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Old-fashioned Oatmeal
1 cup oatmeal 4 cups boiling water 1½ teaspoons salt Mix ingredients, and cook in double boiler six to eight hours.
Boiled Hominy No. I 1 cup hominy (fine) 4 cups boiling water 1½ teaspoons salt Cook all ingredients, stirring occasionally, for one honr. Boiled Hominy No. 2 1 cup coarse hominy 8 cups boiling water 2 teaspoons salt Mix ingredients and cook six to eight hours, or, instead of boiling, cook in double boiler all day. 1 cup wheat
Three breakfast cereals set down in a row, all worked on the assumption of a coal range that stays warm all night. The long times are not errors; they are how whole, unrolled grain was handled before quick-cooking flakes took over.
- What "oatmeal" means hereThis is most likely steel-cut or coarse-cut oatmeal rather than the rolled flakes sold as "old-fashioned oats" today, though rolled oats were also on sale by this date and were usually named as such. Rolled oats in a 4:1 water ratio for eight hours would collapse to paste; steel-cut oats want roughly 4 cups water to 1 cup grain and half an hour or so of direct simmering, or a few hours in a double boiler.
- The double boiler is the pointGrain sitting in a covered upper pan over simmering water cannot scorch and cannot boil dry, which is what made an all-night cook possible on a banked range. A slow cooker on low is the closest modern equivalent; a heavy pot on a diffuser over the lowest flame is the next best.
- Hominy, fine and coarseHominy is dried corn treated with lime or lye to slip the hull, then dried again. "Fine hominy" is what is now sold as hominy grits; "coarse hominy" is samp or whole hulled kernels, which genuinely does need the better part of a day unless soaked overnight first. Canned hominy is already cooked and needs only heating.
- Salt goes in at the startBoth cereals salt the water before the grain swells, which seasons through rather than sitting on the surface. A teaspoon and a half to a cup of dry grain reads high on paper but is about right for a plain porridge eaten with milk.
- Water loss over a long cookA tight lid matters more than the ratio. Over six to eight hours an ill-fitting cover will lose enough steam to leave the grain stiff and the pan dry; check once or twice and add boiling water, never cold.
- The stray line at the end"1 cup wheat" is the opening of the next recipe in the book, cut off mid-page. It is not an ingredient in the hominy.
- YieldA cup of dry grain to four of water gives roughly four generous breakfast servings; the coarse hominy at 8 cups water makes about six. Leftovers set firm in a loaf pan and can be sliced and fried, a common way of using them up.
Lowney's Cook Book was written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and alongside its chocolate chapters it offered a full course of ordinary household cookery. The all-night cooking times reflect the coal or wood range, which held heat long after the cook went to bed, and the same logic drove the fireless cooker, an insulated box popular in exactly these years for finishing grains and stews off the fire. Hominy itself is the surviving kitchen trace of nixtamalization, the alkali treatment of maize generally traced to Mesoamerica and taken up by colonists in North America, who commonly used wood-ash lye and kept both the technique and the Algonquian-derived name.