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Hominy and Corn Muffins
1 cup corn meal 1 cup hominy 1 cup scalded milk 4 cup sugar 4 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon salt cup boiling water 2 tablespoons butter 2 eggs Cook hominy, salt, butter and boiling water twenty minutes. Cool. Scald corn meal with hot milk, add sugar and hominy, yolks of eggs; beat well; add baking powder and beaten whites of eggs. Bake in hot buttered gem pans twenty to thirty minutes.
A batter bread from Lowney's, leaning on cooked hominy for moisture and on beaten egg whites for lift. The hominy has to be cooked and cooled before it meets anything else, or the eggs will curdle and the crumb will be heavy.
- What "hominy" means hereIn American cookbooks of this period "hominy" in a batter usually means hominy grits, cooked to a soft porridge, rather than the whole nixtamalized kernels; the twenty-minute boiling here points that way. Use quick or regular grits, not instant, and not drained canned hominy.
- Cook the hominy firstTwenty minutes of simmering with salt, butter and boiling water gives you a thick mush; that liquid is absorbed, not drained. Cool it to lukewarm before adding the egg yolks.
- Corn mealPlain yellow or white cornmeal, not a self-rising cornmeal mix and not masa harina. Scalding it with hot milk softens the grain and is worth doing properly — pour the milk on just off the boil and let it stand a few minutes.
- Baking powderAdd it at the very end, with the beaten whites, and get the pans into the oven promptly. Modern double-acting baking powder is stronger than some of the tartrate powders of 1907; 4 teaspoons for this quantity of batter is a lot, and 2 to 3 teaspoons will do without a chemical aftertaste.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a heavy cast-iron muffin pan. Standard 12-cup muffin tins work; butter them generously and, if using cast iron, heat the pan in the oven before filling so the crust sets at once.
- "Hot" ovenThe book gives no temperature; "hot" in this period corresponds to roughly 400-425F. At that heat the smaller muffins will be done nearer twenty minutes than thirty ":6:6,
- Folding the whitesBeat the whites to soft, not stiff, peaks and fold them in with a few strokes. The hominy batter is heavy and overworking will collapse the only lift you have besides the powder.
- YieldAbout twelve standard muffins. They stale quickly, as most cornmeal breads do, and are best within a few hours of baking.
Corn and hominy breads sit at the point where Southern and Northern American baking overlap: the cornmeal is universal, but the cooked hominy softening the crumb is a habit of the grits-eating states, carried north in printed cookbooks. Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was published by the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company and written by Maria Willett Howard, and it prints a full domestic repertoire rather than confining itself to confectionery. Its bread chapter uses chemical leavening and beaten egg whites rather than yeast, and mixes a cooked cereal into the batter — a technique often said to keep a coarse-grained bread tender.