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Cereal Left-Overs: Hominy
MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK Raised Hominy Muffins. 1 cupful cold hominy, 4 tablespoonfuls butter, 1 cupful scalded milk, 3 tablespoonfuls sugar, teaspoonful salt, yeast cake dissolved in + cupful lukewarm water. a Warm the hominy in a double boiler and break it into grains in a mixing bowl. Add the butter, milk, sugar, and salt. When it is lukewarm, stir in the yeast and enough flour to make a thick batter. Let it stand over night. In the morning fill gem pans two thirds full, set to raise in a warm place, and bake in a moderate oven.
Hominy in Cream Sauce. 2 cupfuls cream sauce, 2 cupfuls cold hominy.
Make a cream sauce and into it stir the hominy. Reheat in a double boiler and serve very hot instead of potato.
Hominy Griddlecakes. cupful cold hominy, 2 eggs, 2 cupfuls sour milk, 1¼ teaspoonfuls soda, 2 cupfuls flour, teaspoonful salt.
Warm the hominy and mix with it the well-beaten eggs. Sift in the flour and salt, alternating with cupful milk till the mixture is ready to beat; at last stir in the soda dissolved in a tablespoonful warm water. Bake on a hot greased griddle. Eat with maple sirup.
Macaroni and Celery. 1 cupful boiled macaroni, 1 cupful celery, 1 cupful white sauce, cupful buttered bread crumbs, Salt and pepper, cupful grated cheese.
Cut the celery into inch pieces and boil for ten minutes in salted water.
Drain and lay in a dish with the macaroni stirred lightly through it.
Over it pour the white sauce; season with salt and pepper. Sprinkle over the top buttered crumbs and grated cheese. Bake till the top is delicate brown.
Savory Macaroni. 2 cupfuls cold macaroni, 2 tablespoonfuls butter, Pepper, Salt, Paprika.
Melt the butter in an omelet pan.
Put in the macaroni, dust with pepper, salt, and paprika. Let it brown slightly, tossing it with a fork while it cooks. Serve very hot as a side dish; sprinkle with grated cheese.
Creamed Macaroni on Toast. 1½ tablespoonfuls butter, 1 tablespoonful flour, 1 cupful milk or cream, Salt and pepper, 1 cupful cold macaroni, cupful grated cheese, 6 slices toast.
Make a white sauce from the butter, flour, and milk. Chop coarsely the macaroni, add to it the white sauce, and allow it to cook for ten minutes. Pour over the buttered toast, and dust liberally with grated cheese. Set on the top shelf of the oven for a few minutes, and serve very hot.
Macaroni and Chicken. 1½ cupfuls cold chicken, 1½ cupfuls macaroni, 1½ cupfuls cold tomato sauce, cupful buttered crumbs.
Butter a baking dish, put in a layer of macaroni, then a layer of cold chicken cut in small strips, then a few spoonfuls of tomato sauce.
Repeat in the same order till the dish is full, making the top layer macaroni. Cover with crumbs and bake CEREAL LEFT-OVERS till the top is brown and crusty. No seasoning is given in this recipe, because usually tomato sauce is well flavored.
Macaroni Croquettes. 2 tablespoonfuls butter, 4 tablespoonfuls flour, 1 cupful milk, Yolk 1 egg, 2 cupfuls chopped macaroni, 2 tablespoonfuls cheese, Pepper and salt.
If the macaroni is the remainder of a dish of tomato and macaroni or a well-seasoned cheese dish, it will be the more tasty. Make a thick sauce from the flour, butter, and milk, beat in the egg and cheese. Mix thoroughly, spread to cool, flour, egg, crumb, and fry. Serve very hot with tomato sauce.
A run of thrift dishes built on yesterday's cooked hominy and macaroni, from an era when a covered bowl of leftover starch was expected in every larder. The methods hold up; a few of the quantities and vessels need translating.
- What hominy means hereWhole or coarsely broken hulled corn kernels, boiled soft — not the fine grits sold in a canister today. Canned whole hominy, drained and rinsed, is the closest ready substitute; a cupful of it, warmed and broken up with a fork, behaves like the leftover the book assumes.
- Oven temperaturesA moderate oven for the raised muffins is about 350-375F. The book gives no temperature or time for the baked macaroni dishes — only 'bake till the top is delicate brown' / 'brown and crusty' — so a hot-ish oven around 375F and judging by colour is a modern guess rather than a translation. The creamed macaroni on toast goes on the 'top shelf' only to colour and heat through for a few minutes.
- The yeast cakeOne compressed yeast cake is conventionally equated with one modern packet, roughly 2¼ teaspoons of active dry yeast, though period cakes varied in size. Dissolve it in lukewarm water as directed, and be sure the hominy-milk mixture has cooled to blood heat — the recipe says 'when it is lukewarm' — before the yeast goes in.
- Overnight batterA room-temperature overnight rise assumes a cool early-1900s kitchen. In a modern heated house, refrigerate the batter after an hour on the counter, then let the filled gem pans come up in a warm spot in the morning.
- Gem pansCast-iron gem pans are muffin pans; a standard tin will serve, filled two thirds as instructed, though gem cups were often smaller than modern muffin cups. Grease them well; note the recipe fills the pans and lets the batter rise in them before baking.
- Sour milk and sodaThe griddlecakes call for sour milk, the clabbered milk of the period; buttermilk cup for cup is the usual modern stand-in. The soda is paired with that acid, and sweet milk would leave the soda untempered and taste of it.
- Croquette fryingThe panade must be spread thin and chilled thoroughly — an hour in the refrigerator — before shaping, or the croquettes burst. Fry at 365–375°F, a few at a time, until deep gold, about three minutes.
- YieldThe book gives no yields for any of these dishes. The cream-sauce hominy is explicitly offered in place of potato.
Hominy — corn treated with wood ash or slaked lime to loosen the hull, a technique taken from Indigenous nixtamalisation and carried into colonial and then national American cooking — was a daily starch in much of the United States, especially the South, well into the twentieth century. That is the logic of this section: not recipes for hominy, but recipes for hominy already cooked and gone cold, alongside the same treatment of boiled macaroni. Household manuals of the period commonly framed the deliberate use of left-overs as a moral as well as an economic accomplishment, and the raised muffin here, with its overnight rise, belongs to the older tradition of yeast-leavened breakfast breads that chemical leaveners were gradually displacing.