Home › Pastry and Puddings › Hominy Pudding
Hominy Pudding
Prepare as for batter cakes, adding one egg to each pint, some cinnamon, a few raisins, sugar to suit the taste. Then bake just as you would rice pudding. A little butter or chopped suet can be added. Serve hot, with or without sauce. "Every-Day Pudding." -Take half a loaf of stale bread soaked in a quart of milk; four eggs, four tablespoonfuls of flour; a little fruit, dried or fresh, is a great addition. Steam or boil three-fourths of an hour. Serve with the following sauce : Butter, sugar and water, thickened with a little corn-starch, and flavored with lemon extract or lemon juice and rind.
XV. Dumplings.
Oxford Dumplings. Mix well together two ounces of grated bread, four ounces of currants, four ounces shred suet, a tablespoonful sifted sugar, a little allspice, and plenty of grated lemon-peel. Beat up well two eggs, add a little milk, and divide the mixture into five dumplings. Fry them in butter to a light-brown color, and serve them with wine sauce.
The following is one form of dumpling for apples or other fruit, and is easily prepared. The proportions are: One quart of flour, one egg, one teaspoonful of soda, one pint of buttermilk, or enough to mix your flour, and a little salt. Have ready plenty of boiling water. Roll vour dough about three-fourths of an inch thick, A
Four recipes run together here under one heading, and the page breaks off mid-sentence in the last one. Each is workable if you supply the proportions the original assumed its reader already knew.
- What hominy means hereCooked hominy or hominy grits, boiled soft in water or milk and cooled — not the dry canned whole kernels eaten as a vegetable. "Prepare as for batter cakes" means slacken the cooked hominy with milk to a pourable batter, roughly 2 cups milk to 2 cups cooked hominy.
- One egg to each pintA pint is 2 cups of batter, so a modest custard set. For a family dish, figure 3 pints of batter, 3 eggs, about 1/3 cup sugar, 1/2 cup raisins and a teaspoon of cinnamon.
- "Bake as you would rice pudding"The original gives no temperature or time. Treating it as a rice pudding, a modern oven at 325-350F in a buttered dish for about an hour, until the centre is just set and the top browned, works; a water bath keeps the edges from curdling.
- SuetThe recipe treats the fat as optional: "a little butter or chopped suet can be added." Beef suet, shredded fine, was a common enricher and gives a firmer, more savoury pudding; butter — about 2 tablespoons per quart of batter — does the same job.
- Every-Day Pudding proportionsHalf a loaf of stale bread is somewhere around 8 to 12 oz depending on the loaf, soaked in a quart of milk until it collapses. Steamed or boiled in a covered basin for 45 minutes; check that the centre is set rather than trusting the clock, since basin size changes the timing.
- The cornstarch sauceNo quantities are given. A workable ratio is 1 cup water, 1/2 cup sugar, 2 tablespoons butter and 2 teaspoons cornstarch slaked in cold water, simmered until clear, then the lemon added off the heat so the flavour holds.
- Oxford dumplingsGrated bread is fresh breadcrumbs from a stale loaf, not dried crumbs, which absorb far more liquid. The five dumplings are fried, not boiled, so keep them small and the butter at a steady medium heat — high heat browns the outside before the egg sets through.
- The unfinished fruit dumplingThe text stops after "roll your dough about three-fourths of an inch thick." The intent is plain enough: cut rounds, wrap each around a peeled and cored apple or a spoonful of fruit, pinch shut, and drop into hard-boiling water for about 25 minutes. Note that the soda needs the buttermilk's acid to lift, so buttermilk is not optional.
- YieldThe hominy pudding as scaled above serves six; the Every-Day Pudding six to eight; the Oxford dumplings, five as written.
Hominy is nixtamalised corn — kernels soaked in wood-ash lye or slaked lime until the hulls slip — and the word is generally traced to a Virginia Algonquian term recorded by early English colonists. Cooked hominy and grits were a common breakfast dish, most heavily in the South, and turning the leftovers into a sweet baked pudding followed the same domestic logic that produced rice pudding and bread pudding: a cheap cooked starch, milk, eggs, dried fruit and spice, baked slow. The "Every-Day Pudding" name says the rest — these are stale-bread and leftover-grain dishes dressed up with a lemon cornstarch sauce. The Oxford dumplings sitting alongside them are an older English import, a suet-and-currant mixture found in British cookery books before this one, and their presence in an American household manual shows how thoroughly the English pudding tradition still shaped what a household cook thought dessert should be.