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Southern Hominy Bread
Measure and cook 1 cupful of fine hominy.
When tender take from the fire and let stand for ten minutes, then add 2 well-beaten eggs, 1 tablespoonful of butter, 1 cupful of milk, ½ of a teaspoonful of salt, and 2 tablespoonfuls of fine corn-meal. Pour into a well-buttered earthen dish and bake in a hot oven in a good bottom heat. Send to the table in the dish in which it is baked, serving with a spoon.
This is spoonbread in its plainest form: cooked grits loosened with milk and bound with egg, baked until set and eaten with a spoon. The one thing that governs the result is the consistency of the batter before it goes into the dish.
- "Fine hominy" is gritsIn this period hominy meant hulled, dried corn; "fine hominy" is what a supermarket now sells as hominy grits (not the canned whole hominy or masa). Use stone-ground or regular grits, not instant. One cup dry will swell to roughly 4 cups cooked, which is the bulk of the finished bread.
- Cook the grits soft, then slackenThey should be fully tender and thick enough to mound on a spoon before the milk goes in. Adding the milk and eggs takes the mixture back to a heavy pourable batter, about the texture of thick pancake batter. If the grits are undercooked they stay gritty in the finished bread; no amount of oven time fixes it.
- Let it cool before the eggsThe ten-minute rest is not a flourish. Beaten eggs stirred into grits straight off the heat will scramble in streaks. Stir in the butter first, then the milk, then the eggs last.
- On the saltThe printed page gives half a teaspoonful of salt, as our text now reads. That is low for this quantity; salt the hominy as it cooks and adjust to taste before the eggs go in.
- Oven temperatureA "hot oven" in books of this period is usually taken as somewhere around 400-450F. At the top of that range a shallow dish will set in about 30 minutes; a deeper one wants 400F for 40-50 minutes so the centre firms before the top browns hard.
- "Good bottom heat"Cook ranges of the time generally drew their oven heat from a firebox below and to one side, and the instruction means to favour that bottom heat so the base sets and lifts. The nearest modern equivalent is the lower third of the oven, ideally on a preheated baking stone or heavy sheet.
- The earthen dish mattersA buttered stoneware or glass dish of about 1½ to 2 quarts holds heat and lets the bread go to the table still puffed. Butter it generously and put it in cold with the batter; there is no leavening but egg and steam, so a hot dish is not needed.
- Yield and servingServes four to six as a side. It falls within a few minutes of leaving the oven, which is why the original says to send the baking dish to the table and serve with a spoon rather than cut it.
Hominy bread belongs to the family of soft, spoon-served corn breads that Southern cookbooks record under several names spspoon bread, batter bread, awendaw. The Awendaw or "Owendaw" version, made with cooked hominy rather than raw meal, appears in Charleston-area receipt books through the nineteenth century, and it is often said to have come from Lowcountry kitchens where hominy was cooked daily and leftovers went into the next morning's bread. The technique is essentially a savoury pudding: no chemical leavening, just eggs and the steam from a wet batter, which is why it must be eaten from the dish. Its appeal is straightforward economy sp a cup of grits, two eggs and a cup of milk stretch into a hot dish for a whole table, and two tablespoons of cornmeal are there only to give the batter enough body to hold.