An Indian-British-American Thing

A few folks wrote in last night asking for specifics on the Native American contributions to spoon bread. As far as I know there was no definitive Indian antecedent to spoon bread, since they did so many darn things with corn. They pounded it into meal and made porridges of various kinds out of it. Sometimes they cooked those porridges on hot rocks to make corn cakes (sometimes called nokechicks), and sometimes they dispensed with the processing of the corn altogether and just added the kernels to mixtures of vegetables. This is where succotash is thought to have come from. The British colonists took a look at these preparations, pronounced them good, and added eggs as a binder (the pudding connection). That’s about as specific as I think I can get.