Anyone For a Game of Chess?

If you look up “chess pie” on Wikipedia, you’ll find a colorful, but ultimately uncertain etymology for the term. Explanations range from a place name, in Chester, England to a piece of furniture said to store these simple pies in the days before refrigeration (that’s the explanation I had always assumed to be true). But my favorite is a simple corruption of Southern patois: It’s jes’pie.

I guess we’d call this a malapropism, a mistaken use of a word or phrase, resulting in something nonsensical or humorous (much like a mondegreen in the song world). Southern soul food cuisine is replete with this stuff: hush puppies, Limpin’ Susan, Succotash, Gumbo, And this is in the context of a seemingly limitless supply of colorful, colloquial, southern expressions that for the longest time I ignored or dismissed. These expressions were a bit embarassing, seemed somehow lacking in culture and education. Boy did I get that wrong. It says more about my limitations and shortcomings than the rich culture I was fleeing. By a long shot.

Recently, I have launched a series of posts on Instagram under the moniker “How Do You Eat in Hebrew . . .” followed by a southernism. It’s a play on the standard question, “how do you say in Hebrew.” Anyway, as part of that series, I have been doing a bit of research on southern sayings/phrases. It’s a favorite part of my day, like rifling through old photographs or dusting off a book one hasn’t read since childhood. A rediscovery of roots. Cooking southern soul food will do that to you. It’s powerful and humbling stuff.