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Hominy Croquettes
To one cup cold boiled hominy, add two teaspoonfuls melted butter, and stir it well, adding by degrees one cup milk, till all is made in a soft light paste; adding one well-beaten egg.
Roll into oval balls with floured hands; dip in beaten egg, then roll in cracker crumbs and fry in hot lard.--Mrs. M.
A leftovers dish: cold cooked hominy bound with egg and fried. The whole thing hinges on how much milk you actually add, since the original's cup is an upper limit rather than a measurement.
- What hominy means hereIn a Virginia kitchen of this period "hominy" often meant small hominy — hulled corn ground coarse and boiled soft, close to what would now be sold as grits — though whole lye hominy was eaten too. Cold leftover grits, stiff enough to slice, is a good starting material. Canned whole hominy is a different product and will not mash into a paste.
- Stop adding milk earlyA cup of milk to a cup of cold hominy will give you batter, not something you can roll. Add it a spoonful at a time and stop the moment the mass is smooth and just short of sticky; with firm cold grits that may be a quarter cup or less.
- Chill before shapingThe instruction to roll with floured hands presumes a paste that has firmed up. Spread the mixture on a plate and refrigerate half an hour before forming the ovals — they will hold their shape in the fat instead of slumping.
- Cracker crumbsNineteenth-century cracker crumbs generally meant plain soda or water crackers, crushed fine. Saltines (unsalted-top if you can find them) or plain dry breadcrumbs stand in; panko gives a coarser crust.
- Frying fat and temperatureLard is still the right fat and behaves well at frying heat, but any neutral oil works. The recipe says only "hot lard"; the usual modern working range is about 350–375F. Fry in small batches — croquettes dropped into cool fat absorb it and fall apart.
- The second eggThe recipe uses egg twice: one beaten egg worked into the paste, and more beaten egg for the coating. Allow two eggs in total for a batch this size.
- Yield and servingOne cup of hominy makes perhaps eight small croquettes, enough for two or three people. A dish of this kind would have gone to table as a breakfast or supper side rather than as a sweet.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housewives, is full of recipes like this one — signed with an initial, assuming the reader already knows what cold boiled hominy looks like in the safe. Hominy itself is an Indigenous technology adopted wholesale by colonial Southern kitchens: corn soaked in an alkaline solution of wood-ash lye or slaked lime to loosen the hulls, a process now generally called nixtamalization — though not all Southern corn preparations were alkali-treated. Boiled hominy was a familiar presence at Southern breakfast tables, and croquettes are simply what a thrifty household did with the pot's remainder. The croquette form itself came from French cookery and was fashionable in American books through the last quarter of the century, applied to almost anything cold that could be bound with egg and rolled in crumbs — a French technique doing service on a very Southern ingredient.