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HULLED CORN
-This old-fashioned luxury is really a delicious dish when properly prepared. Take a six-quart pail full of ashes (hard wood ashes, if possible, as they are stronger): put them into an iron kettle with three gallons of water; let them boil about five minutes, then set off from the fire, and turn in a pint of cold water to settle it. The water should then feel a little slippery. Turn off the lye and strain; put it into an iron kettle, and put in six quarts of shelled corn; put it over a brisk fire, and let it boil half an honr, skimming and stirring frequently (the outside skin of the kernels will then slip off); strain off the lye, and rinse thoroughly in several clear waters. When the lye is thus weakened, turn the corn into a large dish-pan, and turn in water enough to cover it; then rub thoroughly with the hands, till the black chits come off; rinse and strain off till the water looks clear; then put back into a clean kettle, with water enough to cover it, and let it boil; then turn off water, put on again, and parboil three or four times (it will swell to about double the first quantity); the last time boil till quite soft; it may be necessary to add water occasionally; stir often, so as not to burn at the bottom of the kettle; when quite soft, put in two large table-spoons of salt, and stir well; to be eaten with milk, or butter and sugar. It is a wholesome dish, and although there is trouble in preparing it, yet it is good enough to pay for the labor and trouble. It is good either hot or cold, and was considered by our grandparents to be one of the greatest luxuries of the table. Wheat hulled in the same way is considered a great delicacy, and a very beneficial diet for invalids, but is not so staple or nutritious as Indian corn. Smaller quantities can be prepared by using less lye and corn.
This is lye hominy — nixtamalized field corn — made the frontier way, with lye leached from wood ashes rather than purchased alkali. The technique is sound and still practiced; the variables are the strength of your lye and the thoroughness of your rinsing.
- The hinge: rinse until the water runs clearEvery trace of alkali must be washed out, and the black "chits" (the germ tips and loosened pericarp) rubbed off by hand. Under-rinsed hominy tastes soapy and bitter; the repeated parboils in the original are not fussiness but the actual method.
- Quantities and yieldSix quarts of dry corn is an enormous batch — it doubles in volume, so expect roughly three gallons of finished hominy. The recipe's closing line is the practical one: scale down proportionally, keeping the book's ratio of corn to lye water (six quarts of corn to three gallons).
- Ash and lye strengthA "six-quart pail full of ashes" is loose volume, not weight, and the resulting lye strength varies with the wood. The book's test is the right one: the cooled liquid should feel slippery between the fingers. (The egg-float test sometimes quoted for ash lye belongs to soap-making, where a far stronger lye is wanted, and is not what this recipe asks for.)
- Use clean hardwood ash onlyAsh from painted, stained, pressure-treated or plywood scrap, and from charcoal briquettes, carries binders, glues and metal salts into the lye. Only ash from untreated hardwood is fit for this.
- Handle the lye as causticEven weak potash lye will irritate skin and eyes and will damage aluminium. Use the iron kettle the recipe calls for or stainless steel, wear gloves for the pouring and straining, and do the hand-rubbing only after the corn has been rinsed in several clear waters as directed.
- The cornThis wants dry mature field or dent corn, not sweet corn and not popcorn. Whole dried dent corn sold for hominy or posole is the correct thing; sweet corn has neither the starch nor the hull for it.
- Modern equivalent alkaliCooks who do not have wood ash use food-grade calcium hydroxide, sold as pickling lime or cal; published proportions vary, so follow a tested recipe or the package direction. It acts on the pericarp in much the same way and gives a measurable, repeatable strength, though it is a milder alkali than potash lye.
- Timing and finishThe half-hour boil in lye loosens the skins; it does not cook the corn. The subsequent parboils are where the tenderness comes from, and soft hominy generally takes two to three hours of simmering with water added as it goes. Salt at the end, as written.
- ServingHot with milk, or with butter and sugar as suggested, or drained and fried in bacon fat. Finished hominy keeps several days refrigerated and freezes well, which makes the large batch less unreasonable than it looks.
Treating maize with an alkali ut , wood ash, lime, or lye em is a Mesoamerican technique thousands of years old, known by the Nahuatl-derived word nixtamalization; it loosens the hull, softens the kernel, and, as later nutritional science established, frees the niacin that raw corn holds in a form the body cannot use. Colonists in North America learned the ash method from Native neighbours, and "lye hominy" or "hulled corn" became a winter staple across the eastern states, sitting alongside samp and grits in the household repertoire. The nineteenth-century record treats it as something already nostalgic em "this old-fashioned luxury," a dish its readers' grandparents prized. The note that hulled wheat suits invalids reflects the period's faith in soft, bland, thoroughly cooked grains as sickroom food.