Lighter

For the searches I used "Indian buck" food and "Indian buck" maize. Archive.org I often text search directly; it seems more reliable than google for the texts there.

It's still possible that the song is the origin of the term. The gap to the 1920s seems long to find no references. (There is a reference to Indian buckwheat from 1884 in A dictionary of English names of plants applied in England and among English-speaking people to cultivated and wild plants, trees, and shrubs" (p233). Maybe the writer just contracted Indian buckwheat for the rhyme).


There's another Irish reference to the term in some local recollections: Local Happenings. It's transcribed there "There was a plague of Cholera in this district, supposed to have happened after the Famine. The cause it is said was, that the people got nothing to eat except "indian mean porridge and the women didn't know how to cook it. It wasn't boiled enough. The old people call Indian meal porridge "Indian buck". I can't find a date for the document, but I think might be recent. The term does seem to be known in Ireland though.


I've now found an earlier reference to an Indian buck-bean. 1822: Curtis's Botanical Magazine, Volume 42 has the entry on p84:

June 198 Menianthes indica Indian Buck-bean

This appears to be a wetland flower of some kind, not maize, also known as bogbean. It appears to have some medicinal uses Bogbean-buckbean.

It's possible the writer of the song knew this term (again I haven't checked how popular it was) and found it a useful rhyme, though the context seems to indicate that a food was intended in the song.


The other song I mentioned, The Ingy Buck, has lyrics and the use of the term in this article on mustrad: The Hardy Sons Of Dan.


Mick