Okay--succotash

When I said in my last post that I didn't know what succotash was, I meant specifically. I knew that it was food, for example. And I had a guess, anyway, that it had come from Native American culture. But, though I'm sure people do make succotash here, because California is a crazy quilt of cultures, it isn't really a California dish, even if Richard Sherman is from Compton. So I decided that I would find out just a little more about it.


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Succotash, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, graces American written language in 1751. It comes to us from one of the Eastern Algonquian languages, and bears a resemblance to the Narragansett word misckquatash , which means "boiled whole kernels of corn", though other sources have it that misickquatash (slightly different spelling) means "ear of corn". We may never know precisely what the word meant to the people who first spoke it, because that branch of the language, like many others of the eastern tribes, is extinct. It is sad to think that the language of a whole people is remembered in only these English language traces. As a food, though, as early as 1793 it's recorded that New Englanders thought of succotash as referring to a boiled corn and green bean or lima bean dish.

A word it did not immediately occur to me might be related is "squash", which also comes from Narragansett. Not squash as in "to pound into the ground", but the food. The word was originally askutasquash, which broken down is askut--raw or uncooked, and asquash, which means eaten, the "-ash" at the end making it a plural. So according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, "things that may be eaten raw". I don't usually think of eating squash raw, but you get the drift.


Because I always feel  bad about extinct anything, languages included, I decided to do a little research about the prospects of reviving this one. Although I didn't get so far as to find anything about the Eastern Algonquian languages, I did find something hopeful, so I thought I'd include it here. Remember the movie "The New World"? Well,  director Terrence Malick, with his usual thoroughness, wanted the native people of Virginia to be speaking their real language when the settlers of Jamestown encountered them in the film. He was set back a bit by the fact that the language had been extinct for about 200 years. Set back, but not halted. He ended up hiring a linguist named James Rudes to reconstruct the language. Originally hired to write two scenes, Rudes went on to write something like fifty. All the work he did is being turned over to the Virginian Algonquin tribes. It's an interesting story and you can find it HERE.

Probably didn't need a lot of Algonquian for this scene.

No blog post about succotash would be complete without a video on preparing succotash. I picked this nice southern woman because of her pleasant voice, but also to demonstrate that this food of the Eastern tribes went on to become a Southern cooking staple. I have to say that the recipes I immediately found were pretty low on fat and meat, but the Eastern Algonquins usually made it with bear grease...

scuppernong

"Scuppernong" is a word that may be common in the American South, but as far as I know, it really hasn't made it out west. I have found it several times in my current rereading of To Kill a Mockingbird, and I can deduce a little of what it means from a couple of sentences. Here they are:

"Finders were keepers unless title was proven. Plucking an occasional camellia, getting a squirt of hot milk from Miss Maudie Atkinson's cow on a summer day, helping ourselves to someone's scuppernongs was part of our ethical culture, but money was different."

"Our tacit treaty with Miss Maudie was that we could play on her lawn, eat her scuppernongs if we didn't jump on the arbor, and explore her vast back lot..."

Okay, the fairly obvious thing is that a scuppernong is some sort of fruit. My hunch is that it is fallen fruit, but I am not at all clear whether it is all fallen fruit or some particular kind of fruit, which gains a special name when it is fallen. Well, let's see if I have gotten this all completely wrong...

Well, I got the fruit part right, anyway. But that's about all I got right. Scuppernongs are grapes. They are a type of Muscadine grapes that grow in the southeastern U.S. They got their name because they were originally found  along the Scuppernong River in North Carolina by the first European settlers of the area.

Here's a couple more things I found from this venture into the world of scuppernongs:

Those European settlers could not believe the amount of wild grapes they found in that coastal Carolinian region.

Scuppernongs, the grapes, quickly got new nicknames. "Big bubble", "suscadine", "sculpin", "bullets", which is slang for "bullis", and as it went further afield, "suppeydine" or "scuppydime". I must admit that I really like these variations.

Scuppernong, the river, gets its name from the Algonquian word "ascopo", which means "sweet bay tree".

The Mother Vine, which is of course a Scuppernong vine, contends in a pretty serious way for the title of oldest productive vine in the world. It's four hundred years old and lives on Roanoke island. Here's a little link to   other possible contenders.

Roanoke Island, though? Isn't that where all those colonists disappeared? Yep, here's a little background on that.

Personally, I don't think the role of the Mother Vine in this disappearance has yet been adequately explored.