Sass means Vegetables but Why?

“The kiss of the sun for pardon, the song of the birds for mirth, one is nearer God’s heart in a garden than anywhere else on earth.” – Dorothy Frances Gurney

I have a picture of me years ago with out garden, but of course, I couldn’t find it. Instead, I found this one of Mom that I took back when I was a kid. Mom worked hard in the garden. We helped. Then she canned or froze the vegetables. We helped. And we learned. When I got married, I helped her in her garden and shared the produce or sass. Later we moved to our farm and had a garden of our own. Then my kids helped with the planting and picking and getting the sass ready to can or freeze. Now my son shares our garden here and his kids help.

My characters in my Appalachian books always have a sass patch for vegetables.  The same as it was for us when my kids were younger, they need those vegetables or sass to keep good food on the table for their families. In A Chance for Kallie Mae, Kallie is picking beans and tomatoes and worrying about a drought has her sass patch drying up.

But why is it called a sass patch?

My research told me Appalachian people called vegetables sass and where those vegetable grew were sass patches. I use it in my stories because I like having mountain lingo in the stories. Not long ago, a reader asked me why vegetables are called sass. After writing five books set in the Appalachian region with various characters picking beans and tomatoes, I decided I should try to find out.

So, here goes with some of what I found out there on the great worldwide net.

Sass – a colloquial pronunciation of sauce. Sass (n.) as a colloquial variant of sauce (n.) is attested by 1775.

Oh, and why, would sauce mean “vegetables?”

The word sauce comes from the French sauce, kin to the Spanish (and Portuguese and Italian) salsa, all of which descend from Latin salsa, which is the feminine form of salsus “salted”. Salad, also, is descended from the Latin sal “salt”, which makes it an etymological sibling of sauce.

Here’s another explanation of the term “garden sauce” found in Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book, published in 1956

In the early days of our own country, vegetables were “garden sauce” or just “sass” to go with meat. Beets and carrots sometimes were referred to as “long sauce”, while onions and potatoes were “short sauce.” A vendor who sold vegetables from door to door was a “sauce man.”

While the word sauce had Latin roots, garden sauce is an American term which  has several different spellings and pronunciations. You might find it as garden sars, and garden sarse, but the Appalachian old-timers liked sass. My characters and I do too. Sass. Sass patch.

“Gardens are not made by singing ‘Oh, how beautiful,’ and sitting in the shade.” – Rudyard Kipling

Have you ever picked sass for your dinner table or taken a hoe to the weeds in your sass patch?