Hush Puppies & Pea Salads

I developed a couple new recipes for my vintage vegan cookbook last week — one from the 1920s and another from the 1910s.

For the 1920s, I made Hush Puppies! Yep, the good old-fashioned Southern-fried kind. There's a healthier baked hush puppy in Cookin' Crunk, so I wanted this one to be a more traditional fried version.

Hush Puppies go way, way back. But before they were called hush puppies, they were known as "red horse bread." That's because they were commonly served with a species of fish by that name. But the first printed reference — as far as I can tell — to "hush puppies" was in 1927, when the Macon Telegraph, a Georgia newspaper, reported that a men's bible class was hosting a fish fry and serving "hush puppies" with the fish and coffee. You can read the whole fascinating history of hush puppies in this Serious Eats article.

Basically, they're just fried balls of cornbread, but I like to add minced onion to mine to step it up a little. And I dip mine in ketchup because ketchup!

On the side, I made these pretty little Pea Salads!

I found this great website called RecipeCurio.com, and on it, they've reprinted the entire contents of a 1910 salad cookbook called The Salad Book. There are so many salads listed. Some are pretty basic, and some are quite archaic. Like this little thing! I mean, it's served in a hollowed-out lemon half for god's sake. And it's topped with mayo (vegan Just Mayo!) because that's what folks used to do for salad dressing.

Inside, english peas are tossed with walnuts, olive oil, vinegar, salt, and pepper. The lemon juice left inside the wedge adds flavor as well. Weird as it may seem, this was really good!