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Hominy and Corn Meal Cakes
1 cup corn meal 2 tablespoons hominy 1 tablespoon butter 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons sugar 2 teaspoons baking powder 1/2 cup boiling water 1 cup scalded milk 2 eggs Mix hominy and salt and butter, add boiling water, and cook in double boiler until all the water is absorbed. Scald the corn meal with the milk, add sugar and hominy; cool the mixture and add the eggs, yolks and whites beaten separately, and the baking powder. Bake in buttered gem pans for twenty minutes.
A cornmeal muffin batter thickened twice — once with boiling water on the hominy, once with scalded milk on the meal — which gives a moister crumb than a straight cornbread. The original assumes you know your own oven and your own gem pans.
- Oven temperatureNone is given; the book leaves the heat to the cook's own range. For a modern oven, 400-425F is the usual range for muffin and gem batters, and twenty minutes at that heat suits a standard 12-cup muffin tin.
- Gem pansGem pans were small-cupped baking pans, often cast iron, and period cookbooks commonly direct that they be greased and heated before the batter goes in. A modern muffin tin works; butter it generously, and preheating it briefly gives a better crust.
- The hominy is ambiguousTwo tablespoons is a small amount, and the book does not say whether it means dry hominy grits or already-cooked hominy. The instruction to cook it in a double boiler until the water is absorbed points to dry grits, which will swell to roughly half a cup or a little more once the half cup of water is taken up.
- Hominy versus gritsHominy is corn treated with alkali to remove the hull. Fine or quick grits from the supermarket behave as the recipe expects; canned whole hominy does not, since it is already hydrated and will not absorb the water.
- Cool before the eggsThis is the hinge. Both mixtures are hot, and eggs added too soon will scramble and the baking powder will exhaust itself before the batter reaches the oven. Let it come down to warm at most.
- Beaten whitesSeparating the eggs and folding the whites in last is what lifts a batter this wet. Fold them in with the baking powder and get the pans into the oven promptly.
- YieldAbout 10 to 12 standard muffins. Best eaten warm the day they are made; the cornmeal dries quickly.
Gold Medal's cook book was promotional literature for Washburn-Crosby's wheat flour, which makes a recipe built on corn meal and hominy worth noticing: American home bakers in this period still ate a great deal of corn, and a flour miller courting them had to meet them where they were. Hominy — corn treated to slip the hull, a technique inherited from Indigenous nixtamalization — was a staple grocery item sold both whole and ground into grits, and a spoonful of it in a corn meal batter softens the gritty texture of the meal. The double-boiler step and the separately beaten whites both resemble the fussier, more refined turn that late-nineteenth-century cookery schools brought to plain country dishes, aiming for something closer to a cake than a pone.