“ . . .I used to love my crackers and buttermilk, or my buttermilk and cornbread, in the afternoon. I like to smash it all up in my glass and eat it with a spoon. But you cain’t eat in public like you can at home . . . can you?”
— Ninny Threadgoode in Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café, by Fannie Flagg
To dunk, or not to dunk? That is the question. Emily Post, may she rest in peace, came out firmly against the practice in her foundational volume Etiquette. The 1937 edition gives no quarter: “Don’t dunk, although it is an approved practise* in certain sections of the country. According to the precepts of etiquette, ‘dunking’ bread or doughnuts into coffee is rated very little above eating with a knife.”** By the 1950 edition she had altered her admonition a bit: “Don’t dunk, although it is an approved practice in lunch wagons—according to the movies.”*** But why did Mrs. Post switch the focus of her disapproval from regionalism to the movies? It couldn’t have been Alice Faye trying to persuade James Ellison to dunk his doughnuts in The Gang’s All Here, could it? And why did Mrs. Post even need to mention dunking in the first place, since there’s no reference to it in her first edition of 1922?
The answer, oddly enough, has nothing to do with coffee and everything to do with famously assassinated Louisiana populist Huey Long. Long, “The Kingfish,” started a big kerfuffle with the editor of the Atlanta Constitution about dunking cornbread in potlikker**** in 1931. Huey was an unrepentant dunker, and his Atlanta opponents fierce advocates for crumbling the cornbread or cornpone into the potlikker instead. The national uproar eventually involved a few governors and other elected officials, and The New York Times tried to get Mrs. Post to take a firm stand one way or the other.
For good or ill, the best she could come up with was the Classic Old Advice “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” According to the Times, she would not “take sides with either Governor Huey Long of Louisiana, who dunks his corn pone, or those who oppose him on the ground that the only right thing to do is to crumble it. ‘I can’t set down rules that conflict with neighborhood customs,’ she said.” But this is Etiquetteer’s favorite part of the article. “It’s better not to be uppish about, though.” Because let’s face it, people can really tell you have good manners when they don’t have to look up your nostrils because your nose is always in the air.
So that, Etiquetteer suspects, is why Mrs. Post felt she had to speak out about dunking in subsequent editions of Etiquette, and then years later, when Long’s memory had faded, pivot her disapproval toward Hollywood. However you enjoy your potlikker, Etiquetteer would still rather not hear about anyone dunking into their coffee or tea, though.
Pro-dunking populist Huey Long.
*”Practise” is how she spelled it. Don’t go accusing Etiquetteer of a typgraphical error this time.
**Pages 753-754.
***Pages 494-495.
****You’ll find a definition of potlikker here. “Potlikker” is the Perfectly Proper spelling. “Pot liquor” is pretentious and highfalutin’, and we have no truck with it.