Red Horse Bread
Southerners have been eating tasty balls of fried cornmeal batter for quite some time, though they didn't call them hushpuppies at first. At least two decades before "hushpuppy" appeared in print, South Carolinians were enjoying what they called "red horse bread." It wasn't red in color, and it had nothing to do with horses. Red horse was one of the common species of fish (along with bream, catfish, and trout) that were caught in South Carolina rivers and served at fish fries along the banks.
Red horse bread was part of the repertoire of Romeo Govan, whom the Augusta Chronicle described in 1903 as "a famous cook of the old regime." Govan lived on the banks of the Edisto River near Cannon's Bridge, about five miles from the town of Bamberg. There he operated his "club house," a frame structure with a neatly swept yard where guests came almost every day during fishing season to feast on "fish of every kind, prepared in every way...and the once eaten, never-to-be-forgotten 'red horse bread.'"
That red horse bread, one newspaper captured, was made by "simply mixing cornmeal with water, salt, and egg, and dropped by spoonfuls in the hot lard in which fish have been fried." Govans may well have originated the name "red horse bread," since its earliest appearances in print are almost always in descriptions of a fish fry that he cooked.
"Romy" Govans, as he was familiarly known, was an African American man born into enslavement around 1845. At the end of the Civil War, he settled on a plot of land close to Cannon's Bridge, where he remained the rest of his life. He hosted fish fries and other entertainments that were attended by the most prominent members of the white community, and the tips he earned enabled him to buy the house and surrounding land.
Govan's talents made him, to use the words of one newspaper, "known to every sportsman worthy of the name in South Carolina, he who has entertained governors, senators, and statesmen along these famous banks."
Romeo Govan died in 1915, but the red horse bread he made famous lived on, and it eventually spread throughout most of South Carolina as the standard accompaniment for a fried fish supper.