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Hominy Fritters
Prepare the hominy as for rice fritters, and serve with syrup or jam.
A cross-reference recipe of the kind that fills the vegetable chapters of turn-of-the-century books: it assumes you have already read the rice fritter entry a few pages earlier. The whole dish hinges on starting with cold, stiff, fully cooked hominy.
- What hominy meant hereIn American books of this period hominy is dried corn treated with alkali to loosen the hull, sold whole ("pearl" or "lye" hominy) or cracked fine as grits, sometimes called "small hominy." Canned whole hominy or cooked grits both work; fresh sweet corn makes a different fritter altogether and will not behave the same way here.
- The rice fritter formulaPeriod rice and hominy fritter batters run to roughly two cups cold cooked grain, one or two eggs, a couple of tablespoons of flour, a pinch of salt and just enough milk to bring it together. Keep it thick enough to hold its shape on a spoon; a loose batter spreads and falls apart in the fat.
- Cold and stiff, not warmHominy cooked and used while still hot will slump. Cook it the day before, or spread it in a shallow pan and chill it until firm enough to cut. The original writes out no method at all, and this is the step most likely to decide whether the fritters hold.
- Grits need extra cookingIf you are starting from dry grits, cook them longer and thicker than for breakfast porridge, and salt them properly. Undercooked hominy stays gritty and will taste raw in the middle of a fritter.
- Frying temperatureDeep fat at 365F, or a half-inch of oil in a heavy skillet over medium-high heat. Fry in small batches so the fat does not drop below about 340F, and drain on paper or a rack rather than a plate.
- Syrup or jam"Syrup" in this context would usually mean cane, sorghum or maple; commercial corn syrup was only beginning to appear as a table syrup in this period. Fritters of this kind turn up at breakfast and supper as well as beside a main dish.
- YieldWorking from a batter of the kind described above, two cups of cooked hominy will give roughly twelve to fourteen fritters, enough for four. They do not reheat well; fry them to order.
Hominy came into Anglo-American cooking directly from Native practice, the corn steeped in wood-ash lye or slaked lime to loosen the hulls, a process now generally called nixtamalization. By the nineteenth century it was a staple grocery item across the eastern and southern United States, sold whole or cracked, and cookbooks treated it as a starch as ordinary as rice or potatoes. The fritter itself belongs to the frugal habit that runs through the vegetable chapters of books like this one: yesterday's cooked grain, bound with an egg and a little flour, dropped into hot fat and served sweet. That the compiler saw no need to write out the method twice tells you how routine both rice fritters and hominy were in the household kitchens the book was written for.