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Boiled Hominy
Put I large cupful of hominy into 3 cupfuls of boiling water, add ½ teaspoonful of salt, stir until the hominy boils, then set on the back of the stove, closely covered, to simmer for four or five hours. Use a vessel set upon a stand so that the hominy will not burn. This quantity can be increased and the hominy kept for several days, warming each day as much as required.
A long, slow simmer that assumes a coal range with a cool back plate. On a modern burner the equivalents are low heat, a heat diffuser, or a double boiler.
- What "hominy" means hereIn American cookbooks of this period "hominy" usually means dried corn treated with alkali and then cracked or left whole — sold today as hominy grits (coarse) or as whole dried hominy or posole. The four-to-five-hour time fits whole or coarse-cracked dry hominy; modern quick or instant grits are done in 5 to 20 minutes and will turn to paste if held for hours.
- The vessel on a standThe "stand" is a trivet or heat diffuser between pan and fire. A double boiler does the same job more reliably: set the covered pan over simmering water and the hominy cannot scorch no matter how long it sits.
- "Back of the stove"On a wood or coal range the back plate was the coolest spot, hot enough only to hold a bare simmer. Use the lowest setting on a gas burner, keeping the pot covered.
- Water ratioOne cup hominy to three cups water is on the lean side for whole dry hominy, which absorbs a great deal. Check partway through and add boiling water as needed; the grain should stay submerged until tender.
- Salt timingSalt at the start is fine for grits. With whole dry hominy some cooks traditionally held the salt back until the kernels had begun to soften, though whether this makes a real difference is doubtful.
- YieldOne cup dry hominy or grits yields roughly 3 to 4 cups cooked — four servings as a side dish or breakfast cereal.
- Keeping itThe advice to keep it several days assumes a cold larder. Refrigerate the cooked hominy within two hours; it will set firm, and reheats with a splash of milk or water, or slices and fries in butter.
Hominy is corn that has been steeped in an alkaline solution — wood-ash lye or slaked lime — to loosen the hull and soften the kernel, a process borrowed from Indigenous cooks of Mesoamerica and eastern North America and known now by the Spanish-derived term nixtamalization. The word itself is generally traced to a Virginia Algonquian source recorded by early English colonists. Hominy in whole and cracked forms was among the cheapest bulk starches available to an American household: a cupful of dry grain, water, salt and the waste heat of a range already lit for something else made a filling dish at almost no cost. The instruction to cook a large batch and warm a portion each day is characteristic of the frugal-cookery genre, where fuel was counted as carefully as food.