Long John Silver’s Hushpuppies Recipe

Make your family Long John Silver’s Hush Puppies tonight at home. Your Hush Puppies will taste exactly like Long John’s with our Special Restaurant Recipe.

Making fast food at home is delicious and incredibly healthy! You should also try my homemade versions of Wendy’s Chili, KFC Fried Chicken, Long John Silvers Deep Fry Batter, McDonald’s McGriddles, and KFC Bowls.

These tiny hush puppies resemble the ones served at Long John Silver quite a bit. The recipe card is located at the conclusion of the article.

SO DELISH! Don’t forget to pass this recipe forward to your loved ones! They’ll cherish them.

What Are Hush Puppies?

Hush puppies are golden fritters that are deep-fried to a crisp exterior and a delicate, chewy interior. They are produced from a thick batter made of cornmeal. In the American South, hush puppies are frequently served as a side dish alongside barbecue and fried fish. Balls or oblong fritters can be made from hush puppies.

Why Are They Called Hush Puppies?

The most popular legend is that when a group of fishermen or hunters started cooking their catch, their dogs would surely begin to bark and make a racket in anticipation of the feast. There is no one clear source for this tale. The outdoor cooks fried up a simple cornmeal loaf to feed the dogs and “hush the puppies” in order to keep the canines calm. Another anecdote from the Civil War claims that Confederate soldiers heard Union forces arriving one night as they were cooking dinner over a fire. They gave their howling dogs fried cornmeal treats and told them to “quiet, pups!” in order to avoid being detected.

What Are Hush Puppies Served With?

Particularly in the American South, hush puppies are frequently served as a side dish to barbecue platters and fried fish. Seafood meals like beer-battered fish, crab cakes, coconut shrimp, and handmade fish sticks pair well with husky dogs. To mop up saucy dishes like pulled pork prepared on the grill or in a slow cooker, they take the place of bread or biscuits. They taste great paired with sides like creamy coleslaw or dipped in hot ranch crab dip, homemade ranch dressing, or jalapeno tartar sauce.

What is in Long John Silver’s Hush Puppies

Hush puppies are made from a basic batter consisting of yellow cornmeal, flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, buttermilk or milk and eggs. Many recipes call for the addition of scallions or onions. The base lends itself to riffing, too, including the addition of spicy peppers, cheese, spices or even beer.

What kind of meat is in hush puppies?

How To Make Long John Silver’s Hush Puppies

How to prepare “Long John Silvers” Hushpuppies

In a bowl, mix the onion powder, flour, cornmeal, baking powder, salt, and sugar. In a another bowl, whisk the milk and egg. The flour mixture should be smooth after adding the egg mixture. For 30 minutes, cover and chill.

Until a deep-fry thermometer reads 350 degrees, heat 2 inches of vegetable oil in a big pot on medium heat. Carefully drop heaping tablespoonfuls of batter into the hot oil while working in batches. About 8 minutes per batch, fry while stirring occasionally, until brown (return the pil to 350 degrees between batches). Using a slotted spoon, transfer to a baking sheet lined with paper towels. Salt should be added. Prior to serving, let rest for a few minutes. Enjoy!

Hushpuppies Origin Myths: A Catalogue

Here is a brief summary of the different versions of the hushpuppy origin tale that are currently found in books, magazines, and the Internet’s knowledge-rich Sargasso Sea:

The most typical interpretation for this phrase is that when people went fishing, they would start preparing their catch, and their dogs would howl and yap in anticipation. It’s unclear why they brought hound dogs on a fishing expedition, but the cooks would fry bits of dough and throw them to the puppies to quiet them.

When writing about Southern cuisine, there is a persistent urge to tie everything to the Civil War (boiled peanuts, for instance). In the instance of hushpuppies, the legend claims that Confederate soldiers were eating dinner around a campfire when they heard Yankee soldiers coming and told their barking dogs to “hush, pups!”

How about an Old Mammy: While you’re creating up information about the South, why not include some derogatory stereotypes of African Americans? The dredgings, according to one persistent legend, were sent down to the slave quarters where, according to one story, “the women added a little milk, egg, and onion and fried it up.” (It appears that they had to cut back on cornmeal but had an abundance of milk and eggs.) As dogs and children cried out for handouts attracted by the smell of fried batter, “soft-hearted Mammies would give out the pones, saying, ‘Hush childies, hush puppies.'”

Get Thee to a Nunnery: In this rendition, Southerners learned how to fry cornmeal batter from the French thanks to their culinary prowess. In the 1720s, freshly arriving French Ursuline nuns in New Orleans used the Native Americans’ cornmeal to make hand-shaped patties they named croquettes de maise (that is, corn croquettes). From there, they spread throughout the South; however, the specifics of how and when that occurred are not given, and one of the various “hush, dog” explanations is typically added to explain how the French name was forgotten.

Perhaps the most peculiar are the leaping lizards. According to legend, Cajuns in Southern Louisiana once deep-fried a salamander they called a “dirt puppy.” According to one story, eating salamanders was considered low on the social scale. The diners remained silent about it.

The degree to which culinary writers lazily regurgitate these tales without making an effort to confirm their reality is simply alarming. They list them off, smile a little, and then simply shrug and say, “Oh, well, here’s a recipe!”

And I’m not just referring to bloggers or listicle creators, who you could anticipate such sloppiness from. I’m referring to authors for academic journals and contributors to ostensibly serious publications like The Atlantic, for whom Regina Charboneau explicitly rejected the necessity to go further into the issue. “It is often difficult to separate fact from fiction when it comes to the history of Southern food,” the author writes, “but with many Southern recipes the separation is not worth it, since the mythology adds a lot of charm and attraction.”

“We’re missing out on real stories that are so much more intriguing than a bunch of made-up crap if we mindlessly believe the legend about Southern cuisine,” the author says.

Balderdash. It is intrinsically worthwhile to separate fact from fiction. Being incorrect is not endearing in any way. We miss out on real stories that are so much more intriguing than a bunch of made-up crap if we mindlessly believe the legend about Southern food. Even if we remove the dialect and other objectionable accoutrements in situations like the classic mammy narrative, we are still maintaining harmful preconceptions.

A great illustration of this cerebral laziness in action is Hushpuppies. So let’s investigate their true origins.

Although they didn’t first call them hushpuppies, Southerners have been enjoying delectable balls of fried cornmeal batter for quite some time. South Carolinians were consuming what they called “red horse bread” at least 20 years before the term “hushpuppy” appeared in print. It wasn’t red, and nothing about horses was involved. Along with bream, catfish, and trout, red horse was one of the frequent fish species caught in South Carolina rivers and eaten at fish fries by the banks.

Romeo Govan, who the Augusta Chronicle referred to in 1903 as “a famous cook of the former administration,” had red horse bread in his repertoire. About five miles from the town of Bamberg, Govan resided on the banks of the Edisto River close to Cannon’s Bridge. During the fishing season, he ran his “club house” there, a frame building with a tidy yard where guests could chow down on “fish of every sort, dressed in every way…and the once eaten, never-to-be-forgotten “red horse bread”.”

One newspaper reported that the recipe for the red horse bread was as simple as “mixing cornmeal with water, salt, and egg and dropping by spoonfuls in the hot fat in which fish have been fried.” Since the term “red horse bread” first appears in published descriptions of fish fries that Govans prepared, it’s possible that he invented the phrase.

An African American male named “Romy” Govans was born into slavery in or around 1845. He relocated to a piece of land adjacent to Cannon’s Bridge towards the end of the Civil War, where he lived out the remainder of his days. The most prominent whites in the region attended his fish fries and other events, and the tips he received allowed him to purchase the house and the adjacent land.

One newspaper described Govan as “known to every sportsmen worthy of the name in South Carolina, he who has entertained governors, senators, and statesmen along these famous banks,” as a result of his talents. That’s a slightly different tale from one in which a loving mother uses hand-me-downs from a Big House to sate her pets’ hunger.

Romeo Govan passed away in 1915, but the red horse bread he made famous continued to be baked, and it eventually became a staple of fried fish dinners across most of South Carolina.

From Red Horse to Hush Puppies

Southerners were not simply cooking gallons of cornmeal batter in the Palmetto State. “Red Horse” cornmeal is frequently referred to as “Hush Puppies” on the Georgia side of the Savannah River, according to Augusta Chronicle fishing columnist Earl DeLoach, who made this observation in 1940. Since at least 1927, when the Macon Telegraph reported that the First Methodist Church’s Men’s Bible Class was hosting a fish fry, where chairman Roscoe Rouse would “cook the fish and the ‘hushpuppies,’ and serve the coffee,” they had been calling it that.

A group of vacationers fishing in Florida is where hush puppies first gained widespread recognition. An article about central Florida’s fishing at Mr. Joe Brown’s resort on Lake Harris near Orlando was published in the Harrisburg Sunday Courier of Pennsylvania in 1934. According to the author, “Brown can cook,” and his menu featured fried fish, French fried potatoes, and a delectable cornbread mixture he named “Hush Puppies.”

Soon, Key West fishing trips and articles about hushpuppies appeared in Boy’s Life, American Legion Magazine, and American Cookery, among other publications. National Scout Commission Dan Beard also wrote about hushpuppies in Boy’s Life. He published Mrs. J. G. Cooper’s “renowned recipe,” describing her as “an expert on hush-puppies.” A batter was made and baked in the same pan as the fish, using one quart of white water-ground cornmeal, two eggs, three teaspoons of baking powder, and one teaspoon of salt.

The cutesy tales frequently undersell the quality of traditional Southern foods, portraying them as examples of chefs making the best of inexpensive, modest ingredients, as we have seen with other Southern culinary origin myths, such as the one involving chicken and dumplings. However, early tales of hushpuppies and red horse bread show that diners did not view this new dish as a subpar alternative but rather as a luxury deserving of awe.

This was a novel bread to the writer, and it was so good that I implore lovers of the finny tribe to try some, said one reporter who wrote about the red horse bread at a Romeo Govan fish dinner. When a Modern Beekeeping journalist went to a fish fry, he observed, “Everyone who came to visit soon had a pencil and piece of paper in hand, recording the recipe. (The guys also were.)”

Hushpuppies Take America

In addition to “red horse bread,” Southerners called what we now refer to as hushpuppies by a number of other names, including “wampus” in Florida, “red devils,” and “three finger bread” in Georgia. But the term that caught on was “hushpuppy.” By the 1940s, word had made its way up the Carolina coast, and seafood restaurants serving beachgoers and travelers traveling down U.S. 17 toward Florida were serving hushpuppies with fried fish and steamed oysters.

Walter Thompson, a businessman from the little seaside town of Swansboro, North Carolina, made the decision to export hushpuppies to other countries in 1948. He created Thompson’s Fireside Hushpuppy Mix, a ready-to-use mixture of cornmeal, flour, and seasonings that was sold in pasteboard tubes. The label stated, “Just add water.” A Southern hot bread that is delightfully unique. Each can cost 30 cents to buy.

The Hushpuppy Corporation of America was the lofty name chosen by Thompson for his business. He made partnerships with distributors all across the South, but his biggest success came when he signed a deal with John R. Marple & Co. in Westfield, New Jersey. This company became the country’s distributor for Thompson’s Fireside Hushpuppy Mix and advertised it extensively in newspapers and on the radio.

After only one year in operation, Thompson sold the Hushpuppy Corporation of America to a group of investors, who relocated it to the larger city of Jacksonville, North Carolina. They continued selling Thompson’s Fireside Hushpuppy Mix for at least another two decades. Around 1970, House-Autry Mills of Four Oaks, North Carolina, bought the Hushpuppy Corporation of America. The company continues to sell the Original Hushpuppy Mix and Hushpuppy Mix with Onion varieties of the product today.

How about the renowned “hushpuppy” shoes? Yes, they were given the name of the Southern side dish for fish fry. The Wolverine Shoe and Tanning Corporation created a casual men’s shoe with a soft rubber-crepe sole using a novel technique for producing brushed pigskin after World War II. The genesis of the fried fritter was allegedly revealed to one of the company’s salesmen while he was eating fried catfish and hushpuppies on a sales trip to the South. He believed it to be the ideal moniker for a pair of sneakers that would “calm your noisy pets.” In America, Hush Puppies were the first non-athletic casual shoes to be introduced, and by 1963, it was estimated that one in ten people had a pair.

But rather than wearing one, I’d much prefer eat one. Nowadays, places like Mel’s Fish Shack in Los Angeles and Snappy’s Shrimp in Chicago serve straightforward hushpuppies. They are also being cheffied up by chefs, as is customary. John Stehling serves roasted corn hushpuppies with pimento cheese fondue at the premium Vintage Twelve in North Myrtle Beach, and broccoli cheddar hushpuppies with creamy garlic sauce at the Early Girl Eatery in Asheville, North Carolina.

And I don’t mind at all. This adaptable Southern symbol can withstand any level of enhancement and fanfare. For nostalgia’s sake, I wouldn’t even mind if eateries started calling them “red horse bread” once more.

However, if you try to convince me that some nuns or Confederate troops created them, I’ll advise you to keep quiet.

Some Additional Questions

Q: What are Long John Silvers hush puppies made of?

How To Make copycat “long john silvers” hushpuppies. Combine the onions, flour, cornmeal, baking powder, salt, sugar, and onion powder in a bowl. Whisk the egg and milk in another bowl. Whisk the egg mixture into the flour mixture until smooth.

Q: Are hush puppies the same as corn fritters?

Corn Fritters are savory, cornmeal-based batter with a pinch of sugar, milk and eggs mixed with canned or fresh corn. They are similar to hush puppies because they are fried dishes containing corn products. Hush puppies are made from balls of cornmeal or cornbread mixtures that are fried.

Q: What kind of oil does Long John Silver’s use?

Q: Are Long John Silver’s hush puppies vegetarian?

Are Long John Silver’s Hush Puppies Vegan? Long John’s hush puppies contain both milk and egg in the form of whey and dried whole eggs and are therefore, not vegan.