Henrietta Stanley Dull–or Mrs. S. R. Dull as she preferred to be called–taught at Bessie Tift College in the early 1920s. She provides detailed instructions for cooking possum in her influential and very successful Southern Cooking, first published in 1928.
More recently, Rosemary King Evans in Down Home Cuisine gives another way of preparing possum for the dinner table. She begins her detailed recipe with this clear instruction: “A live ‘possum should be penned up and fed for at least a month to assure that it is clean and fat.”
These women knew the reality of the Southern cuisine and the poverty of Southern society in the early 20th century.