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Grit or Hominy Bread
2 eggs, beaten separately. 1 pint of milk. Small piece of butter. Add enough meal and hominy to make a batter, and bake quickly.--Mrs. C.L.T.
A spoonbread-adjacent batter bread written in the shorthand of a cook who already knew what it should look like. The quantities for the dry ingredients are left entirely to your judgment, so work from the liquid.
- What "hominy" means hereIn Southern usage of this period "hominy" commonly meant cooked hominy or grits — hulled corn boiled soft — rather than dry or canned whole hominy, and the title treats grits and hominy as interchangeable options. About a cup of cooked, cooled grits is a reasonable starting point; the recipe gives no quantity.
- "Meal" is cornmealWhite cornmeal, stone-ground if you have it, was the common choice in Southern kitchens, though the recipe specifies nothing. Add it a few spoonfuls at a time until the batter falls thickly from the spoon, roughly the consistency of a loose pancake batter.
- Eggs beaten separatelyYolks go in with the milk, butter and grits; the whites are whipped and folded in last. They are the only leavening in the recipe, so fold gently and get the pan into the oven immediately.
- Bake quicklyThe recipe gives no temperature or time. "Quickly" indicates a hot oven; a modern equivalent would be somewhere around 425-450F, checked from about 25 minutes. High heat sets the outside and lets the interior puff before the whites collapse.
- Preheat the panIf you like, melt the butter in the skillet in the oven and pour the batter into the hot pan; a hot greased pan is a common approach with Southern batter breads, though this recipe says nothing about it.
- SaltNone is listed. The grits may already have been salted when cooked, or the omission may simply be part of the recipe's shorthand. If yours were unsalted, add half a teaspoon to the batter.
- Yield and servingA pint of milk makes enough for six as a side dish. Serve hot from the pan, spooned rather than sliced, with butter — it is too moist to cut cleanly.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by two hundred and fifty Virginia housewives, is full of these terse initialed recipes that assume a shared kitchen vocabulary. Corn breads leavened only with beaten egg white \— spoonbread, batter bread, and hominy or grit bread among them \— form a distinct Southern family separate from the soda-and-buttermilk cornbreads of the wider region, and it is often suggested that they owe something to the fact that cooked grits and hominy were made in quantity and had to be used up. The book's habit of giving no dry measurement at all is characteristic: the cook was expected to know the batter by sight, and the contributor's initials stood in for the recipe's authority.