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Hominy Fritters
Sift together 1 cupful of flour, 1 teaspoonful of salt and 2 teaspoonfuls of baking-powder. Mix with this 1 pint of cold boiled hominy, using a fork to break the latter fine. Add I well-beaten egg and sufficient milk to make a very thick batter. Drop by spoonfuls into a kettle partly filled with smoking hot fat. Turn as they rise, and when golden brown all over skim out and drain on unglazed paper.
A plain fritter built on leftovers: cold cooked hominy bound with a small amount of flour and egg, then deep-fried. The success or failure of it is entirely in the fat temperature.
- "Smoking hot fat" is hotter than you wantFry at 365-375F, verified with a thermometer. Fat that is actually smoking is past its smoke point and will scorch the outside before the centre heats through; the older phrase was a rough visual cue from the days before frying thermometers were common in kitchens.
- Which hominyMost likely whole or coarse hominy boiled and cooled, though period 'boiled hominy' can also mean small hominy or grits boiled stiff; either sets firm enough to break apart under a fork. A pint is 2 cups of cooked hominy. Canned whole hominy, drained and rinsed, works if you chop it coarsely first.
- "Very thick batter"Aim for something that holds its shape on the spoon and drops off reluctantly. Start with 2 tablespoons of milk and add more only if the mixture will not come together; hominy varies enormously in how much moisture it carries.
- Baking powderUse standard double-acting baking powder. Many powders of the period acted largely on wetting, so it is sensible to mix and fry without letting the batter stand, though the recipe itself gives no instruction either way.
- Batch size in the kettleFry six or eight at a time at most. Crowding drops the fat temperature and gives you greasy fritters; let the fat recover between batches.
- "Turn as they rise"They sink briefly, then float. Turn once at that point and give them roughly two minutes a side. Total time is about four to five minutes for a spoonful the size of a walnut.
- Unglazed paperBrown paper or newsprint was the standard drain. Paper towels on a rack do the same job better, and the rack keeps the underside from steaming soft.
- Yield and servingRoughly two dozen fritters, depending on the size of the spoonfuls. Fritters of this kind were generally served as a starch alongside meat, or with syrup or molasses at breakfast. Serve them straight from the fat; they collapse as they cool.
Hominy is maize treated with an alkaline solution -- wood ash lye or slaked lime -- a process called nixtamalization that loosens the hull, softens the kernel and, incidentally, makes the grain's niacin available to the body. The technique is Indigenous to Mesoamerica and moved north long before European settlement; the English word is generally traced to a Powhatan term recorded in early Virginia. By the time this book was printed, hominy was a cheap staple across much of the United States, sold whole or cracked into grits, and cookbooks of the period commonly included ways to use up the leftovers. That is what this recipe is: a use for cold boiled hominy, stretched with a cup of flour and an egg into something that could stand in for a hot bread at breakfast. Fritter recipes of this shape -- cold cooked starch, flour, egg, deep fat -- appear for rice, potato and samp as well, and they belong to a household economy in which throwing out a pint of cooked grain was not a consideration.