IX THE SUNNY SOUTH. #> 



of plantation tidbits the negroes liked before the war. Only the old survivors can 

 tell you how a real hoe-cake used to be made. It is sung in the Old Dominion that 



"De way to bake a hoe-cake, 

 Old Virginny nebber tire, 

 Is to slap it on your foot 

 And hold it to de fire." 



It is simply a mixture of corn-meal with water and a little grease, made flat 

 and stood up before the fireplace on the back of a heavy plantation hoe. It was an 

 invention of old slave times, and is used generally to this day among the lower 

 classes. Game hunters always carried a couple of hoe cakes in their shooting 

 jacket side pockets and sat on a fence at noon and ate them with peeled turnips 

 pulled from the fields. Another favorite relish is corn pone made of meal and 

 sour milk with a little shortening. It used to be made in an old-fashioned Dutch 

 oven with a handle and cover and baked in the hot coals in the fireplace. When 

 done an expert cook seizes the pan by its handle, throws it up in the air, gives it 

 a turn and a flop, and catches it on a platter all ready to serve. Ash cakes are the 

 same as hoe cakes, except that they are cooked in the ashes between two cabbage 

 leaves or corn shucks. Boiled corn meal, called dumplings in eastern North 

 Carolina, flapjacks, Johnny cakes, corn dodgers, boiled corn muffins round, gems 

 oblong, spoon bread, egg bread, corn mush, boiled cracked hominy, kernels soaked 

 in lye and shelled corn pounded in wooden pestles constitute the main menu of 

 the antebellum colony. Sportsmen cannot readily dispense with this table d'hote 

 at home or in the open field not even in aristocratic cuisine. Good old Frances, 

 superlative cook for Major John B. Broadfoot, of Fayetteville, N. C., serves corn 

 meal to order at any given time. Likewise old Sam Hudson and the Benders, of 

 Pollokville, up Trent river, will serve an old-fashioned "boiled dinner' in an 

 inimitable manner which few housekeepers can do at this age. Moreover, it is 

 quite a trick to garnish a Christmas turkey with the very golden corn which lured 

 him up to the blind where he lost his life when the hunter shot off his head. There 

 is a host of sharpshooters and high grade anglers in that Cumberland country 

 Pemberton, Holt, Luttcloh, Morgan, Col. Mellett, and fifty others who fish from 

 clear water ponds and running streams which are rare down South, and eat plank 

 shad and shuck oysters at their inimitable club houses by Cape Fear reservoirs 

 and feeders. Rainbow trout and striped bass are common and heavy in that 

 marvelous plateau of glaciology. 



By the way, speaking of way back reminiscences, I may mention casually that 

 my large Rand & McNally railroad map, which embraced all the states of the 

 period, is a net drag to observers who discover that each line of my peregrinations 

 is marked red with my convenient pencil. It is the same on the Canadian Pacific 

 early map. Both folders include coastwise and inland routes from ocean to ocean. 

 I have added new trails each year. An active spider could hardly have spun his 

 own web with more diligent tracery. Maps of the United States are not made 

 nowadays as they used to be a half century ago. The scale of miles is different. 

 One man cannot live all over the Western country at one time any more. A single 

 sportsman may have suffered disappointment by the scarcity of birds which the ' 

 burning off the dry grass in springtime has destroyed, or midsummer drouth 

 driven off to more favored places ; yet the whole West should not be condemned 

 as barren of game. Doubtless game has disappeared by various causes from 

 localities now populated where it once abounded ; but, nevertheless, it exists in 

 widespread abundance and in remarkable variety "all over" if one can procure 



