Home › Vegetables › Hominy
Hominy
1 cup hominy 3 cups boiling water 1 teaspoon salt Wash the hominy well, soak over night in one quart of cold water; in the morning drain and cook in the boiling salted water for about three hours. Fine hominy can be cooked in one hour if soaked in warm water, changing it once or twice for warmer. Boil in the last water.
A plain boiled-hominy formula from the era when dried hulled corn was a pantry staple rather than a can on the shelf. The main adjustments are the water and what "hominy" means at your store.
- What "hominy" meant hereWhole or "pearl" hominy: field corn soaked in lye or lime to loosen the hull, then hulled and dried. "Fine hominy" is the same corn cracked or ground, which today is sold as grits or samp. The two cook very differently, which is why the recipe gives separate times.
- The water is not enoughOne cup of dried whole hominy will absorb far more than three cups over three hours of simmering, and the pan will scorch. Keep boiling water at hand and top up so the grain stays covered throughout; figure on four to six cups total.
- Canned hominyDrained canned hominy is already fully cooked and needs only heating through, five minutes at most. It is the practical substitute if dried hulled corn is not available; the texture is softer than the long-simmered version but close.
- Grits timingModern stone-ground grits need 40 to 60 minutes in four to five times their volume of water, whisked at the start to prevent lumps; quick grits need five. The warm-water soak, changed once or twice for warmer as the recipe directs, does shorten cooking, but it is optional now.
- DonenessWhole hominy is done when a kernel splits easily under a spoon and tastes tender to the center, not merely soft outside. Undercooked hominy stays chalky and no amount of butter hides it.
- SaltA teaspoon in three cups of water is on the light side once the grain has swelled. Taste and correct at the end rather than adding more early.
- ScorchingStarchy corn settles and sticks. A heavy pan over low heat with occasional stirring, or a double boiler for the last hour, is the safer arrangement on modern burners, which concentrate heat more than a coal range did.
- Yield and servingOne cup dried gives roughly three to four cups cooked, four servings. Served hot with butter, salt and pepper, or with milk and sugar at breakfast; leftovers were pressed into a pan, chilled, sliced and fried, which is the best use of the second day.
Hominy is a borrowing from an Algonquian word, generally traced to Virginia Powhatan, for hulled corn prepared by soaking the kernels in wood-ash lye or slaked lime -- the process Mexican cooks call nixtamalization, and the same one that produces masa and posole. English colonists took the technique from Native neighbors and it stayed in the American kitchen long after most other Indigenous foodways faded from print, which is why a cookbook of the period could treat it as an ordinary vegetable needing no introduction. In the early 1900s hominy was sold dried in bulk, whole or cracked, and required exactly the sort of overnight soak and long simmer given here; quick grits, which removed that labor, belong to the decades after.