According to a popular story, hoecakes got their name from the slave practice of cooking them on field hoes. If you've ever made hoecakes, this sounds like a near impossible task, and the appeal of this origin story is surely its evocation of the industriousness, fortitude, and resilience that defines much early American cooking, particularly African-American cooking. But the story’s power as a metaphor is stronger than its case as historical fact. As Rod Cofield, author of the paper “How the Hoe Cake (Most Likely) Got its Name,” explained to me, hoe was a colloquial term for griddle dating back to at least the 1600s in parts of England, where baking cakes on boards or griddles was commonplace.
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