Chapter 2

VIRGINIA’S FOOD TRADITIONS

There was hardly a neighborhood in which there was not some favorite spring devoted to barbecuing purposes. The barbecue season generally commenced in May, before which time fish fries and squirrel stews were the order of the day. In every neighborhood there was some person noted as a skillful barbecue cook. The squirrel stew, when well concocted, formed a delicious repast. All sorts of savory condiments were thrown into the cauldron, and its steam was sufficient to make the mouth of an epicure fairly water.

The barbecue proper consisted of shotes and lambs, dressed with a super abundant supply of pepper, and cooked over a large fire built up in holes five or six feet long and three or four deep. Sticks were placed over these, and the shote or lamb laid on it. Vegetables in abundance were always to be had, and the foot of the table was usually graced by a ham of bacon. The table was a temporary affair, made of rough planks, laid upon scantling, and the seats were of the same character. The plates, knives, forks, dishes, pots, etc., were of course contributed by the givers of the feast, and in the evening an ox cart or two generally drove up to take all the materials home. The drink was almost entirely mint juleps, that delicious beverage which is now never had as it used to be in the days of yore.

The principal amusements were ninepence loo, quarter whist, and conversational upon all manner of subjects. It was very rare to see anybody intoxicated, and if one became so, and made himself disagreeable, he was not invited again. Neighborhoods took it by turns to give barbecues. This neighborhood would begin this Saturday, and invite the adjoining neighborhood. That neighborhood would reply next Saturday and then a third, a fourth, and so on. Thus nearly every Saturday would witness a barbecue somewhere in the county, and it was kept up until frost came.

—New York Herald, “The Old Fashioned Barbecue in Virginia,” April 29, 1858

Virginians have observed their traditional barbecue season for almost four hundred years. No other state in the Union has an older, uninterrupted barbecue tradition. Before the twentieth century, families in Virginia took turns hosting community gatherings of some sort all year long. When the weather turned cold from November to January, Virginians slaughtered hogs in order to smoke the meat for Virginia hams and bacon. Hog killing time was also a time for festivals, as farmers would take turns holding hog killing parties. Virginians used to have a saying, “We had a hog killin’est time,” that reflects the lively events.1 After hog killing season, the months of March and April brought with them the season for fish feasts, “soups” and “stews.”

Catching fish from local waters, Virginians served them fried along with ham, fish stews, crabs, clams and oysters from local waters, as well as other delicious foods. Throughout spring and summer, squirrel soup and Brunswick stew were cooked outside in large iron pots. Springtime was the planting season, and holding squirrel soup and stew feasts at that time of the year was a way for farmers to protect newly sown crops from pillaging squirrels. Brunswick stew events started before Barbecue Season started in May and continued until the Barbecue Season ended after the first frost arrived in October. Virginia’s barbecue season provided a way for communities to gather for fellowship and community feasts in times before refrigeration when it was difficult to store fresh meats in the hot summertime. During the Barbecue Season, Virginia’s communities took turns barbecuing whole animal carcasses and invited all to the events. Unlike other states, whose backyard barbecue season tradition started in the twentieth century, Virginia’s barbecue season is the original and oldest in the Union and is rooted in Virginia’s agrarian past.

Delicious Brunswick stew served at Shaffer’s BBQ & Market in Middletown, Virginia. Author’s collection.

VIRGINIA-STYLE BARBECUE

The first English colonists who arrived in Virginia in 1607 brought hogs with them, along with their way of salting pork to preserve it. Shortly after colonists arrived, the Powhatan Indians taught them how to smoke and barbecue the pork the way they smoked and barbecued wild game. Dr. L. Daniel Mouer, who was head of archaeology at Virginia Commonwealth University and co-founder and vice-president of the Culinary Historians of Virginia before retiring, observed, “[U]sing the Indian method of cooking bear or venison, barbecued pork became typical of Virginia’s cuisine.”2 This is how what we call southern barbecue was born in Virginia.³ It is important to keep in mind that the barbecue cooking technique is ancient. However, the origins of the various modern incarnations of it can be identified. For example, the southern version of barbecue, what we call “southern barbecue,” has its beginnings in seventeenth-century Virginia.

The English word barbecue came from the word barbacoa, which is what Spanish conquistadors heard Native Americans in Haiti calling their wooden hurdles and grills. However, the same scholars who discovered that fact are the very ones who also told us that the English word barbecue is a “Virginian word” recognizing that Virginia is the birthplace of southern barbecue.⁴ In recognition of the collaboration between Virginia’s Indians and colonists that created southern barbecue, the 1887 edition of A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (the original edition of the Oxford English Dictionary) stated, “The Virginia barbacue [sic] and the French boucan were all derived from the names of the high wooden gridiron or scaffolding on which Indians dried, smoked, or broiled their meats.”5

The fact that the most esteemed scholars of their day identified Virginia with the word barbecue is significant for our understanding of barbecue history. The modern and often repeated myth that “barbecue” was born in Haiti and “made its way” to North America from there sometime in the seventeenth century is not supported by the historical record. Native Americans were using wooden barbecue grills all over the Americas before European contact, not just in Haiti. There is no barbecue “line of succession” from Haiti to North America. Native people were cooking their version of barbecue in what is today Virginia at least 10,000 years before natives from South America first reached Haiti’s shores 2,500 years ago.⁶

After Europeans arrived in the New World and mingled with Native Americans, various styles of barbecue emerged in several regions of the Americas without influence from one another. Southern barbecue developed in Virginia from Powhatan Indian, African and European cookery without the aid of the faraway and hostile Spanish conquistadors or the Taino Indians in Haiti. The southern style of barbecue reflects the barbecuing technique practiced by the native peoples of Virginia with seasonings introduced by English colonists and people of African descent. Barbecue in the Caribbean, such as Jamaican jerk, has its own independent path of development. The barbecue cooked by Spanish colonists and Mexicans in North America was cooked by burying meat with hot rocks underground, and this style of barbecue is called “barbacoa” to this day. Barbacoa was preserved in the Southwest and in California, where it was advertised to eastern visitors at the turn of the twentieth century as barbecue “à la Mexicana.”⁷ The common thread in all of those styles of barbecue is the cookery of local Native Americans, not the Taino people of sixteenth-century Haiti. Unfortunately, the origin of the word barbacoa in Haiti that became the English word barbecue has caused some to confuse the origin of the word barbecue with the origin of the barbecue cooking technique. However, it is the word barbecue that “made its way” from the Caribbean to Virginia in the seventeenth century and then to the rest of North America, not the barbecue grill or the basic barbecue cooking technique.

Today, Virginia has a thriving barbecue tradition, even if you haven’t heard of it on TV or seen it in magazines. Indeed, reports of the death of Virginia-style barbecue are greatly exaggerated. Over the last decade, Virginians have embraced Virginia’s own delicious barbecue recipes more strongly than ever. This has resulted in a dynamic renaissance of the Old Dominion’s delicious barbecue styles.

In colonial and Federal times, when Virginians departed in order to settle lands to the south and west, they took their barbecue with them. Virginians even treated Texans to their delicious style of barbecue. Early Scott was an African American who was born in Virginia in 1852. By 1869, he had made his way to San Antonio, Texas, and married a woman named Eliza. He and Eliza had three children. By the 1870s, Scott was the operator of a saloon in San Antonio called the Old Gray Mule that featured gambling and a bar on the first floor and dancing on the second. That saloon was famous, or infamous, even into the early twentieth century. By 1910, Scott and his family had moved to El Paso, where he made his living as a cook and “saloonman.” Early Scott’s menu included typical Texas specialties such as hot tamales, chili con carne and enchiladas. However, at the top of his menu, listed in capital letters, was “OLD VIRGINIA BARBECUE.”8

In the early seventeenth century, many Virginians tried to emulate the lifestyle of the English nobility. In England, kings and nobles enjoyed grand feasts, and only they could legally hunt deer. In colonial Virginia, anyone could hunt deer and eat venison. Consequently, early colonists and Powhatan Indians invited one another to their outdoor celebrations and festivals. As is often the case in such situations, both groups created a sort of colonial-era fusion cuisine. Colonists introduced Powhatan Indians to foods and seasonings such as salted pork, milk and wheat. The Powhatan Indians introduced the English to cornbread, smoked meat and their style of barbecuing meats. Instead of old England’s “ox roasted whole” or carbonadoed venison, such as the king would serve, Virginians enjoyed wild game, beef and hogs barbecued by Powhatan Indians but seasoned with English ingredients such as salt, butter, red pepper, mustard and vinegar. They played the same games that the king of England played, such as cockfighting, horse racing and gander pulling. Gander pulling was a cruel game where men competed to pull the head off a greased goose hung upside down from a tree limb. By the 1640s, those Virginia-style barbecues had become especially popular at weddings and funerals.

In the eighteenth century, Virginians were the first to establish barbecue clubs, and the custom persisted into the late nineteenth century. American poet and author Laughton Osborn (1808–1878) paid homage to Virginia’s barbecue clubs in his 1869 drama The Magnetiser: The Prodigal Comedies in Prose. In it, a character was asked how he found “the folk in the Old Dominion” during his recent trip to Virginia. He responded, “Such a round of feasting! And that infernal Barbecue-Club! I have nearly drunk my liver into a hepati’is.”9 Although a work of fiction, the dialogue demonstrates that Virginia was famous for its barbecue clubs and club members had a reputation for holding lively meetings.

Early Scott’s menu of delicious foods offered to patrons in El Paso, Texas, included “Old Virginia Barbecue.” From the El Paso Herald, July 18, 1914. Courtesy Library of Congress.

The Buchanan Spring Barbecue Club, which met near Richmond, Virginia, was one of the most famous. It started in the mid-1700s and continued until the start of the Civil War. Chief Justice John Marshall was a founding member. George Washington, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson attended club meetings from time to time. Club members and their guests met every Saturday or so to enjoy an “old fashioned barbecue under the trees.”¹⁰ R.T.W. Duke Sr. and his friends established the Cool Spring Barbecue Club near Charlottesville, Virginia, after the end of the Civil War. R.T.W. Duke Jr. recorded how Juba Garth and his wife, Mandy, who were enslaved until the end of the Civil War, prepared Virginia-style barbecue for the club:

The process was as follows: A pit about ten feet long—five feet wide and about 3 feet deep, was dug in the ground & filled with kindling & green wood & set on fire about 5 o’clock in the morning & allowed to burn until it became a mass of glowing red hot coals. In the mean time pigs—quite young ones—& lambs—had been prepared & tied with green withes to two green poles about 6 or 7 feet longer than the pit was wide. They were then stretched over the coals & basted with melted butter in which some boiling water—salt & pepper were mixed. Two men were assigned to each animal, one on each side of the pit & turned the carcass over & over whilst a “baster” basted it with the melted butter.¹¹

In 1875, the “Father of American Fly Fishing,” Thaddeus Norris, wrote about three types of Virginia barbecues that existed before the start of the Civil War.12 One was what he called “the little squirrel barbecue.” This was a summertime barbecue held by a small company of friends after a morning of hunting. Hunting commenced at daybreak and continued until about ten o’clock in the morning. At that time, the small band of hunters would head to an appointed place near a cool stream or spring. They used the spring to chill foods and drinks. They constructed a wooden hurdle using sticks just as the Powhatan Indians first taught Virginians to construct in the early seventeenth century. A barbecue hurdle is what we would call today a wooden barbecue grill that rests on four forked posts. They started a fire using hardwood and let it burn down to glowing coals. The young squirrels were cleaned, dressed, seasoned and set on the barbecue hurdle over the coals. They barbecued the young squirrels slowly until they were tender and juicy. The hunters took the “old squirrels” home and used them to make Virginia-style squirrel soup.

Another type of Virginia barbecue mentioned by Norris is the community barbecue. This type of barbecue was often accompanied by a fish fry. Many people from all around the community attended these barbecues, and everyone who could afford to do so contributed labor, equipment and foods for the events. Large barbecue pits were dug over which a wooden hurdle was placed. Muttons, shoats (young pigs), squirrels and other meats were barbecued. Expert cooks prepared squirrel soup in large kettles seasoned with “onions and smoked middling,” which is the original Virginia-style Brunswick stew recipe. The events were very festive, with good food, fellowship and games such as card playing and horse racing.

Tender, mouthwatering Virginia pork barbecue slathered with Virginia’s Southside-style barbecue sauce. Author’s collection.

The third type of Virginia barbecue mentioned by Norris is what he called the “Ladies Barbecue,” or the “Dancing Barbecue,” where “matrons and maidens who danced were invited to attend.” R.T.W. Duke Jr. also mentioned a “ladies’ barbecue” in his Recollections.13 This type of barbecue was more formal than the other two types. Attendees arrived in carriages and on horseback wearing their finest apparel. Ribbons adorned the servants and music filled the air, prompting attendees to participate in “reels, cotillions, and jigs.” Sometime in the 1840s, the squirrel soup that Norris wrote about became widely known in Virginia as Brunswick stew. This kind of Virginia barbecue was a frequent occurrence “in the days of plenty ‘befo’ de wah.’”¹⁴ However, according to Norris, by 1875, the frequency at which Virginians hosted this type of barbecue had diminished.

Unlike some North Carolinians, Virginians have rarely used undiluted vinegar mixed with salt and pepper on barbecued meats. Virginians have always added something to the vinegar such as water, butter, lard, mustard and/or tomato to reduce its acidity. By the Virginian standard, eastern North Carolina barbecue sauce is too vinegary, and central Texas and Kansas City barbecue sauce isn’t vinegary enough. As Goldilocks would say, Virginia’s barbecue sauces are “just right.” Tomato in some form has been an ingredient in some Virginia-style barbecue recipes since at least the 1870s and was probably included in earlier times.¹⁵

As more people prospered and as immigrants brought new foods into the United States, the ingredients used to season barbecue changed with the times in Virginia just as they did everywhere else. Over a period of several years, Mrs. Gibson Jefferson McConnaughey researched, transcribed and experimented with old family recipes handed down from mother to daughter through six generations that lived at Haw Branch Plantation in Amelia, Virginia, built by her ancestors in 1745. McConnaughey’s study of the plantation records uncovered several Virginia-style barbecue recipes—one she calls “the old way” and another she calls “the new way.” The “old way” calls for a classic colonial and antebellum Virginia-style sauce made with butter, vinegar, salt, black pepper and red pepper. The “new way” recipe reflects how Virginia-style barbecue had changed by the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. The “new way” recipe adds tomato ketchup, brown sugar and Worcestershire sauce to the “old way” recipe.16 Today, there are four main styles of Virginia barbecue sauces. There are the tangy sauces of Southside Virginia, which include a hint of mustard; the vinegar-based sauces seasoned with herbs of the Shenandoah Valley; the central Virginia sauces that are perfumed with spices (some there add a little Virginia peanut butter, too); and the sweeter, richer barbecue sauces of Northern Virginia.

VIRGINIA SMOKED HAM

Planter William Bullock (1612–1650) recorded in 1649 that there was “an infinite number of Hogges” in Virginia.¹⁷ Eighteenth-century historian Robert Beverly wrote of Virginia in 1705, “Hogs swarm like vermin upon the earth.”¹⁸ Union soldiers encountered so many hogs in Virginia during the Civil War that they called them “Virginia rabbits.”¹⁹ Some cities had to pass strict ordinances to deal with the free-roaming hogs that filled their streets. Falmouth, Virginia, was nicknamed “Hogtown.” These facts bear witness to Virginian’s long-held love for and expertise at barbecuing and smoking pork. Since colonial times, Virginia smoked ham has been a delicacy famous the world over. Author and scholar Marshall Fishwick eloquently expressed his admiration for Virginia ham when he wrote, “No self-respecting Southern pig can imagine a higher distinction than becoming, in due course, a Virginia ham—spicy as a woman’s tongue, sweet as her kiss, as tender as her love.”²⁰

As far back as the 1630s, Virginians were exporting their smoked pork to happy customers in England.²¹ By 1649, the sale of Virginia smoked pork could enable a man to earn enough money to “woo a good man’s daughter.”²² In a 1688 letter to the Royal Society of London, clergyman John Clayton wrote, “[S]wine, they have now in great abundance.” He went on to describe Virginia’s smoked pork, which was “as good as any Westphalia [considered the finest hams in Europe at the time], certainly far exceeding our English.”²³ Hugh Jones, an English clergyman who lived in Virginia for two years, wrote in 1724, “[T]heir [Virginian’s] Pork is famous, whole Virginia Shoots [shoats, or young pigs] being frequently barbacued [sic] in England; their Bacon is excellent, the Hams being scarce to be distinguished from those of Westphalia.”24 This statement not only illustrates the fame of Virginia’s smoked hams but also implies that by 1724, Virginia had become famous for its barbecue and people in England wanted to try their hand at cooking Virginia-style barbecued pork.

An 1841 Pennsylvania newspaper reporter wrote of how diners “smack their lips as heartily as I do over a good old Virginia ham that fairly melts in your mouth.”²⁵ The Daily Dispatch reported in 1858, “A delicious Virginia ham on its bed of greens, engirdled by its rim of eggs (a la Old Dominion), and a slice of chicken or turkey, might do very well for a plain country gentleman’s dinner for two or three times a week, and these could be had for the asking on every Virginia farm.”²⁶ The nineteenth-century American humorist George W. Bagby wrote in his famous 1877 essay The Old Virginia Gentleman, “[A] Virginian could not be a Virginian without bacon and greens. He must have fried chicken, stewed chicken, broiled chicken, and chicken pie; old hare, butter-beans, new potatoes, squirrel, cymlings, snaps, barbecued shoat, roas’n ears, buttermilk, hoe-cake.” Bagby continued, “He next gets religion at a camp-meeting, and loses it at a barbecue or fish-fry.”

Nicholas Cresswell (1751–1804) recorded an eyewitness account of how colonial Virginians preserved pork. Born in Derbyshire, England, he came to America seeking a better life than he could forge in Europe. However, personal difficulties and the American Revolution compelled him to return to England. He wrote about his time in America between the years 1774 and 1777 in his personal journal. While in Virginia on Tuesday, July 26, 1774, he recorded the following:

The bacon cured here is not to be equaled in any part of the world, their hams in particular. They first rub them over with brown sugar and let them lie all night. This extracts the watery particles. They let them lie in salt for 10 days or a fortnight. Some rub them with hickory ashes instead of saltpeter, it makes them red as saltpeter and gives them a pleasant taste. Then they are hung up in the smoke-house and a slow smoky fire kept under them for three or four weeks, nothing but hickory wood is burnt in these smoke-houses. This gives them an agreeable flavor, far preferable to the Westphalia hams, not only that, but it prevents them from going rancid and will preserve them for several years by giving them a fresh smoking now and then.

The first English colonists in Virginia preserved pork with salt or vinegar. However, they quickly learned that salted pork didn’t hold up well in Virginia’s hot summers. Looking to the local Powhatan Indians for inspiration, they started smoking their salted pork just as the Powhatan Indians had been smoking wild game and fish for centuries. The English salt along with the Powhatan-inspired hickory smoke turned out to be the perfect mix. In 1879, a newspaper columnist observed of Virginia’s pork smoking process: “There appears to be no limit to the time for which bacon thus treated will keep. The writer has eaten hams over twenty years old which were still fresh and sweet. Indeed an orthodox Virginia housewife does not consider a ham cured until it is at least two years old.”27

A FISH FRY IN THE OLD DOMINION

On the Rappahannock River, in the county of Richmond, is the Cobham Park Estate, and on it is to be found one of the most delightful spots for out of doors festive occasions. A large and natural arbor is formed by a noble grape vine which overspreads some trees at the foot of a high bank on the river shore. A spring of pure water is nearby, and a mint bed, fresh and verdant, is immediately contiguous.

Some three or four gentlemen, it may be, would be spending the evening sociably with one of the hospitable entertainers of the neighborhood, when among other matters talked of, a Fish Fry would be proposed, and no sooner mentioned than settled that one should take place, and a day named for the gathering. The gentlemen present were to inform some eight or ten of the neighbors, who were to furnish everything necessary for such an occasion; and each one had the privilege of inviting as many gentlemen as he pleased—so that it was no uncommon thing to see from forty to fifty persons at these social reunions.

One gentleman would furnish fine old ham, cured in a manner peculiar to this section, and juicy and delicious beyond comparison. Another would prepare a shoat. Another a quarter of a lamb. And so on, till the bill of fare would be made complete, including some choice old liquors wherewith to brew the julep, which always flows freely on such occasions. To the gentleman on whose estate the Fry takes place is usually accorded the honor of furnishing the fish, oysters, and crabs, which are invariably caught the morning of the Fry, and of course are perfectly fresh.

The eventful day at length arrives. The spot described is the one selected, and at a very early hour active preparations have commenced. A long table of rough planks is soon erected, with benches of the same material, directly under the arbor, which nature has made so complete as almost entirely to exclude the sun. A number of servants are on the ground, and are busily engaged in cleaning the fish, opening the oysters and preparing the crabs, which are all cooked on the spot, ample arrangements being made for that purpose.

Alexandria Gazette, “A Fish Fry in the Old Dominion,” December 1, 1851

In 1902, the pork industry pioneer P.D. Gwaltney Jr. discovered a smoked ham that had been hanging in one of his company’s smokehouses in Smithfield, Virginia, for twenty years. Gwaltney fashioned a brass collar for the ham and jokingly called it his pet. He took it to expositions to demonstrate the preservative powers of Virginia’s pork smoking method. Ripley’s Believe It or Not! featured the ham in 1929, 1932 and 2003. Today, the ham resides in the Isle of Wight County Museum, and it is presumably still edible.

VIRGINIA FISH FEASTS

Virginians have held outdoor fish feasts (aka “fish frys”) for centuries. In fact, the fish fry is an invention of the Old Dominion. An 1851 edition of the Alexandria Gazette recorded, “[A]mong their chief pleasures in the summer season is the Fish Fry—an entertainment known by this title from time immemorial to all lower Virginia.”28 The first Virginian “fish fry” took place on a spring day in 1608. John Smith and his men were traveling on a barge when they encountered an “abundance of fish lying so thicke with their heads above water.” Lacking nets, Smith’s men attempted to catch the fish with frying pans. That experiment failed, and Smith noted that a frying pan “is a bad instrument to catch fish with.” After trial and error, they finally found an effective way to catch the fish: they used their swords to spear them. Smith wrote, “[W]e took more [fish] in one hour than we could all eat.” Although frying pans were a bad instrument to catch fish, they turned out to be perfect for cooking them, and the Virginia fish fry was born.²⁹

Philip Vickers Fithian was born in New Jersey in 1747. He lived in Virginia between 1773 and 1774 after he became a tutor for the family of Robert Carter at his plantation in Virginia’s Northern Neck. Fithian kept a journal of his stay and often mentioned fish feasts and barbecues. He wasn’t fond of Virginia barbecues or fish feasts and often declined invitations to attend them. Fithian wrote of his response to one invitation, “I declined going and pleaded in ex[c]use unusual & unexpected Business for the School.” On another occasion, he wrote, “Ben Mr Taylor, Mr Grubb, & Harry went to the Potowmack to a Fish Feast—Come, Fithian, what do you mean by keeping hived up sweating in your Room—Come out & air yourself—But I choose to stick by the Stuff.” The excuse used for declining yet another invitation to a fish feast was “I am uncertain whether my Latinitas will not be a Shackle too heavy to allow me to favour his kind invitation.” Rain saved him on one occasion, as he noted, “I had a strong invitation to Dr Thompsons Fish-Feast, but the Rainy Weather hindred [sic].”30

An advertisement for a gander pull, fish dinner and barbecue at Petersburg, Virginia, circa 1828. Courtesy Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia.

In 1824, Henry C. Knight, author of Letters from the South and West, described Virginia fish feasts as events that could get rowdy at times. Just as it was with barbecues, Virginians were sure to hold a shooting match before the party was over. Knight wrote, “They sometimes meet, and shoot at a target for a fish-fry. Fish-fries are held about once in a fortnight, during the fish season; when twenty or thirty men collect, to regale on whiskey, and fresh fish, and soft crabs just out of their sloughs, cooked under a spreading tree, near a running stream, by the slaves. Here you may see a forester upsnatch a perch by the gills, and, at one quick drawing through the teeth, strip it clean from the spine; then up with another, and so on to the end.”³¹ Such behavior could explain Fithian’s distaste for the events. However, in 1791, a Frenchman named Ferdinand Bayard traveled through Maryland and Virginia. He described fish feasts as being wholesome events.³²

VIRGINIA FISH FRY—BILL OF FARE—JULY 4, 1833

Mr. B.—one quarter of a lamb, and drum fish; one gallon of whiskey.

Mr. N.—four bottles of wine; two bottles of old whiskey; oysters, crabs, corn bread, peach.

Mr. W.S.—lard and pig, and brandy.

Mr. B.—a middling of bacon, bread, a quarter of a lamb, two bottles of brandy.

Mr. M.—one gallon of brandy and nutmegs, and what he pleases.

Mr. B*******—drum fish and crabs.

Mr. G.S.—drum fish.

Dr. B.—loaf bread, loaf sugar.

Dr. S.—spirits and sugar; and professional services, if need be, gratis.

Mr. R.W.C.—old ham and suet.

Mr. L.—spirits, one gallon.

American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine (August 1833)

In 1833, the American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine published an article about a Fourth of July fish feast held in Warsaw, Virginia, in which the author described them as parties where good food and good friends gathered for good-humored fun. Like barbecues, people attended fish feasts from all walks of life. A nearby spring made the occasions even more festive. Just in case the rowdy behavior got out of hand, medical services were provided free of charge.33 Fresh fish weren’t the only foods served at fish feasts, as a 1905 edition of the Richmond Times-Dispatch described. While one group was catching the fish and cleaning them, another group was serving foods such as ham and fried, roasted and barbecued meats.³⁴ A fish fry could be held near any body of water that could supply fish for the feast. When Spangler Mill in Floyd County, Virginia, was reopened in 1911, a fish fry was held in the Graham Grove near Spangler’s Pond. Everyone was invited, and all brought “baskets filled with good things to eat.” Spangler’s Pond and a nearby river were “seined for fish.”³⁵ An 1851 account of Virginia fish feasts from the Alexandria Gazette sheds more light on the events and reflects Fithian’s experience of being compelled to attend them:

DREAMY AND HAZY INDIAN SUMMER

These “fish fries” in old Virginia are not to be despised by any means. Young and old can participate and add each his quota to the day’s programme. They start early in the morning in wagons, buggies, carriages and on horseback, nobody hurries, the day is before them. They seek a shady grove near the banks of a river or mill-pond. At 12 o’clock preparations begin for dinner. Great hampers of food are opened and the odorous contents are removed to the snowy table cloths spread on the grass, and such contents!—old ham, fried chicken, chicken pie, shoat, lamb pies, cakes, pickles, literally everything, except fish.

The young people who have been fishing in full view, bring in the shinning fish, kicking, fresh from the water. These are speedily prepared and in a few moments the whole community is redolent with the frying fish. The people eat, talk politics, discuss crops, make love and flirt. The little folks romp and roll on the grass—was there ever such a time except at a fish fry?

Richmond Times Dispatch, October 1, 1905

[T]hey [fish feasts] were gatherings of very great enjoyment to the neighbors, and to all strangers who were fortunate enough to be in the county at the time; for be assured if one were known to be within anything like a reasonable distance, great pains would be taken to seek him out, and he would be pressingly invited to make one of the party.36

My father has often told me of fish feasts that he attended when he was a youngster growing up in Virginia. A company of friends and family would meet at a large pond or a lake. They used nets to catch the fish. They started a cooking fire and fried the fish in iron skillets. Everyone enjoyed the delicious meal with good company.

VIRGINIA HOECAKE

From the earliest colonial days, hoecake made with cornmeal (Indian hoecake) or wheat flour (English hoecake) has been a favorite bread in Virginia. Hoecake was so prevalent in colonial and Federal-era Virginians’ diets that in 1793, American poet and diplomat Joel Barlow observed in his poem “The Hasty Pudding” that hoecake is “fair Virginia’s pride.”

Hoecake recipes in Virginia have changed over the centuries. Some call for hominy, some rice flour, some cornmeal and some a mixture of cornmeal and wheat flour, and others call for just wheat flour. The most basic recipe for hoecake is simply cornmeal and water. Indian women taught colonists in Virginia how to prepare hominy and cornmeal and how to use them to make hoecakes, tamales (called “dainties” by Virginians), corn mush and grits just as they would teach the English settlers in Maryland after that colony was established.³⁷ British explorer and author Thomas Anburey recorded in his diary in the eighteenth century, “Hoe-cake is Indian corn ground into meal, kneaded into a dough, and baked before a fire, but as the Negroes bake theirs on the hoes that they work with, they have the appellation of hoe-cakes.”³⁸ Although it may be true that some enslaved people may have literally cooked hoecakes on hoes, that practice may not fully explain how the cakes got their name. They could have received their name from the unique device Virginians used for cooking hoecakes.

Old fashioned Virginia-style hoecakes made with wheat flour. Author’s collection.

Maryland-born Quaker Elizabeth Ellicot Lea wrote of hoecakes in her 1846 cookbook, “These cakes used to be baked in Virginia on a large iron hoe, from whence they derive their name.”39 In 1774, Philip Vickers Fithian, who was no doubt an eyewitness as to how hoecake was cooked, wrote that he “[s] up’d on chocolate, & hoe-Cake, so called because baked on a Hoe before the fire.”⁴⁰ In 1805, Abraham Edlin shared a recipe for “Indian Hoe Cake” that he ascribed to Captain John Smith in his A Treatise on the Art of Bread-Making. The recipe calls for making dough with corn (maize) flour, salt and water and rolling it into thin cakes before baking them on “a hot broad iron hoe.”⁴¹

The “hoe” on which hoecakes were cooked is called a Virginia “bread hoe.” In 1888, an author explained that the phrase “John Constant” was slang for cornbread baked “on the bread-hoe.”⁴² In 1880, merchants were selling new “Gold Coin Cook Stoves” with several accessories, including “2 hoe cake bakers.”⁴³ In 1890, an unusual and undoubtedly ineffective treatment for a toothache was to “slam a hot bread hoe ’ginst his jaw.”⁴⁴

The possessions listed in the will of William Mitchell, a Virginian who had moved to Georgia after the Revolutionary War, included two bread hoes that he brought with him from Virginia. Writing about them in 1901, an editor commented, “Many of your readers have heard of the hoe cake, but few of them ever saw a bread hoe on which it was baked.”⁴⁵ In 1953, the Daily Times-News printed an article about a Mrs. William Russell Rogers, who arranged flowers in her home on an “old fashioned oblong corn bread ‘hoe.’”46 Although forgotten by most today, the bread hoe was a fairly well-known device in colonial and Federal Virginia. The earliest mention of the device is from 1771, when John Greenhow’s store in Williamsburg, Virginia, advertised “Bread Hoes” for sale.⁴⁷ Among the equipment found in her mother’s plantation kitchen, Martha McCulloch Williams, the author of Dishes and Beverages of the Old South, listed “a biscuit-baker,” “waffle-irons” and “a hoe-baker.”⁴⁸

The “bread hoe” was a Virginian device. European as well as colonial American bakers used a “baking hoe” to scrape up ashes from their ovens, but this is not the same device as a bread hoe.⁴⁹ Another colonial and Federal-era cooking pan that resembles the bread hoe is the “bake-iron.” Like the bread hoe, the bake-iron was a flat iron pan. However, unlike the bread hoe, it had an iron handle that allowed it to be suspended on a hook over the cooking fire. While in his nineties, Virginia-born John Jay Janney (1812–1907) recorded everything he could remember about life in early nineteenth-century Virginia. He wrote about Virginia hoecake, “But what some thought was the best was the ‘hoecake.’ We did not bake it before the fire on a hoe but on the bake iron in a large cake about half or three quarters of an inch thick, and baked on both sides.”⁵⁰ The “hoe” referred to by Janney was a bread hoe, not a farm tool. In the November 28, 1886 edition of the Cleveland Leader, Virginia-born author Marion Harland described Virginia bread hoes as being “round, broad, with a short, stout handle like that of a frying-pan, and had a rim around the edge about an inch in height. Sometimes it had three stubby feet, sometimes none.”

Some theorize that the word hoecake is derived from the old English word hough, which referred to a plot of land shaped like a hill. The shape of the hill reminded people of the shape of the cakes.⁵¹ However, that theory doesn’t account for Fithian’s eyewitness account of the cakes being cooked on a hoe.

Describing how Canadian Indians prepared corn cakes in the 1530s, the French explorer Jacques Cartier wrote that they pounded the corn into flour using wooden mortars and made it into “small loaves, which they set on a broad hot stone and covered them with hot pebbles.”⁵² This is similar to how Powhatan Indians cooked cornbread and tuckahoe bread on flat, broad, oblong stones set near burning coals. American historian Edward Eggleston wrote in 1894, “The cake which the Indians baked on a hot stone was cooked in New England on a pewter plate, set half on edge before the fire; but the Southern pioneer’s wife baked it on a hoe kept for the purpose, calling it a ‘hoe-cake.’”⁵³

Mary Randolph (1762–1828) is the author of a cookbook titled The Virginia Housewife. She was born in Goochland County, Virginia, and had family ties to Thomas Jefferson. According to culinary historian Karen Hess, Randolph’s cookbook was the most influential cookbook of the nineteenth century. Randolph’s recipe for journey cake (a New England version of hoecake) is the only recipe in her cookbook that calls for food to be cooked on a wooden board set aslant before a fire.54 One can only guess as to why Randolph chose a recipe for New England’s journey cake rather than Virginia’s hoecake. Anne Howe’s 1839 cookbook, The American Housewife, contains recipes for both journey cakes and hoecakes. That fact strongly implies that in earlier times, Americans differentiated between the two. At some point, cookbook authors started to regard hoecake and journey cake as different names for the same recipe. A hoecake recipe printed in an 1895 edition of the New England Kitchen Magazine instructs us to cook the cakes on a “floured board” that is “slanted before the open fire.” If no board is available, the author continues, hoecakes can “be baked on a smooth flat stone.” The author pointed out that cooking hoecake on a board or a rock is “the original fashion.”⁵⁵

Powhatan Indian–style hoecakes at the re-created Powhatan Indian village at Jamestown Settlement living-history museum, Williamsburg, Virginia. Author’s collection.

The techniques for cooking hoecake and journey cake were adopted from Native Americans. Powhatan Indians used stone and wooden garden hoes, and those tools may have performed double duty as “bread hoes” in Powhatan kitchens.56 Multipurpose tools were not unheard of among Native Americans. Archaeologists in Texas discovered stone tools used by Native Americans that served double duty as griddles used for cooking.⁵⁷ The Powhatan Indian griddles made of flat stones could very well be the inspiration for the Virginia bread hoe. Although similar, it appears that recipes for New England journey cake and the Virginia hoecake developed independently of each other. In New England, Native Americans and colonists cooked the cakes on planks propped up beside the cooking fire. In Virginia, Native Americans cooked them on flat stones, and colonists cooked them on flat bread hoes that mimicked the Powhatan stone griddles. The interchangeableness of the names probably developed merely from the similarities of the recipes.

Tuckahoe, also known as the “Virginia truffle,” is a tuber that Powhatan Indians used to make bread.⁵⁸ The American scholar James Hammond Trumbull wrote of tuckahoe, “The word is not derived from the Indian word for ‘bread’ but the word for loaf or cake…and signifies that which is made round, or rounded.”⁵⁹

In colonial times, English colonists learned to mix tuckahoe with corn or rice flour to make little round cakes called “Indian bread.”⁶⁰ This practice implies that the name for these Indian tuckahoe cakes could have eventually been shortened from “Indian tuckahoe cakes” to “Indian hoecakes” and, finally, “hoecakes.” This is supported by the fact that Virginians living in the Tidewater region came to be known as “Tuckahoes” because of their great fondness for hoecakes.⁶¹

Some have conjectured that the word hoecake is a mispronunciation of the word nocake. The evidence for that theory comes from the writings of William Wood, who lived in New England from 1629 to 1633, and a Puritan named Roger Williams. In 1635, Wood wrote about an Indian food called “nocake” described as “the best of their victuals for their journey.” It was corn that had been “parched in hot ashes” and beaten to powder. They carried it in sacks they wore on their backs. The custom was to eat three “spoonefulls” of it three times a day. In 1643, Williams wrote that “[n]okehick” was “[p]arch’d meal, which is a readie very wholesome food, which they eate with a little water, hot or cold.”⁶²

Others have conjectured that the name “journey cakes” is a nickname for the eat-on-the-go nocake. “Johnnycakes,” some claim, may be a distortion of the name “journey cakes.”⁶³ Alternatively, others claim that “johnnycakes” refers to the New England version of hoecake because the name “Johnny” has long been associated with New England.64 However, New England’s Indians ate nocake as a dry powder washed down with water. There was no “cake” (no pun intended) involved. The eastern Algonquian word nocake doesn’t mean the same thing as the English phrase “no cake.” The similarity of pronunciation is purely coincidental.

In addition to hoecakes, Powhatan Indians cooked what we call today tamales. John Smith described the Powhatan process: “Their corne they rost [roast] in the eare greene, and bruising it in a morter of wood with a Polt, lappe it in rowles [rolls] in the leaves of their corne, and so boyle it for a daintie.”⁶⁵ Just as these dainties are Virginian tamales, hoecake is Virginia’s version of the Mexican tortilla, the Venezuelan arepa and Indian frybread. The recipes and cooking methods for all of those are very similar and exhibit clear Native American origins. In fact, frybread is essentially a hoecake recipe that is fried in grease rather than baked on a griddle. Like tortillas, frybread and arepas, hoecakes are round in shape and may be thick or thin. For example, in 1856, a restaurant in Washington, D.C., advertised “thin hot Corn Hoe Cakes.”⁶⁶ Powhatan Indians used to make “round balls and cakes” as well as “flatt” cakes using cornmeal or hominy.⁶⁷ “Thin” and “flat” are characteristics shared by hoecakes, tortillas, arepas and frybread regardless of whether the cakes are made with corn or wheat or a mixture of the two.

Powhatan Indian–style tamales, called Virginia “dainties,” at the re-created Powhatan Indian village at Jamestown Settlement living-history museum, Williamsburg, Virginia. Author’s collection.

The eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century historian William Dunlap described Virginia as “the land of Hog, homminey [sic] & hoe-cake.” This description underscores the importance of smoked pork and “Indian corn” in colonial and Federal-era Virginians’ diets.68 In the late 1700s, a poet quipped, “It’s bacon, bacon, is their fare; They’d sooner choose to live on air, Than too much fresh, or too much fish, For bacon’s the Virginian’s dish.”⁶⁹ The Virginian diet of pork and hominy eventually spread to become important parts of the southern diet as well.⁷⁰

The early Virginia colonists, most of whom were men without training as cooks, did not independently develop the recipe for hoecake using a grain that many of them had never seen or eaten before arriving in Virginia. Moreover, Europeans were not aware of the process required to make hominy by boiling maize in water containing a high alkaline lye produced by wood ash before contact with people of the Americas.⁷¹ This process, called nixtamalization, releases the nutrients in corn, which protects people who eat a mainly corn-based diet from developing a nutritional deficiency called pellagra.⁷² Numerous cases of pellagra occurred in Europe that resulted from eating maize without applying the Native American nixtamalization process. Moreover, some historians have postulated that pellagra played a part in creating the conditions that caused Jamestown’s Starving Time.⁷³

The Powhatan Indians provided their “rockahomin,” what we call today hominy and corn, and the English provided the pork. Colonists, Native Americans and enslaved people of African descent in Virginia eventually became dependent on both of those two important foods. As Virginian author Roon Frost wrote, “Fondness for pork was one of the few points of agreement between the Indians and the Virginia settlers.”⁷⁴