Hopping John and Its Surprising Connection to Jambalaya

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The first recipes attested for two of America’s most iconic regional dishes appeared at almost the same time in the mid-nineteenth century.1 In 1847, Sarah Rutledge, a member of South Carolina’s social elite, included a recipe for ‘Hopping John’ featuring bacon, ‘red peas’, and rice in her cookbook The Carolina Housewife. Just two years later, Solon Robinson of Alabama, a regular contributor to the journal American Agriculturist, published a short article entitled “Recipes for the Ladies,” which includes the earliest known mention of jambalaya, the Gulf Coast stew of chicken to which rice is added and cooked; Robinson calls the dish “jambalaya”, but does so only parenthetically, following the recipe’s main title, “Hopping Johnny”.

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