A Culinary History of Atlanta

1

THE VILLAGE BY THE PEACH TREE

PRE-COLONIZATION

Long ago, before time was measured by calendars and clocks, the Muskogee (Creek) Indians marked a peach tree next to the Chattahoochee River as a convenient meeting place.¹ Peach trees were not common in that particular patch of forested land, and this peach tree was easy to find, described in later years by the first postmaster as a great huge mound of earth heaped up there—big as this house, maybe bigger—and right on top of it grew a big peach tree. It bore fruit and was a useful and beautiful tree.² A network of trails soon made its way to that tree, and uncounted Muskogee women picked fuzzy pink-orange fruit as sticky juice dripped down their children’s chins and hands.

Eventually, the Muskogee built a village there named Pakanahuili, literally Standing Peachtree, referring to that large peach tree that stood at the top of the hill. The Muskogee comprised the largest Native American nation in the state of Georgia, controlling much of present-day Georgia and Alabama, but it was not a single tribe. Rather, the Muskogee were a confederacy or commonwealth of chiefdoms, with each chiefdom consisting of eight to ten villages and around five thousand people who adopted sophisticated agricultural methods, rituals, art and architecture, managed by a single chief. Standing Peachtree was the main village in its chiefdom.

For ten thousand years, the success and strength of the Muskogee Nation lay in its domination of food. Food was critical to the Muskogee way of life, and the Creek women were inventive and talented cooks, to the point that every European visitor who wrote about them mentioned the variety, flavor and freshness of Creek cuisine in their writings.

Benjamin Hawkins, George Washington’s principal Indian agent in the Southeast, was continually delighted by the delicious food he ate among the Georgia Muskogee. At one Creek village in 1796, Hawkins noted that the women grew beans, ground peas, squash, watermelons, collards and onions and raised hogs, cattle and poultry. The Muskogee wanted principally salt, that they used but little from necessity, and where they were able to supply themselves plentifully with meat, they were unable to preserve it for the want of salt.³ For dinner, a Muskogee chief greeted Hawkins with good bread, pork and potatoes, ground peas and dried peaches, and in the morning, he breakfasted on corn cakes and pork. The Indians he visited had fowl, hogs and cattle and a four-acre field fenced for corn and potatoes.

Among the Native American tribes, the Muskogee Nation was particularly adept at agriculture, with women planting and gathering, while the men focused on hunting and fishing. The women dried and preserved fruits, vegetables and meat and boiled, roasted and smoked meat and fish. Barbecue—smoking meats on thin slats of wood—was the most popular Muskogee method of cooking. Any type of meat could be intended for the barbecue, ranging from alligator and fish along the coast to venison in the verdant woods near Standing Peachtree. Hawkins reported that a deer hunted and killed would be butchered and on the barbecue in less than three hours.

Early barbecue with Secota Indians. Thomas Hariot, 1585, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (2003).

Timucua men and women cultivating a field. Theodor de Bry, engraver, Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, 1591, Library of Congress.

But corn was the Muskogee Nation’s most important food. Domesticated, bred and adapted from a grass called teosinte near the Tehuacan Valley of Mexico more than five thousand years ago, corn quickly became the predominant food across the Americas. In the southeastern United States, corn accounted for 50 percent of the Muskogee diet, and hominy was the preferred way to prepare corn. The Muskogee particularly favored sofkee, an invigorating morning drink of thin hominy flavored with venison. When Benjamin Hawkins came to Georgia, one village chief presented him with a basket of corn for his horses, a fowl, sofkee and hominy.

Given the importance of food, every month, the Muskogee held a festival dedicated to the first fruits of horticulture and hunting, such as the gathering of chestnuts, mulberries and blackberries. Of these festivals, none was more important than the poskita, or Busk, to recognize the importance of the ripening of the green corn. Held each year in July or August, depending on when the corn began to ripen, the Busk celebrated collective renewal, including rites of purification such as fasting, the destruction of old things and mass cleaning and refurbishing. Then, a priest would ignite a new fire in which young men would burn an ear of the season’s first corn, recognizing that corn was a sacred plant that gave life to the chiefdom.

BY THE TIME THE white man reached the state of Georgia in the late 1700s, Standing Peachtree, that small village by the Chattahoochee, had become a notable trading post and rendezvous point due to its strategic position on the frontier between the competing Muskogee and Cherokee Nations. In the first written mention of the village in 1782, a Georgia colonel begged a South Carolina general to send troops to help him battle a group of braves who were meeting at the standing Peach Tree. In August of that year, a commissioner planned to meet with Indians at the standing peach tree.⁴

During the War of 1812, the Creek Nation split into two. Half of the Creek Nation supported the British because they feared that the Americans would continue expanding into Indian lands. The other half of the Creek Nation supported the Americans, believing that the Americans would maintain good relations with them, become good trading partners and help them prosper. The Creek Indians who lived at Standing Peachtree were among those who supported the Americans.

As a friendly village to the fledgling American government, Standing Peachtree was chosen as the site of a U.S. infantry fort, unoriginally named Fort Peachtree. Built directly across the river from the Standing Peachtree village, Fort Peachtree was led by Lieutenant George Rockingham Gilmer, and the militia named the road running from Fort Peachtree to Fort Daniel as Peachtree Road.

Though the Muskogee and Americans were allies, tensions ran high between the closely situated Standing Peachtree Indians and the Fort Peachtree militia. When Gilmer went out for the day to scout, he often baited lines for catfish and hung the lines from limbs into the Chattahoochee River. One afternoon, a Creek Indian came to Gilmer and offered to sell him some fine catfish. An argument ensued when Gilmer claimed that the catfish was from his lines, while the Creek insisted they were from his lines. The Creek Indian threatened to slit Gilmer’s throat and then ran away from the camp.

Despite these ill feelings, the village of Standing Peachtree continued to support the Americans and General Andrew Jackson. On a pleasant spring evening, Gilmer heard the Standing Peachtree braves firing bullets into the Chattahoochee River, and when he went to investigate, the warriors were going from cabin to cabin in joy and described to him exultingly as well as they could the battle of the Horseshoe, where they had fought under General Jackson. They brought home eighteen scalps.⁵ That Battle of Horseshoe Bend under General Andrew Jackson was the definitive battle of the War of 1812, in which Muskogee killed Muskogee. Some 80 percent of the Native Americans who supported the British were killed, resulting in America winning the war.

Andrew Jackson and Creek Indian William Weatherford at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. John Reuben Chapin, W. Ridgeway, 1859, Library of Congress.

The win was ultimately a loss for the Standing Peachtree braves. Within a year, Jackson forced the entire Creek Nation to cede twenty-three million acres of their land to the American government in payment for the unprovoked, inhuman, and sanguinary war fought by the Creeks who supported the British, despite the fact that the Standing Peachtree braves and many like them had supported and fought with the Americans. Within the next decade, the American government forced the Creek Indians to march westward, eventually into Oklahoma, scores freezing to death in harsh climates they had never before experienced. By 1821, the village of Standing Peachtree was empty and there were no Muskogee Indians left in the great wild woods of north Georgia.

But the present cannot shake the past. The vestiges of ten thousand years of Native American life continue in modern-day Atlanta. Cornbread and hominy are essential southern staples. Sofkee lives on as grits. Indian corn bread, known as hoecake, is frequently served with collards. Boiled cornbread or Indian fritters are called hush puppies and served with fried catfish in both that age and this. Southerners cook their beans and field peas by boiling them, as did the Native Americans. Barbecue, Georgia’s most prized meal, has not changed much in five thousand years.

Most telling, Peachtree Street, the iconic road that runs through the heart of the capital of the South, was named after the original Standing Peachtree village, in turn named after that massive peach tree that bore ripe sweet fruit by the banks of the Chattahoochee River.

From then to now, Atlanta is the city built on food.

HOMINY AND GRITS

The Muskogee Indians made a significant contribution to Atlanta’s food by introducing hominy and grits. At their heart, both hominy and grits are simple foods, requiring only boiling three ingredients—coarse cornmeal, salt and water—while a dab hand at the stove prevents lumps, graininess and unevenness. The difference is in the preparation.

The Muskogee Indians favored hominy. They prepared hominy by soaking corn kernels in an alkaline mixture of wood ash and water that made a natural lye. The caustic lye ate away the exterior skin of the corn, in a process known as nixtamalization, leaving the soft, plump interior behind. This nixtamalization process adds niacin to the corn and helps balance essential amino acids in the body, resulting in a healthy and versatile meal. Women then dried the hominy, ground it into coarse meal and boiled it with water, milk or butter to turn into grits or thinned it with venison flavoring to make sofkee.

While early American pioneers ate hominy, grits were much simpler to prepare, since grits required only drying corn and grinding the kernels with the exterior skin between stones to create fine cornmeal, something even a farmer could do without much trouble if he lived far away from a mill.

As Atlanta grew, hominy became the staple food for both the pioneers as well as the slaves. In Georgia, the standard ration given to slaves was a single peck of corn a week with perhaps a small quantity of salt, meaning that cornmeal made up the vast majority of the slaves’ diets. During the Civil War, cornmeal was the primary grain furnished to the Confederate troops.

After the Civil War, Atlantans still ate a great deal of hominy and grits. In 1867, Mrs. A.P. Hill included several recipes that were clearly Native American in origin in her cookbook, including hominy, a bread made from hominy and grits.

Ley (lye) hominy. To a gallon of shelled corn, add a quart of strong ley (lye). Boil together until the husks begin to come off the corn; rub the grains of corn between the hands and entirely remove the husk; wash it well, and boil in plenty of water until the grains are soft. It requires long boiling. As water may be needed, replenish with hot water. Boil in it sufficient salt to season. When nearly done, stir it from the bottom to prevent its burning. Before using it, mash it slightly with a wooden mallet, and fry in a small quantity of lard or butter.⁶

Emma Patterson, an Atlanta resident, born in 1901, remembered that when she was a child, she would make hominy by skinning corn with Red Seal lye. We’d boil the corn in that and when it got done then we’d take it and wash it and rub every one of them husks out of it and we’d put it in big containers.⁷

In 1928, Henrietta Dull, known professionally as Mrs. S.R. Dull, provided the following recipe for hominy grits:

Hominy

1 cup of hominy (grits)

4 cups of boiling water

2 teaspoons of salt

Pour the hominy into the boiling water and stir until it comes to a good boil. Lower the fire or pull to a slow boiling point on range. Cover and boil slowly for one hour, stir frequently. When ready to serve, put a small lump of butter into the hominy and beat well for several minutes.

The beating whitens and makes the hominy much lighter.

Half a cup of hot milk or thin cream in place of butter can be used.… Hominy to be the best must be stirred often while cooking.

Hominy and grits consumption has steadily decreased over the last century, with hominy now barely registering as a consumed grain. In 1909, 4.5 pounds of hominy and grits were consumed per capita in the United States; in 1997, 2.6 pounds of hominy and grits were consumed per capita, and the numbers continue to dwindle. The consumption is also largely racially and socioeconomically divided. A 1986 study found that low-income families were five times more likely to eat grits than their wealthier neighbors. A New York Times study found that grits appeared in only 11 percent of kitchens in white families, whereas 51 percent of black families had grits in their kitchens.

Today, in Atlanta, though it is rare to find hominy in restaurants, grits continue to be a popular breakfast side, and shrimp and grits has been adopted from the Lowcountry region in Atlanta’s top seafood restaurants.

2

WHISKEY DENS AND GINGERBREAD

TERMINUS AND MARTHASVILLE: 1821 TO 1847

When the American government pushed the Creek Indians out of northern Georgia, the area surrounding Standing Peachtree did not even have a name, but it became a rough frontier town. Prior to 1837, there was only one settler in the hundreds of acres surrounding Standing Peachtree, a reluctant pioneer named Hardy Ivy who had wanted property near Decatur, Georgia, but instead agreed to take on the land closer to Standing Peachtree.

About eight miles west of Standing Peachtree, in present-day West End, Charner Humphries and his family migrated from South Carolina and opened up the first restaurant in the area, a small tavern and inn at the crossroads of the Newnan and Sandtown Roads. Humphries named his tavern and inn White Hall because it was whitewashed at a time when most buildings would be in natural or weathered wood. The White Hall Tavern served as a tavern, stagecoach stop, general store and post office. Travelers could rent one of eight rooms from the White Hall House, get a basic meal at the tavern and walk across the street to the store.

At the very back of the store, Humphries kept a whiskey barrel on tap where cash customers were allowed to drink on the house, but for strangers or occasional visitors, it was considered good etiquette to leave a dime on the barrel head after having their fair share of whiskey. Every year, White Hall hosted a muster day where the members of the local militia gathered to perform a drill of arms with feats of marksmanship. The militia provided a yearling cow as the prize, which was then killed, butchered, barbecued and served to all the hungry men, with generous helpings from Humphries’s whiskey barrels.

White Hall Tavern was the exception, however. Most travelers and pioneering settlers had little, subsisting largely on what they foraged or hunted. Any tiny amount of cotton or corn raised by settlers was traded to the few merchants for dry goods or staple groceries, and plenty of those rugged settlers had never seen wheat flour.⁸ George Washington Collier, one of Atlanta’s founding settlers, described that period:

Why there were no towns here when I came. There was nothing except land lots and trails and corn patches. There was