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Beef Stew with Hominy
2 T flour 1½ lbs. stewing beef 2 T cut onion 2 t salt 1/8 t pepper 2. C strained tomatoes 4 C boiled hominy 2 t sugar Wipe meat, cut into two-inch pieces, boil rapidly twenty minutes with 2 C boiling water. Add onion, sugar, salt and pepper; boil slowly 2 C boiling water. Add onion, sugar, salt and pepper; boil slowly two and one-half hours. Add tomatoes, boil ten minutes. Mix flour with cold water until smooth, and add to meat. Boil three minutes. There should be two cups of gravy. Serve with border of hominy and parsley.
Rowena M. Nutt. 1½ lb. flank steak 1 t mustard 1 T vinegar 1 T flour
A plain church-supper stew whose printed text has picked up two flaws: a line repeated by the typesetter, and a stray ingredient list from the following recipe. Neither affects the cooking once you know they are there.
- Read past the duplication"Add onion, sugar, salt and pepper; boil slowly 2 C boiling water" is a compositor's repeat. The sequence is: boil the beef in 2 cups water for twenty minutes, add the seasonings, then simmer two and a half hours.
- The trailing four ingredients are not yoursThe trailing four ingredients are not part of this recipe -- "1", "1 t mustard, 1 T vinegar, 1 T flour" appears to be the ingredient list of an adjacent recipe that has run on. Ignore it.
- T and tCapital T is tablespoon, lowercase t is teaspoon, C is cup. So 2 tablespoons flour, 2 teaspoons salt, 2 teaspoons sugar, 2 cups strained tomatoes.
- Boil slowly means simmerThe hinge of the dish. "Boil slowly" in period usage is a bare simmer with the surface barely moving; a genuine rolling boil for two and a half hours will squeeze the beef into strings. Keep it at a low simmer; the recipe does not say whether to cover the pot.
- Strained tomatoesTomatoes cooked and pushed through a sieve to remove skin and seed, that is, passata or plain tomato purée. Two cups of canned passata is the direct substitute; do not use concentrated tomato paste.
- Boiled hominyCorn treated with alkali to loosen the hull. Period books use "boiled hominy" for both whole (pearl) hominy and the coarser cracked kind, so either would serve for the border. Four cups cooked is roughly two large cans, drained and heated through; from dried, about 1" soaked overnight and boiled an hour or more before serving.
- The flour is a slurry, not a rouxMixed smooth with cold water and stirred into the simmering pot, then given three minutes to lose the raw taste. Two tablespoons is enough for the two cups of gravy the recipe expects.
- Serving and yieldThe recipe gives no yield; 1" lbs of beef with four cups of hominy would stretch to about four to six. The hominy is spooned in a ring around the edge of a warm platter with the stew in the centre, parsley over the top.
Hominy is field corn soaked in an alkaline solution until the tough hull slips away, a process taken from Indigenous North American cookery and known as nixtamalization; the swollen kernels keep well and became a cheap, filling starch across the Midwest and South. Canned hominy was widely sold by the early twentieth century, which may be why the book can call for four cups of it without explaining where to get it. Pairing it with a long-simmered beef stew and serving it as a border rather than a side is characteristic of the era's luncheon cookery, where a single dish was expected to look composed on the platter and stretch a modest cut of meat across a table. The attribution to Rowena M. Nutt is standard practice in fundraising cookbooks of the period, where each contributor's name stood as a small guarantee of the recipe.