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Hominy Griddle Cakes
Break fine 1 cupful of cold hominy, add I wellbeaten egg, 1 pint of milk, 1/2 of a teaspoonful of salt, 2 teaspoonfuls of baking-powder and sufficient flour to make a drop batter. Bake at once on a hot greased griddle.
A leftover-porridge pancake of the sort that turned yesterday's supper into today's breakfast. The whole recipe hinges on the batter's consistency, since the flour is left to your judgment.
- What "hominy" means hereCold cooked hominy — either whole hulled corn or cooked grits left to set overnight in the pan. Both were called hominy in this period, and either works: grits give a smoother cake, whole hominy a chewier one with visible kernels.
- "Break fine"Mash the cold hominy thoroughly with a fork or work it briefly in a food processor before anything else goes in. Cold cooked corn sets into a solid block, and lumps left at this stage will not disperse once the milk is added.
- A "drop batter"Thicker than a pour batter, loose enough to fall from a spoon in a lump rather than run off it. Add flour a few spoonfuls at a time until it reaches that consistency; with a pint of milk it will take a good deal, and the exact amount depends on how wet the hominy was.
- Cupful and pintA cupful is 8 fl oz, a pint 16 fl oz. Note that this is a very wet start — 2 cups of milk to 1 cup of hominy — which is why the flour quantity is left open.
- "Bake at once"This is the instruction that matters. The baking powder starts working the moment it meets the milk, and single-acting powders of the period gave one lift only. Modern double-acting powder is more forgiving, but the cakes are still lightest cooked straight away.
- Griddle heatAbout 375F on an electric griddle, or medium on the stove — a drop of water should skitter, not vanish instantly. These cakes are heavier than a plain flour pancake and need a moment longer per side, roughly 3 minutes before turning.
- YieldMakes a generous batch of 3-inch cakes; the open-ended flour means the exact number varies. Serve with butter and syrup, or alongside sausage and eggs.
Hominy is corn treated with an alkali — wood-ash lye or slaked lime — to loosen the hulls, a technique developed by Indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica and North America long before European contact, and one that also makes the grain's niacin available to the body. Colonists took it up as well, and by the nineteenth century hominy and its ground form, grits, are generally described as common breakfast fare in the South and in parts of the Midwest. A recipe like this one belongs squarely to the economy books: it exists because a pot of hominy could easily yield more than was eaten, and cold leftovers stiffened into something that could be mashed, loosened with milk and egg, and stretched with flour into a second meal. The same logic produced rice cakes, oatmeal cakes and bread-crumb griddle cakes, all of which appear in collections of this kind.