Home › Breakfast and Tea Cakes › Fine White Hominy or Grits
Fine White Hominy or Grits
Take two cups to two quarts salted water, soak over night, and boil three quarters of an hour in a custard kettle; serve with milk and sugar, or when cold slice and fry.
Two lines of instruction with a great deal left out. The vessel and the ratio are the whole recipe.
- Custard kettleThis is a double boiler — an inner pan set over water in an outer one. Grits scorch and stick over direct heat, so a heatproof bowl over simmering water, or a heavy pan on a diffuser with frequent stirring, does the same job.
- The ratioTwo cups of fine grits to two quarts of water is 1:4, which is right for a stone-ground meal that has already absorbed water overnight. Expect to loosen it with more boiling water toward the end if it stiffens before the grain is tender.
- Hominy or gritsHere "fine white hominy" most likely means dried corn broken small rather than the whole nixtamalized kernels sold in cans today. Look for stone-ground white grits; instant grits are pre-cooked and quick grits are very finely ground, so either is likely to turn to paste under this treatment.
- The overnight soakWorth keeping for coarse stone-ground meal — it cuts cooking time and gives a more even texture. Skip it only if you are using a fine modern grind, which hydrates quickly on its own.
- SaltSalt the water before the grain goes in, as directed; salting early is generally held to season the grain more evenly than salting at the end.
- Three quarters of an hourAccurate for stone-ground grits in a double boiler, and not excessive — it is a gentle, indirect heat. Stir every ten minutes or so; the finished porridge should be thick but still pourable.
- Slicing and fryingPour the hot grits into a greased loaf pan, cover, and chill until firm — several hours at least, ideally overnight. Cut slices about half an inch thick and fry in butter or bacon fat until crusted on both sides.
- YieldTwo cups of dry grits makes roughly two quarts cooked, enough for six to eight at breakfast, or one loaf pan's worth for frying the next morning.
Hominy came into English from an Algonquian word, and the food itself — dried corn softened, hulled and broken — was learned from Native cooks and taken up in American breakfast habit. "Grits" is older still, from the Old English grytt, meaning coarse meal; by the nineteenth century the two words were used loosely and often, as here, interchangeably. Buckeye Cookery came out of Ohio in the 1870s, where corn was the cheap and constant grain, and the recipe's second half is the more telling one: last night's porridge was pressed, chilled, sliced and fried, much as cold cornmeal mush and cold oatmeal were treated. Milk and sugar as the sweet serving suggests a breakfast dish rather than a savory one, though a single serving suggestion can carry only so much.