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Large Hominy
Put one pint of hominy to a gallon of water; let it cook very slowly an entire day; after it cooks slowly two or three hours, put it to boil gently, but do not stir it. When you wish to serve it, throw a little butter in a pan well heated, season with salt and pepper, and send to table.
This is whole hominy — big nixtamalized corn kernels, not grits — and the recipe's real instruction is the one about time: an all-day simmer with no stirring. A few clarifications make it workable.
- What "large hominy" isDried whole hominy, sold today as posole or pozole corn in Latin American markets and by mail. It is field corn treated with lime or lye to slip the hull, then dried. Canned hominy is the same thing already cooked and needs only reheating; the long simmer here applies to the dried kernels.
- Soak firstThe original says nothing about soaking. Dried whole hominy soaked 8-12 hours cooks appreciably faster, often in a few hours rather than a day; unsoaked it can genuinely take most of a day.
- ProportionsOne pint dry hominy to one gallon water is about 2 cups to 16 cups — very generous, because the kernels swell considerably as they cook and the pot is meant to sit on the back of a range all day. On a modern stove, keep it covered and top up with boiling water as needed rather than starting with quite so much.
- "Do not stir it"This is the hinge. Stirring breaks the kernels and turns the pot starchy and gluey; hominy is wanted whole and separate, each grain split open like a flower. Move the pot, not the spoon.
- Very slowly, then gentlyThe two stages describe range heat, not a distinction you need to fuss over: hold the water at a bare shiver for the first hours, then a lazy simmer with occasional lifting bubbles. A heavy pot, a low burner, or a 300F oven all achieve it; so does a slow cooker on low.
- Salt at the endNote that seasoning happens in the finishing pan, not the pot. Salt added early is often said to slow softening, though the recipe gives no reason for the order.
- DonenessThe kernels should be fully tender and burst open, chewy but not squeaky at the center. Underdone hominy tastes raw and starchy and no amount of butter hides it.
- Finishing and yieldDrain, then toss the hot hominy in a good spoonful or two of butter in a hot pan with salt and pepper — a couple of minutes, long enough to gloss and dry the surfaces. A pint of dry hominy feeds six to eight as a side; leftovers fry well in bacon fat the next morning.
Hominy is one of the few things in a book like this that comes directly and unmistakably from Native American cookery: the lime or wood-ash treatment of dried corn, later called nixtamalization, was practiced across Mesoamerica and the eastern woodlands long before European contact, and the word itself is generally traced to a Virginia Algonquian (Powhatan) term. Colonial and then American households adopted it wholesale, and by 1900 cookbooks routinely distinguished "large" or "pearl" hominy — the whole kernel — from the cracked and ground grades that became hominy grits. It was eaten as a starchy side dish beside meat, buttered and peppered, in the same slot a modern menu gives potatoes. The all-day cooking time is a fair record of a coal or wood range, where a pot could be pushed to a cool corner and left alone from breakfast until dinner at no extra cost in fuel or attention.