were many more, minor and seasonal, foods of substance, too. On frontiers
chickens fell prey to predators despite their capacity to fly into trees, but
on settled landscapes chickens thrived and eggs were plentiful—except in
winter, when most hens stopped laying. Chickens were not so plentiful to
be common meat, however, but were reserved for special occasions. Even
then, it was usually tough old roosters and aged hens who succumbed to
the axe, and their flesh was usually better devoted to stew pots for extended
tenderizing. Virtually all families owned a milk cow or two, although south-
ern stock was notoriously scrubby. The cows usually ranged about, to be
brought home for milking or calving. Milk seems to have been common,
however, if not so abundant or reliable by modern standards. Venison and
small game were common, too. In addition to rabbits, turkeys, quail, opos-
sums, raccoons, and squirrels, southerners black and white shot or snared
pigeons and, in spring, robins (among the easiest of catches). Then there
were fish. Coastal southerners always caught and consumed many shell-
and finfish, and settled inlanders acquired poles, line, hooks, and nets, add-
ing quantities of catfish, especially, to their diets.
Haute cuisine was rare in the Old South. Instead, everyone, it seems,
from great planter to yeoman farmer to herder to slave, tried to present
great quantities and as much variety as possible at the afternoon meal
called dinner, especially when there was company. A visitor to an Alabama
big house was astounded by the plenty helped upon many platters yet com-
plained of dissimilar meats on the same plate: ‘‘always roast turkey and
ham, a boiled fowl here, a tongue there; a small piece of nondescript meat,
which generally turns out to be pork disguised.’’ But these were hardly all.
Table and sideboard groaned with ‘‘hominy, rice, hot corn bread, sweet
potatoes; potatoes mashed with spice, very hot, salad and radishes, and
an extraordinary variety of pickles.’’ The enslaved women who cooked such
a meal likely enjoyed some, if not a lot, of it. Their fieldhand sisters and
brothers did not, but except in rare cases of irrational abuse or neglect, the
black proletariat of the Old South had sufficient and healthy food. Nearly
always sufficiency and surplus alike were owing to slaves’ own initiatives—
at gardening, hunting, fishing, trading, and appropriation.^13
For practically everyone in the late antebellum South, there was a cornu-
copia of vegetables. In addition to bread in many forms made from corn,
hominy and grits from corn, wheaten biscuits, turnips, and sweet potatoes,
there were several varieties of peas in the family called cowpeas, including
blackeyed and crowder, and many beans, the favorites called string (green
beans to Yankees) and butter, a small, light green (sometimes speckled)