by Dish Staff
Jennifer Jensen Wallach reviews Sam Bowers Hilliard’s recently reprinted Hog Meat and Hoecake: Food supply in the Old South, 1840–1860, admiring the author for examining “patterns in eight states of the former Confederacy to learn what Southerners ate and how effective they were at producing their own food”:
Swine, he shows, appeared on regional tables in the colonial period, and it remains today one of the most obvious markers of Southern-style cooking. “If the ‘king’ of the antebellum Southern economy was cotton, then the title of ‘queen’ must go to the pig.” And yet, Hilliard explains, the meanings assigned to different foods change over time, and although many relished the meat, antebellum Southerners were sometimes ambivalent about their dependency on pork, deeming it a coarse, indigestible food more appropriate for the beleaguered enslaved population than for the purportedly delicate white Southern belle. Despite the consternation of medical professionals such as John S. Wilson, who despaired in 1860 of the quality of fare served in the “great Hog-eating Confederacy, or the Republic of Porkdom”, nineteenth-century Southerners ate about 150 pounds of the meat annually. Because plantation owners were reluctant to set aside land for grazing cattle that could be used to grow cotton, beef was in short supply and thus rarely eaten by the enslaved population or by poor whites. Mutton served, according to Hilliard, as merely an “occasional diversion” in a pork-focused diet.
Corn was the other foundational element in the Southern diet, and the persistence of cornbread on contemporary Southern menus indicates that this pillar is still intact. Antebellum Southerners grew as much corn as they did cotton, and the grain was a staple across the class and caste spectrum. Although wheat was grown in the Southern hills and rice was cultivated in Louisiana and along the Atlantic Coast, neither grain challenged the South’s identity as “corn country”. Hilliard’s subjects rounded out their meals with garden crops such as sweet potatoes, cowpeas, turnips and watermelon, foods that are still subjected to endless variations in nouveau Southern cooking. Southerners, both enslaved and free, also hunted for venison and smaller game, including possums, raccoons and squirrels, animals yet to be rebranded as sources of “heritage” foods worthy of a place on the menus of high-end restaurants.
Update from a reader: “It has long been a Southern truism that ‘We eat every part of the pig but the oink.'”
(Photo of Central BBQ Sign in Memphis via Southern Foodways Alliance)
The Dish 