Mystery of ‘chicken in ham gravy’ closer to solved
- Scott Daniels: We Ate Well and Cheaply
- March 7, 2021
- 978
A few months ago, I picked up a coffee table book about life in the Southern U.S. in general, and it referenced two cookbooks as Bibles of the last few generations: “The Joy of Cooking” and “Southern Cooking,” the latter by Mrs. S.R. Dull.
I wanted to get my hands on “Southern Cooking” for curiosity’s sake and started looking for a copy. It was last published in 1941, so it took some hunting, but I finally got a copy a couple of weeks ago. I expected, or at least hoped, it would reveal some serious secrets of the cooking of the old south, but the recipes are basic and could be found in any high school foods class text.
It did, however, help further solve a mystery I’ve mentioned here before: What is “chicken in ham gravy?”
In the 1930s as part of the Works Progress Administration, the government created the Federal Writer’s Project to keep unemployed writers working by sending them out into the field and recording the memories of living former slaves.
The interviewers were men and women, black and white, and the stories they collected eventually filled some 10 volumes. The people they interviewed would have been 75 or 80 years old at a minimum, but their recollections are pretty clear and detail-filled.
The full collection is too ponderous for any but the most serious researchers, but it has been edited down in a few mass market books, two of which I have read: “Bullwhip Days; the Slaves Remember” and “Lay My Burden Down; a Folk History of Slavery.”
They make for some sober reading as the people who survived the ordeal of being owned by another pulled no punches in telling their stories. They are a remarkable mix of memories of treatment good, bad and horrific told by people who were there and knew firsthand what life was like in bondage.
A recurring theme in their stories was what they had to eat. Some of the plantation owners seemed to have tried to keep their labor force well fed in the interest of keeping them at least marginally healthy and strong.
Remembering also that slaves were very expensive, there also was a dollar-and-cents motive for keeping your considerable investment in good condition. I cannot express how sickened it makes me to include that last sentence. The entire blight of U.S. slavery will always be beyond atonement.
We mustn’t think that “well fed” equaled “good food.” The slaves ate boiled greens, greasy pork, turnips, potatoes and unleavened corn cakes. They lacked seasoning, and more than one former slave told of breaking boards loose from inside the smokehouse to boil with dinner to extract the fat and salt. Their inventiveness gets my full respect and is another reminder that cooks will go to whatever length is necessary to give others something good to eat.
There are several references to “chicken in ham gravy,” so many that I’ve always wondered what that could have been. One former slave spoke of “corn cakes with onions mashed in” and chicken that was “seasoned, dropped in flour, then simmered in a pot with ham gravy until it was tender, then the lid was (taken) off and the chicken was fried until brown.”
If Mrs. S.R. Dull is any help on the matter, ham gravy seems to have been dripping from cooking a ham, rather than an actual gravy. “Gravy” was perhaps a catchall term for any kind of juices from cooking a protein, much as we refer to it as “natural gravy” today.
“Southern Cooking” includes a recipe for fried chicken that puts the lie to our modern conception of what proper southern fried chicken should be. Her recipe calls for dredging the chicken pieces in flour, throwing on some salt and pepper, and frying it all in vegetable shortening. No egg dip, no bread crumbs, certainly none of that annoying flavor to worry about.
The interesting bit is a variation, which suggests further cooking the chicken in ham dripping juices. Could this be the “chicken in ham gravy” I’ve been looking for for years? It looks like there’s some experimentation ahead.
I wish when I was a tender youth trying to land on a career idea, which never really happened, I knew being a food historian is a thing. There are few things as fascinating, to my thinking, as tracking down the history of a dish and the culture from which it emerged.
If you have any ideas about how to make “chicken in ham gravy,” drop me a note.