Kids Cuisine

I recently went to the Atlanta History Center to see the Ben Franklin exhibit and also learned about Civil War kitchens. I saw an actual kitchen from the late 1800s. Did you know that the kitchens back then were separate from the main house? It’s true. It was separate because about every 3 years, it burned down! So you wouldn’t want your own house to burn down would you? Another reason was because here in Georgia, our summers are pretty hot, so if the kitchen was attached, the heat from the kitchen would just make the house smelly and hot. In northern states (North Carolina & Virginia), the kitchens were attached to the main house and would warm up the house in the winter.

Popular foods back then were corn pudding, porridge, and roasted meats. Under the kitchen was a root cellar. A root cellar held vegetables in a cool place. A smoke house is a place where people hung meats and smoked them for several hours to give them a nice flavor. Farms back then had chicken coops to have fresh chickens to eat and fresh eggs to eat. Learning about foods from history lessons is fun.

Want to know how hush puppies got their name? Back then people cooked pieces of seasoned dough rolled in a ball and fried them. Well, when women were making the fried dough, dogs would sit at the kitchen door and howl for food. The cooks would yell to the dogs, “Hush puppies!” Have you ever heard of Shoo Fly Pie? Back then, kitchens didn’t have air conditioning, so when a woman made a pie, she would set it by the windowsill to cool, and of course flies would come. The cooks would say, “Shoo fly, shoo!” and that’s how the pie got its name!