Important: Safety Warning
This page directs the use of hazardous substances — such as benzine, gasoline, lye, or strong acids — for household tasks. These materials are highly flammable, corrosive, or poisonous, and the practices described have caused fires, burns, and poisonings.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Lye Hominy
Make a lye strong enough to wash and drop into the hot lye. coming off and the eyes falling eat a feather. Take good sound corn, As soon as you discover that the hull is out, remove and throw into cold water.
Wash well and put the corn in a pot, allowing room for the corn to swell. Boil until thoroughly done, add salt. It is very nice fried in butter, or pork gravy, and makes a good breakfast dish .
This entry is both textually broken and chemically out of range, so the points below explain what it once meant rather than how to carry it out. The lines have been transposed in printing: the sense is "Make a lye strong enough to eat a feather. Take good sound corn and drop into the hot lye. As soon as you discover that the hull is coming off and the eyes falling out, remove and throw into cold water."
- The lye is unmeasured caustic alkali"Strong enough to eat a feather" was a real test — a quill dipped in the liquor would soften and dissolve — but it describes a solution capable of destroying skin, eyes and the lining of the mouth and throat on contact. No concentration, no volume and no water ratio is given anywhere in the entry, so there is nothing to reproduce accurately.
- Wood-ash lye varies wildlyWood-ash lye varies -- The lye here was presumably home-leached from wood ashes, and its strength depends on the wood, the ash and the leaching. Batches made the same way can differ considerably in alkalinity, which is why the feather was used as a crude assay in the first place.
- Alkali is not fully removed by one rinseThe instruction is to lift the corn out and throw it into cold water, then "wash well." Residual alkali clings to hulled corn; modern practice depends on repeated changes of water, which is not specified here.
- The hot-lye immersion is the hazardCorn is dropped into a hot caustic bath and then fished out by hand while the hulls slip. Splashes of hot alkali cause deep burns that may not be immediately painful, so the injury can progress before it is noticed. This is the part of the process that cannot be recommended in a domestic kitchen.
- What the dish actually isWhole hulled corn, boiled soft and salted — the same thing sold today as hominy or posole, and available cooked in cans or dried for soaking. A current, measured recipe should be used if you want to make it from field corn.
- "Good sound corn"Means dried field or dent corn, not sweet corn. Sweet corn varieties have too little starch and too tender a hull to survive the process, and were not what a farm household kept in the crib.
- The serving note is soundCooked hominy fried in butter or in pork gravy was a familiar breakfast starch in American farm cookery, and works as described with commercially prepared hominy.
Hulling maize in an alkaline solution is the technique Mesoamerican cooks developed with lime and wood ash long before European contact — nixtamalization — and it does more than loosen the skins: it softens the kernel, alters the aroma, and frees bound niacin, which is why maize-based diets built on nixtamalized corn escaped the pellagra that plagued those built on plain cornmeal. That link was not understood at the time; American farm households simply inherited the ash-lye method as the ordinary way to turn hard field corn into something edible, and "lye hominy" was distinguished from the pounded or "pearl" sort by how the hull came off.