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Jonathan
Into 1 pint of hot, boiled hominy stir i tablespoonful of butter, salt and pepper to taste, and I beaten egg. Pack in a mold and set aside.
When cold, cut into thin slices. Arrange in a buttered dish, sprinkling between each layer some grated cheese and a few drops of tomato catsup. Over the top spread 1/2 of a cupful of fine stale bread crumbs, mixed with 2 tablespoonfuls of melted butter, and place in a hot oven for twenty minutes. Serve for luncheon or as a vegetable.
A thrift dish built on cold, sliced hominy layered like a gratin. The hinge is the setting: the cooked hominy must be stiff enough to slice cleanly, or the layers slump into mush.
- What hominy means hereIn American books of this period "boiled hominy" usually means hominy grits cooked to a thick porridge, not the whole canned nixtamalized kernels sold as hominy or pozole today. Cook grits with roughly four parts liquid to one part grits until very stiff, thicker than you would serve at table.
- A pint, packedOne pint is two cups of cooked hominy, not dry. With the butter and egg this fills a small loaf pan or a 3-cup mold and yields perhaps four modest servings as a side, two or three at luncheon.
- Setting time"Set aside... when cold" means several hours, and overnight in the refrigerator is better. Warm hominy will not slice; chilled hominy cuts into clean 1/4-inch slabs with a wet knife.
- The eggStir the beaten egg into the hominy off the heat, or temper it with a spoonful of the hot mash first. Dropped straight into boiling-hot grits it scrambles and you lose the binding.
- A hot ovenRead this as roughly 400-450F. Twenty minutes at that heat browns the crumb topping and heats the layers through; the hominy is already cooked, so nothing more is needed.
- Tomato catsupPeriod catsup was thinner, sharper and far less sweet than the modern bottle. A few drops of today's ketchup between layers will read as sugary; a spoonful of thin tomato sauce or passata with a dash of vinegar is closer to the intent.
- CheeseThe recipe leaves "grated cheese" unspecified; in American household books of this era it would most often have been a firm "store cheese", i.e. something in the cheddar family. Half a cup total for the layers is a workable amount.
- CrumbsStale bread crumbs, dried and grated, are drier and coarser than fresh soft crumbs. If using fresh, reduce the melted butter slightly or the topping goes greasy rather than crisp.
Hominy is corn treated with alkali to loosen the hulls, a technique taken from Indigenous nixtamalization and long naturalized in American kitchens, where it was ground into grits and boiled as an everyday cheap starch. Recipes like this one belong to a whole family of late nineteenth and early twentieth century economy dishes in which yesterday's cooked cereal is chilled, sliced and rebaked with cheese or crumbs, the same logic that produces fried mush and fried polenta; nothing is wasted and a little cheese carries a large amount of grain. The name "Jonathan" is unexplained in the text and may simply be a household attribution, though Brother Jonathan was also a stock figure for the plain American of the era, which suits a dish of hominy and catsup. The instruction to serve it "as a vegetable" shows how loosely that category was drawn when starch was expected to fill out a meatless luncheon plate.