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Hominy Muffins
Break up fine with a fork 1 cupful of cold boiled hominy, add ½ of a teaspoonful of salt, 2 teaspoonfuls of sugar, 2 well-beaten eggs, 2 teaspoonfuls of melted butter, 1/2 of a cupful of milk, 1 cupful of corn-meal and 1 teaspoonful of baking-powder. Bake in muffin cups in a very hot oven.
A hot-bread recipe built on leftover breakfast hominy, thinned with milk and bound with egg. It behaves more like a spoonbread batter than a stiff muffin dough.
- What hominy means here"Cold boiled hominy" in this period may mean either small hominy (grits) boiled as a porridge or hulled whole kernels; the direction to break it up fine with a fork points to cooked grits. Use about a cup of leftover cooked hominy, cold and stiff, and mash it so no lumps survive into the batter.
- The milk quantity is unclearThe text gives the milk as "1½ of a cupful," which reads as either half a cup or a cup and a half; the same transcription writes 1 as "I" throughout, so half a cup is a live possibility. Add milk until the batter will just drop from the spoon.
- "A very hot oven"Read that as roughly 450F or a little above. Cornmeal batters need the initial blast to set the crust and lift the egg; a slack oven gives a dense, damp muffin.
- Heat the pansThe recipe does not call for it, but greasing the muffin cups and warming them in the oven before filling is a common approach with cornmeal breads and helps the crust.
- CornmealUse plain stone-ground yellow or white cornmeal, not self-rising cornmeal mix and not corn flour. Self-rising mix would double the leavening already specified.
- Leavening is lightOne teaspoon of baking powder for a cup of meal is modest by current standards. Single-acting powders of the period began working as soon as the batter was wet, so mix and bake without delay. Expect a close, moist crumb rather than a domed muffin.
- Timing and yieldTwenty to twenty-five minutes at that heat, until browned and firm in the centre. The batter fills about ten standard muffin cups.
Hominy muffins belong to a large family of nineteenth-century American breads that stretched a cup of leftover porridge into a fresh hot bread for the next meal. Cooked hominy or grits, rice, and oatmeal all turn up this way in period cookbooks, valued because the cooked starch holds moisture and keeps the notoriously dry cornmeal crumb tender. The logic is plain: the hominy is already paid for, having been cooked for an earlier breakfast, and the recipe asks only for meal, milk, two eggs and a spoonful or two of butter. The use of baking powder rather than yeast or saleratus suggests a date somewhere after the middle of the century, when commercial baking powders were spreading and quick breads were becoming a standard filler of the American bread basket.