Entry · catalog no. 4327
hoppin' John
/ /ˈhɒpɪn dʒɒn/ /HOP-in JON
noun · South Carolina Lowcountry · 1830s
✓ Verified
1.
A one-pot Lowcountry dish of rice cooked together with field peas — red cowpeas first, black-eyed peas later — and a piece of pork. West African in method: rice and beans cooked in the same pot, from the rice culture enslaved people carried into the Carolina lowlands. Eaten at New Year's for luck since at least the turn of the twentieth century.
“Among the many desirable things our parents brought us, the most delightful was cow pease, rice, and a piece of bacon, cooked together; the mixture was called by the slaves, hopping John.”
Origin & Attribution
Black rice-plantation cookery of the South Carolina Lowcountry, named by the 1830s. The receipt that matters most is community-internal: Jacob Stroyer, born enslaved in South Carolina in 1849, writing in My Life in the South in 1885, says the mixture was called by the slaves, hopping John. That is the people who made it, naming it themselves, in print. The earliest datable print attestation found is the Charleston Courier of 13 October 1832. Caroline Gilman put it in a novel in 1838 and the Courier promptly corrected her for leaving out the cowpeas. Sarah Rutledge printed the first recipe in The Carolina Housewife in 1847 — one pound of bacon, one pint of red peas, one pint of rice. Frederick Law Olmsted found it along the Congaree in 1856. The dish itself is a West African rice-and-bean one-pot, documented as such by Karen Hess in The Carolina Rice Kitchen. On the name: nobody knows. Three folk etymologies circulate as fact — the French pois à pigeon, a one-legged man named John who hopped around the table, and a hospitable planter calling hop in, John. The third is a post-bellum Lost Cause anecdote from 1899, presented even there as what local philologists assert. John Martin Taylor's verdict in the South Carolina Encyclopedia is the honest one: none of the popular explanations is convincing.
1832
Charleston Courier, 13 October — earliest datable print attestation
1847
First printed recipe, in The Carolina Housewife
1885
Jacob Stroyer names it as the enslaved community's own word
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The South
South Carolina Lowcountry · 1830s
Spoken by
Enslaved and freed Black Carolinians of the rice coast; now the whole South
$HOPPINThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady194 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
70/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1832
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.
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Citations & Sources
■
My Life in the South, Jacob Stroyer, Salem Observer Book and Job Print, p. 11 — memoir · 1885
book
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Charleston Courier, p. 2 col. 4 — newspaper · 13 Oct 1832
researched
■
The Carolina Housewife, [Sarah Rutledge], Charleston — cookbook · 1847
book
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A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, Frederick Law Olmsted, p. 506 — book · 1856
book
■
+ Cite a sourceThe Carolina Rice Kitchen: The African Connection, Karen Hess, USC Press — scholarship · 1992
book
See also