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To Boil Hominy
Soak in water over night, wash well next morning, and boil until thoroughly done. Season and send to the table hot.
The recipe assumes dried whole hominy, a staple that most cooks of the period bought loose by the pound and knew how to handle. The instructions omit the two things a modern cook needs: which product to buy, and how long "thoroughly done" actually takes.
- What hominy means hereThis is whole dried hominy — field corn treated with lye or wood ash to loosen the hulls, then dried. It is sold today as posole or pozole corn, often in Latin American groceries. It is not hominy grits, which are ground and need no soaking, and not canned hominy, which is already cooked.
- The long soak is not optionalDried whole hominy needs 8 to 12 hours in plenty of cold water; the kernels roughly double in size, so use at least three times their volume of water. Skipping the soak adds an hour or more to the boiling and gives unevenly cooked kernels.
- "Thoroughly done" is 2 to 3 hoursAfter soaking, simmer gently in fresh water until the kernels burst open and flower at one end and the centres are tender rather than chalky. Two to three hours at a bare simmer is normal; older, drier corn can take longer. A pressure cooker does it in about 35 to 40 minutes at high pressure.
- Salt at the endThe recipe says only "season"; for boiled hominy that ordinarily meant salt, pepper and butter. Salt is traditionally added in the last half hour, on the common (though disputed) grounds that salting from the start keeps the kernels from softening.
- Keep it covered with waterHominy absorbs a great deal of liquid and will scorch the moment the pan runs dry. Top up with boiling water as needed and skim off any hulls that float free.
- ServingOne cup of dried hominy yields roughly three cups cooked, enough for four as a vegetable. Serve hot with butter, or with cream and a little of the cooking liquid; leftovers were sometimes fried in slices the next day.
- Canned as a shortcutCanned hominy is fully cooked and only needs draining, rinsing and heating through with butter and seasoning. The texture is softer and the corn flavour flatter than the dried kernel gives.
Hominy is the English rendering of a Virginia Algonquian word, and both the food and the process behind it are Native American: field corn simmered with wood ash or slaked lime so the hulls slip off and the kernel swells, the technique known today by its Mexican name, nixtamalization. Colonial and then nineteenth-century American kitchens took it up widely, and by the time this book was printed hominy was ordinary enough — North and South alike — that a cookbook could give the whole method in two sentences. It was commonly eaten buttered and salted alongside meat rather than sweetened in a bowl. The same corn survives in American cooking chiefly through Southern grits and Southwestern posole.