What is hush puppies

Cook for minutes or until they are golden brown and cooked through. These southern Hush Puppies are crispy on the outside and soft and tender in the center. They are easy to prepare and quick to come together. They can be mixed and ready for the fryer in less than ten minutes. Keywords: homemade hush puppies recipe, how to make hush puppies, what are hush puppies, easy hush puppy recipe. On the hunt for more delicious recipes?

Nutrition Disclaimer: All nutritional information shared on this site is an approximation. I am not a certified nutritionist and any nutritional information shared on this site should be used as a general guideline. I love hush puppies but never knew how to make them from scratch at home and have them turn out well! A classic! These look such a comforting, tasty treat — perfect to add with some other appetizers for a party.

These hush puppies are so crispy and perfect as a side! I love the hint of Cajun seasoning too. I made these tonight to go with our Catfish Dinner, and it was Super easy, Quick and oh my gosh they Tasted so Delicious. My Family Loved them! I will be making these often and passing this recipe on to my daughters. Thank you so much! The end product was good but not what I had hoped for.

Next time I will leave out the sugar and up the salt. BTW, I do not use a lot of salt most of the time. Great job! This is exactly how a lot of southern people really eat. Thank you very much. Have a blessed day. Thanks Misty! So glad that you and your husband liked them. The addition of jalapenos is always tasty. Of course I love jalapenos. We love comeback sauce too. It is delicious on so many things. It is almost addicting. Have a wonderful day!

I found that these were too dry and they crumbled when pulled apart. I double checked the ingredients and I got them all right. For the next batch, I used a whole cup of milk and they came out perfect. I never knew these could be so easy! Enjoyed them with dinner last night and they did not disappoint! Easily, a new favorite recipe in my home! Your email address will not be published. Hush Puppies Recipe.

Print Recipe. Scale 1x 2x 3x. If you're eating a fried catfish or shrimp dinner at a seafood restaurant in the South or, increasingly, anywhere else in the country , odds are it will be accompanied by the golden brown nuggets known as hushpuppies. Made from a thick cornmeal batter, they're dropped in balls, fingers, or even long squiggly strands into a deep fryer and cooked till crisp on the outside and soft and chewy in the middle.

They're delicious, they're iconic, and no one seems to have a clue where they came from. Which isn't to say that people haven't tried to explain the origin of hushpuppies. Plenty have. The problem is that no one has really tried hard enough. Here's a quick rundown of the various versions of the hushpuppy origin story that now permeate books, magazines, and the Sargasso Sea of knowledge that is the Internet:. Shut Up, Dog!

Why they had hound dogs with them on a fishing trip isn't explained, but the cooks would fry bits of dough in the fryer and throw them to the puppies to hush them. It Was Back in 'de Wah: There's a enduring impulse when writing about Southern food to connect everything to the Civil War boiled peanuts, for instance.

In the case of hushpuppies, the story goes, Confederate soldiers making dinner around a campfire heard Yankee soldiers approaching, so they tossed their yapping dogs some fried cornmeal cakes and ordered them to "hush, puppies! How About an Old Mammy? One persistent tale claims the dredgings left over after battering and frying catfish were sent down to the slave quarters, where, as one account puts it, "the women added a little milk, egg, and onion and fried it up.

The fragrance of frying batter drew hungry children and half-starved dogs, who whined for hand-outs, so, "soft-hearted Mammies would dole out the pones, saying, 'Hush childies, hush puppies.

Get Thee to a Nunnery: In this version, it took the culinary genius of the French to teach Southerners how to fry cornmeal batter. In the s, French Ursuline nuns newly arrived in New Orleans adopted cornmeal from the local Native Americans and made hand-shaped patties they called croquettes de maise that is, corn croquettes.

From there they spread across the South, though how and when that happened isn't detailed, and one of the many "hush, dog" stories usually gets appended to explain how the French name was lost. Leaping Lizards: This is perhaps the most bizarre. Cajuns in Southern Louisiana, the story goes, used to take a salamander that they called a "mud puppy," batter it, and deep fry it. It's downright distressing the extent to which food writers blithely repeat these stories without any effort to determine their veracity.

They rattle them off, chuckle a little, then just shrug their shoulders and say, "Oh, well, here's a recipe! And I'm not just talking about bloggers or listicle-compilers, from whom you might expect such slapdashery.

I'm talking about academic press authors and writers for supposedly serious periodicals like The Atlantic , for whom Regina Charboneau directly abjured any need to dig into the matter. Separating the fact from the fiction is inherently worth it. There's nothing charming about being wrong.

If we blindly accept the folklore about Southern cuisine, we're missing out on real stories that are so much more interesting than a bunch of made-up nonsense. In cases like the old mammy story, we're perpetuating damaging stereotypes, even if we do excise the dialect and other offensive trappings. Hushpuppies are a fine example of this intellectual laziness in action. So let's look into where they really came from. Southerners have been eating tasty balls of fried cornmeal batter for quite some time, though they didn't call them hushpuppies at first.

At least two decades before "hushpuppy" appeared in print, South Carolinians were enjoying what they called "red horse bread. Red horse was one of the common species of fish along with bream, catfish, and trout that were caught in South Carolina rivers and served at fish frys along the banks. Red horse bread was part of the repertoire of Romeo Govan, whom the Augusta Chronicle described in as "a famous cook of the old regime.

There he operated his "club house," a frame structure with a neatly swept yard where guests came almost every day during fishing season to feast on "fish of every kind, prepared in every way That red horse bread, one newspaper captured, was made by "simply mixing cornmeal with water, salt, and egg, and dropped by spoonfuls in the hot lard in which fish have been fried.

At the end of the Civil War, he settled on a plot of land close to Cannon's Bridge, where he remained the rest of his life. He hosted fish frys and other entertainments that were attended by the most prominent members of the white community, and the tips he earned enabled him to buy the house and surrounding land.

Govan's talents made him, to use the words of one newspaper, "known to every sportsman worthy of the name in South Carolina, he who has entertained governors, senators, and statesmen along these famous banks.

Romeo Govan died in , but the red horse bread he made famous lived on, and it eventually spread throughout most of South Carolina as the standard accompaniment for a fried fish supper.

The Palmetto State was not the only place where Southerners were frying gobs of cornmeal batter. Hush puppies first got national attention thanks to a bunch of tourists fishing down in Florida.

In , Pennsylvania's Harrisburg Sunday Courier ran a travel piece about central Florida, where the author fished at Mr. Joe Brown's camp on Lake Harris near Orlando. He published the "famous recipe" of Mrs. Cooper, "an expert on hush-puppies. As we have seen with other Southern food origin myths, like that of chicken and dumplings , the cutesy tales often undersell the quality of old Southern dishes, treating them as examples of cooks taking inexpensive, humble ingredients and making the best of them.

But early accounts of hushpuppies and red horse bread make clear that diners treated this new food not as a cheap substitute but rather as a luxury worthy of admiration.

One reporter who penned an account of the red horse bread at a Romeo Govan fish fry commented, "This was a new bread to the writer, and so delicious, that I beg lovers of the finny tribe to try some. The men were too. Let's poke at that term hushpuppy a little and see if we can figure out where it came from. The many explanations of the word's origin seem to start with the name itself and extrapolate a story from there.

Some even take it one step further and use the "shut up, dog" tale to explain not only the name but the invention of the food itself. A article in the Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin , for instance, attributes the creation to a Florida cook who was tired of hearing the dogs whine when they smelled frying fish.

Sure she did. As we've already seen, deep-fried cornbread is older than the term hushpuppy. And, curiously enough, the term "hushpuppy" is also older than the fried cornmeal treat.