Home › Miscellaneous Recipes › Boiled Hominy
Boiled Hominy
1/2 pint (I cup) hominy 2 pints (4 cups) boiling water grits Salt to taste Have the water boiling in a fireproof dish, stir into it the hominy, adding salt to taste. Cook slowly for three hours or longer, stirring frequently. If the hominy is soaked overnight, one and a half hours' boiling in the morning will suffice.
Cook in the same manner.
A bare-bones porridge recipe whose only real variables are the grind of the corn and the patience of the cook. Two things in the original need translating: the vessel and the cooking time.
- "Fireproof dish" means flameproofPeriod "fireproof" ware was earthenware or heat-resistant glass meant to take direct heat, and the recipe boils water in it. Modern glass and stoneware bakeware is generally not rated for stovetop heat; use a heavy saucepan or an enameled cast-iron pot.
- The measurementsHalf a pint is one cup, two pints is four cups, so the ratio is 1 part hominy to 4 parts water. Salt to taste; about a teaspoon suits this quantity, and the recipe has it going in at the start so the grain absorbs it.
- Hominy versus gritsThe garbled line in the original covers both: whole hominy (corn treated with alkali) and grits, coarsely cracked corn, which may or may not have been nixtamalized. Whole dried hominy is what justifies three hours; canned hominy needs only reheating.
- Three hours is for stone-groundCoarse stone-ground grits take 45 to 60 minutes at a bare simmer. Supermarket quick grits are done in 5 to 10 minutes and will turn to paste if held for hours. Only whole dried hominy or very coarse grind warrants the full time.
- Soaking still worksSoaking -- The original's overnight soak halves the boiling time, three hours down to one and a half. It does not specify the soaking liquid; soaking in the water you then cook in loses nothing.
- Stirring and scorching"Stirring frequently" is the hinge. Corn starch settles and catches on the bottom well before the grain is tender. A heavy-bottomed pot, the lowest possible heat, and a stir every few minutes; a double boiler all but eliminates the risk at the cost of longer cooking.
- Consistency and yieldExpect roughly 3 to 4 cups cooked depending on the grind. Add boiling water if it stiffens before the grain is tender; it will continue to thicken as it stands and sets firm enough to slice and fry once cold.
Hominy is corn treated with an alkali solution of wood ash or lime, a process Indigenous peoples of the Americas developed long before European contact; the term nixtamalization derives from Nahuatl, taken into Spanish and later into English. The word hominy itself comes into English from Virginia Algonquian, first attested in the early seventeenth century. The treatment loosens the hull, softens the kernel and, as was only understood much later, frees niacin that is otherwise chemically bound in maize. Coarsely cracked corn is grits, the everyday breakfast starch of the American South, and it also appears in Northern cookbooks as a plain invalid and nursery dish. Recipes of this kind sit easily in books built around fireproof earthenware and the newer heat-resistant glass, which let a cook simmer a long-cooking grain and bring the same dish to the table.