Home › Vegetables › Hominy
Hominy
Soak one quart of ground hominy over night, put over the fire in a tin pail, set in boiling water with water enough to cover, boil gently for five hours, as it can not be hurried. After the grains begin to soften on no account stir it. The water put in at first ought to be enough to finish it, but if it proves too little, add more carefully, as too much makes it sloppy. Salt just before taking from the stove, as too early salting makes it dark. If properly done, the grains will stand out snowy and well done, but round and separate.
A double-boiler method for coarse hominy that trades attention for time. Two instructions carry the whole dish: do not stir once the grains soften, and do not salt until the end.
- What "ground hominy" meansHominy is dried corn treated with lye or slaked lime to slip the hull; ground hominy is what we now sell as grits. Buy coarse or stone-ground grits, not instant, or use whole hominy and expect an even longer cook.
- The tin pail in boiling waterThis is a double boiler. Any heatproof bowl or insert over a pan of simmering water does the same job, and the point is that the hominy never touches direct heat and so cannot scorch or catch.
- QuantitiesOne quart of dry grits is a great deal, roughly 1 1/2 to 1 3/4 lb, enough for a large table with leftovers for frying. For four people, scale to about one cup dry; the recipe specifies only water enough to cover, so judge the water rather than measuring it.
- Five hours is not an exaggerationOver indirect heat the grains swell slowly, and the recipe's insistence that it 'can not be hurried' is consistent with a very long cook. The recipe attributes a 'sloppy' result to too much water rather than to speed.
- Do not stirStirring after the grains begin to soften ruptures them and releases starch, so the batch turns gluey instead of staying "round and separate." Resisting the spoon is the hinge of the whole method.
- Late saltingThe recipe gives colour as the reason: it says too early salting makes the hominy dark. Salt is sometimes said to slow softening as well, though that is less certain than the book's own stated reason.
- Water managementThe recipe says only to add more water carefully if the first quantity proves too little. Given the no-stir rule, adding it gently down the side rather than mixing it in follows from the method.
- ServingServe hot with butter, cream, or gravy. Cold leftovers set firm, and slicing and frying them in butter or bacon fat was a common second-day use.
Hominy comes to English from an Algonquian word, and the food itself from Indigenous nixtamalization: soaking dried maize in lye or lime water to loosen the hull, which also unlocks niacin and improves the protein. Colonial and then nineteenth-century American households took it up widely, and by the time Buckeye Cookery was compiled in Ohio in the 1870s, hominy in some form -- whole, cracked, or ground into grits -- was a common everyday starch, cheap, storable, and easily reheated. The book's insistence on a pail set in boiling water suits a kitchen with a wood range holding steady low heat for hours at a stretch, so a long cook cost little but a corner of the stove; the same recipe on a modern burner asks a good deal more of the cook's patience than of the fuel bill.