Lois F Clark
the meat when tender, leave samp and beans to simmer until 6 P.M.
Corned beef may be sliced cold, and put back to warm.
This is very fine. The recipe I got from a lady who had it handed down for three generations. "Samp" is the old-fashioned name for hominy, and one should get the whole kind.
Los F Clack
This is the tail end of a longer entry — the opening quantities are missing — but what survives is a recognisable New England samp-and-beans, a slow all-day pot thickened by whole hominy and enriched with corned beef. The points below fill in what the fragment assumes its reader already knew.
- The recipe is incompleteNo quantities, pot size or starting instructions survive on this page. Treat it as a method rather than a formula: dried beans and whole samp, water, and corned beef, with the proportions lost.
- Samp is not gritsSamp covered coarsely broken corn as well as whole hulled corn (maize treated with lye or wood ash to slip the skins, then dried). The "whole kind" the author insists on corresponds to what is sold today as dried hominy or posole. Grits, hominy grits and cornmeal are all ground and will dissolve into mush over this cooking time.
- Soak both the corn and the beansDried whole hominy wants an overnight soak and can still take three to four hours of simmering to go tender. The beans are usually soaked separately overnight.
- The clock in the originalWater on at 9 in the morning, everything down to a bare simmer until 6 at night — around nine hours. On a modern burner, the lowest setting with a heat diffuser holds the same gentle heat without scorching the bottom.
- Add the beef by feel, not by clockThe instruction is to take the meat out when tender and let the samp and beans carry on. A 3-4 lb corned brisket is done in three to four hours; leaving it in for the full nine will shred it into threads.
- Salt last, if at allCorned beef gives up a great deal of salt into the pot over nine hours. Season only after the beef has come out and the beans are soft.
- LiquidA long simmer loses a lot of water. Keep a kettle of hot water beside the pot and top up rather than letting the mixture catch and stick.
- Yield and servingServing -- The dish is served as a thick porridge with the sliced beef laid over or beside it; the note about slicing the beef cold and returning it to warm is a sensible way to get clean slices from meat that has gone soft.
Samp is one of the oldest loan words in American cooking — generally traced to the Narragansett nasàump, a dish of coarsely broken corn boiled soft, recorded by Roger Williams in seventeenth-century Rhode Island. From there it became a fixture of southern New England and Long Island households, where samp and beans simmered all day at the back of the stove with a piece of salt or corned beef was ordinary winter food well into the nineteenth century. By the time this contributor wrote, the word had faded enough that she had to gloss it for readers as "the old-fashioned name for hominy."