Sunday, June 13, 2010

Rent Parties and Fried Fish During the Depression

Fried fish, hush puppies, fries, and tartar sauce, recipes below
To make ends meet during the Depression some African Americans turned to strategies like throwing rent parties. On a Saturday night during the Depression, one could always find buffet-flats, rent parties, whist parties, and dances, where, for a small fee, one could purchase down-home food and dance to good music. Langston Hughes recalled: The Saturday night rent parties that I attended were often more amusing than any night club, in small apartments where God knows who lived—because the guests seldom did—but where the piano would often be augmented by a guitar, or an odd cornet, or somebody with a pair of drums walking in off the street. And where . . . good fried fish or steaming chitterling were sold at very low prices. This is the last post in a series I been doing on fish, I’d love to get some feedback on the stories and recipes and please share your own fish stories and or recipes from your own families. Here is a recipe for southern fried fish and hush puppies


Fried fish and hush puppy recipe: http://find.myrecipes.com/recipes/recipefinder.dyn?action=displayRecipe&recipe_id=346878

4 comments:

lamour said...

This is completely off the subject of rent strikes and fried fish but if anyone can answer this question, you can. What do you think slaves ate when fleeing the South via the Underground Railroad? What foods did they take on this long and dangerous journey?

Dr. Frederick Douglass Opie said...

Most enslaved African would have starved while in captivity if they did not supplement rations that masters distributed. Thus most foraged for berries, herbs, mushrooms, etc and hunted for small game like rabbits, squirrels, and muskrats, and they fish and dug up oysters. Most of those who escaped on the underground rail road did so from the bordering states such as Maryland, Kentucky, and Virginia to name a few places. What they ate depended on the topography and those who assisted them along the way. Common travel foods for whites and blacks included roasted sweet and regular potatoes, jerked beef, fat back, hard tack, corn bread, and fruit, especially apples. The documented history of the Underground Railroad is not very strong so much of what we know comes from putting together bits and pieces from slave narratives, autobiographies, runaway accounts, and stories in published in southern newspapers. I'm going to use this answer as a blog very soon, questions like yours often is what generates a new post.

FDO

lamour said...

Thank you.

lamour said...

I live in CT and there is a house near me that is listed as part of the underground railroad. So, I tried to imagine the New England abolitionist family welcoming the fugitive slaves with a bowl of clam chowder and the familiar piece of salt pork floating in the bowl. I also wondered if adding dairy to fish was a European phenomenon because it doesn’t seem like dairy would have been combined with fish in the African slave kitchen.