a dishhushpuppies

Balls or fingers of cornmeal batter — meal, a little flour, egg, buttermilk or water, salt, soda, often onion — dropped by the spoonful into hot oil and fried until the outside is crisp and dark gold and the inside soft and steaming. In the Carolinas they are the bread of the fish fry and, since the 1940s, of the barbecue tray: Lexington pits serve them with the shoulder and red slaw in place of rolls, and most eastern pits give them with whole hog, though a third of the pits in the Wilson–Greenville counties give corn sticks instead. Sweeter and lighter than a corn stick, and fried, not baked.

The first of them had a fish in the name. Romeo Govan, born into slavery in the 1840s, settled after Emancipation near Cannon's Bridge on the Edisto River, five miles from Bamberg, South Carolina, and by the early 1900s ran a club house where the state's political and civic clubs came for his fish fries; the Augusta Chronicle wrote in 1903 of his never-to-be-forgotten 'red horse bread' — cornmeal, water, salt and egg dropped by spoonfuls into the lard the fish had fried in, named for the red horse, a river fish. Govan died in 1915; red horse bread lived on at fish fries in Bamberg, Orangeburg and Dorchester counties through the 1920s. Across the Savannah the same fritter was picking up another name: the Macon Telegraph in 1927 has a church fish-fry chairman cooking 'the hushpuppies', in quotation marks, a word still strange, and by 1940 a Chronicle fishing columnist could write that red horse cornbread is often called hush puppies on the Georgia side. Florida fishing camps fed them to Northern visitors and the name won. In North Carolina the hushpuppy walked from the fish camps of the Piedmont rivers into the barbecue houses in the 1940s: Kennedy's in Greensboro advertised barbecue, Brunswick stew, slaw and hushpuppies in 1949, and Warner Stamey — whose son Keith says he picked the idea up from a friend's fish camp, the Friendly Road Inn in Greensboro — made them the bread of Lexington-style barbecue.

Self-rising cornmeal, or meal with soda and a little flour, salt, an egg, buttermilk or water, and chopped onion for the savoury kind; some pits sweeten the batter and some add beer or jalapeño. The batter rests thick enough to hold a spoon, is dropped into oil at frying heat — in the old way, the oil the fish came out of — and fried until it floats and browns. Lexington houses fry them to order and shape them round, oblong or as fingers, dense or light, house by house. Served hot in the tray or in a paper bag as a side.

Lexington Barbecue: hushpuppies small $3.10, large $3.90 cash (September 2026); the Barbecue Center gives a choice of hushpuppies or a potato bun with every plate. House-Autry Mills of Four Oaks still sells the Original Recipe Hushpuppy Mix descended from Walter Thompson's post-war Swansboro business.