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Hominy Loaves
Cold boiled hominy will make a good dinner dish. To each pint add 2 tablespoonfuls of melted butter mashing until free from lumps.
Season well with salt and pepper and, if still stiff, use just enough milk to mold into small oval loaves or pats. Place these an inch apart on buttered pans, brush with I beaten egg, dust with grated cheese and brown in a quick oven.
Serve as a vegetable.
A leftovers dish: yesterday's boiled hominy bound with butter and egg, baked into small cakes. It works, but only if the hominy is mashed thoroughly and the oven is genuinely hot.
- What "hominy" means hereNineteenth- and early twentieth-century American recipes use "hominy" for both whole nixtamalized corn and the coarsely cracked form sold as hominy grits. Either works: canned whole hominy, drained and mashed, or a stiff pot of coarse grits cooked the day before and chilled.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400-425F. The loaves are already cooked through, so all the heat is doing is setting the egg wash and browning the cheese. A cooler oven dries them out before they colour.
- QuantitiesA pint is 2 cups of cold cooked hominy, which with 2 tablespoons melted butter and one egg for the wash makes roughly eight small oval pats. Reckon on four servings as a side.
- Mash while cold, but work it hardThe instruction to mash "until free from lumps" is the hinge. Cold hominy is stiff and stubborn; any lump left in becomes a crumbly fault line and the pat collapses on the pan. A potato masher or a few pulses in a food processor gets there faster than a fork.
- Go easy on the milkMilk is only there if the mixture will not mold, so add it sparingly, a spoonful at a time. Too much and the ovals slump flat before the surface sets.
- Chill before bakingNot in the original, but twenty minutes in the refrigerator on the buttered pan firms the shapes and makes them far easier to brush with egg without deforming.
- The cheese"Grated cheese" in a book of this date usually means a dry aged cheese for dusting — Parmesan or a hard, sharp Cheddar. A soft or high-moisture cheese will weep rather than brown.
Hominy — corn treated with an alkali to loosen the hulls, a technique inherited from Indigenous nixtamalization — was one of the cheapest starches in an American pantry, and books of low-cost cookery lean on it heavily, arguably as a stand-in for potatoes. This recipe belongs to a whole genre of period instructions for reusing cold cereal: cold mush fried in slices, cold rice made into croquettes. The economy is not just in the grain but in the assumption that a pot of hominy would be boiled once and eaten two or three ways, with butter, egg and a dust of cheese doing the work of making the second appearance look deliberate. "Serve as a vegetable" reflects the older habit of classing starchy dishes among the vegetables on the dinner table rather than as a course of their own.