Hominy Bread
Mix with two teacups of hot hominy a very large spoonful of butter. Beat two eggs very light and stir into the hominy. Next add a pint of milk, gradually stirring it in. Lastly, add half a pint of corn meal. The batter should be of the consistency of rich boiled custard. If thicker, add a little more milk. Bake with a good deal of heat at the bottom, but not so much at the top. Bake in a deep pan, allowing space for rising. When done, it looks like a baked batter pudding.--Mrs. F.D.
This is a spoon bread in all but name, and it behaves like one: soft, custardy, scooped rather than sliced. Two things decide whether it works — the hominy must be freshly cooked and hot when the butter goes in, and the heat must come mostly from below.
- What "hominy" means hereIn nineteenth-century Virginia usage this almost certainly means cooked hominy in the porridge sense — what a modern cook makes as grits, ideally coarse stone-ground, cooked soft and still hot. Canned whole nixtamalized kernels sold as hominy or pozole will not blend into a batter unless mashed.
- Teacups and pintsTeacup measures in books of this period are not standardized; a teacupful is usually reckoned somewhere between 1/2 and 3/4 cup, so two teacups is roughly 1 to 1 1/2 cups of cooked hominy. The pint of milk is 2 cups and the half pint of meal is 1 cup. A "very large spoonful" of butter is a generous tablespoon, closer to two.
- Corn mealUse plain fine or medium white cornmeal, not self-rising and not a cornbread mix. There is no leavening in the recipe beyond the beaten eggs and steam, which is why the pan needs room to rise.
- Oven and pan"A good deal of heat at the bottom" has no exact modern equivalent; a hot-ish oven in the region of 400F, with the dish on a low rack, or set on a preheated baking sheet or in a buttered cast-iron skillet, follows the intent. If the top colors too fast, tent it loosely with foil.
- The consistency testRich boiled custard means pourable, thick enough to coat a spoon but not moundable. Hominy varies in how much liquid it holds, so judge by the batter rather than the measurements and thin with milk as directed.
- TimingThe original gives none. A 1 1/2- to 2-quart dish takes 40 to 50 minutes; it is done when set at the center with the barest tremble, like a baked custard. Overbaking dries it into cornbread, which is the one failure mode.
- Yield and servingServes six as a side. Bring it to the table in the baking dish and serve with a spoon while hot, with butter — it collapses somewhat as it cools and does not reheat well.
Hominy bread of this kind sits directly in the line that produced spoon bread, the soft, custard-textured cornbread of the Virginia and Carolina table. The technique depends on a household that already had cooked hominy on hand, and the recipe may well have served as an economical second use for the leftover pot, though it calls explicitly for hot hominy — a habit visible throughout Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), which Marion Cabell Tyree assembled from contributions by named and initialed Virginia housewives, here "Mrs. F.D." The comparison to "a baked batter pudding" tells the reader to expect something closer to a pudding than to a loaf, and the name "spoon bread" for such dishes is generally traced to later in the century.