Important: Safety Warning
This page directs the use of hazardous substances — such as benzine, gasoline, lye, or strong acids — for household tasks. These materials are highly flammable, corrosive, or poisonous, and the practices described have caused fires, burns, and poisonings.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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To Hull Corn
Put one pint of clear, hard wood ashes in two quarts of cold, soft water; boil fifteen minutes, stand aside until the water is perfectly clear, then drain it off carefully. Dip your finger in the water, rub it against your thumb, and if it feels slippery, add as much cold water as will cover two quarts of white corn. Return the corn and the lye to the porcelain kettle, boil gently until the hulls begin to start; then with a skimmer dip out the corn and throw it into a pan of clear, cold water. When you have it all out rub thoroughly with the hands to remove the hulls and also to cleanse the corn of the lye. It may be necessary to rub it through three or four fresh waters, but this washing must continue until the corn is perfectly free from the taste of lye. Then put it into clear water and boil until tender, about three or four hours. Drain, add a quarter of a pound of butter and a palatable seasoning of salt and pepper. A half pint of cream may also be added, if liked. This corn having been soaked in an alkali to remove the hull, has, of course, lost a quantity of corn oil and therefore makes a good summer food.
This is hominy — corn nixtamalized in homemade wood-ash lye. The finished dish is unremarkable, but the process as described cannot be reproduced safely in a modern kitchen, and the points below explain where it breaks down rather than how to rescue it.
- The lye is unmeasuredLeachate from wood ashes (mostly potassium carbonate, with some hydroxide) varies in strength depending on the species burned, how completely it burned, and how long it steeped. Two quarts of water over a pint of ashes gives the cook no way to tell whether the result is too weak to loosen a hull or strong enough to be genuinely caustic.
- The strength test is the worst partDipping a finger into the drained liquid and rubbing it against the thumb to feel for slipperiness is direct skin exposure to an alkali of unknown concentration. The slippery sensation comes from the solution acting on the fat in the skin. Alkali injuries can develop slowly and go deep, so contact may not feel damaging at the moment it happens.
- "Free from the taste of lye" is not a safe endpointThe recipe's only check on residual alkali is repeated rinsing until the corn no longer tastes of it. Taste cannot detect the pH of the corn's interior, and tasting is itself the exposure. Commercial nixtamalization uses measured food-grade calcium hydroxide, controlled contact time, and verified rinsing.
- Splashing and boil-overA caustic solution held at a gentle boil for the time it takes hulls to loosen throws droplets. Eye contact with even dilute hot lye is a medical emergency, and nothing in the period text suggests eye protection or gloves.
- Why the porcelain kettle is specifiedAlkali attacks tin, and enamelled or porcelain-lined vessels were preferred for preparations of this kind over metal pots that might discolour or taint them; the original calls for porcelain. The text does not say whether the reason was corrosion or flavour.
- If you want the dishCanned or dried hominy is widely sold, and posole and grits recipes using it are everywhere. Use a current recipe from a modern source; there is no adjustment to the wood-ash method here that makes it fit for a home kitchen.
- The nutritional claim is wrongThe nutritional claim is doubtful -- The closing line, that alkali treatment removes corn oil and so makes "a good summer food," may reflect the period idea that fatty foods were heating to the body. Alkaline treatment mainly loosens the pericarp and frees bound niacin; some oil is lost with the germ, but this is not primarily a defatting process.
Hulled corn, hominy and lye corn are all names for the same ancient technique: soaking dried maize in an alkaline solution so the tough outer pericarp slips off and the kernel swells. The method is indigenous to Mesoamerica, where it is called nixtamalization from the Nahuatl nextli (ashes) and tamalli (dough), and it spread north through Native American agriculture long before European settlement. Colonial and nineteenth-century American households took it up, using the potash lye that any wood-burning kitchen produced as a byproduct; this recipe assumes its reader has a pint of clear hardwood ashes to hand. Twentieth-century nutrition later established what the practice had accomplished without knowing it: alkaline treatment releases niacin that is otherwise chemically bound in maize, and populations that ate untreated corn as a staple suffered pellagra while those that nixtamalized it did not.