Entry · catalog no. 4329
hoecake
/ /ˈhoʊkeɪk/ /HOH-kayk
noun · US South · 1720s
✓ Verified
1.
A flat cake of cornmeal and liquid cooked on a griddle, a skillet, or in the ashes. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century version was cornmeal, water, and salt — a ration food, made daily. The modern one is enriched with flour, egg, and sugar and comes out closer to a pancake.
“Plantation corn bread, or hoe cake — take one quart of meal and boiling water enough to wet it.”
Origin & Attribution
Not a Black coinage, and the entry says so. The food is an Algonquian preparation that English colonists on the Carolina and Chesapeake coast adopted, and the word is in a Virginia planter's diary by 1720. What is Black about it is everything after that: hoecake became the daily bread of enslaved people across the South, and the cooking knowledge, the technique, and the survival of the dish into the present run through Black Southern kitchens. The best receipt is Abby Fisher, born enslaved in South Carolina around 1832, who could not read or write and dictated What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking in San Francisco in 1881 — one of the two earliest known cookbooks by a Black American woman. Her recipe is headed Plantation Corn Bread or Hoe Cake. Mount Vernon sells hoecakes as George Washington's favorite breakfast; Washington did not staff that kitchen.
1720
Earliest OED evidence, in the diary of William Byrd of Virginia
1770s
A British soldier records that Negroes bake it on hoes that they work with
1881
Abby Fisher publishes Plantation Corn Bread or Hoe Cake
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The South
US South · 1720s
Spoken by
Enslaved and freed Black Southerners; still on soul food menus
$HOECAKThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady306 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
60/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1720
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@nolakid
New Orleans, LA
@htxdri
Houston, TX
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking, Abby Fisher, Women's Co-operative Printing Office, San Francisco, p. 11 — cookbook · 1881
book
■
"How the Hoe Cake (Most Likely) Got Its Name," Rod Cofield, Food History News — scholarship · 2008
published
■
+ Cite a sourceOxford English Dictionary, hoecake n., earliest evidence 1720 — reference · 1720
researched
See also