a cookout.

Originally published in The Hickman Courier, August 2013