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Hominy
AMONGST various preparations of maize, or Indian corn, Hominy takes a useful place as a medicinal nutriment. It is the maize broken or split into a preparation of high nutritive value, containing eight per cent of proteid, and seventy-eight per cent of carbohydrates. Maize, though not used largely in this country, is literally the "staff of life" in Mexico, and Natal. It is fully as nourishing as wheat in all its parts, except as to its mineral ingredients, whilst richer in fat than any cereal besides oats. The johnny (journey) cakes of North America are made of maizemeal unleavened. This cereal is readily digested in the human body, but its corn flour is little more than starch, because the proteid and fat have been washed away by alkaline solutions. Per contra, the maize itself as Hominy is highly supporting for brain workers, for persons whose daily avocations demand a considerable amount of physical exertion, and for sufferers from general dyspepsia. To dress this as a vegetable, soak the grains for several hours in cold water sufficient to cover them, then strain off the liquid. Empty the meal into a saucepan containing plenty of fast-boiling water, to which some salt (in the proportion of one and a half dessertspoonfuls to each half gallon) has been added, and cook it for from three and a half to four hours, with an occasional stir, to prevent it from sticking to the bottom of the pan, and getting burnt. Drain carefully, and stir in a small piece of fresh butter about the size of a walnut; pepper slightly, and send to table very hot in a well-heated dish. Hominy porridge may be made also with the meal, first soaked as directed above, to be eaten with milk, and sugar, golden syrup, or salt.
The instructions are sound but the vocabulary drifts: the author calls the same thing "grains" and "meal" within a sentence. What is meant throughout is dried hulled corn — whole or coarsely cracked hominy, not cornmeal.
- What to buyLook for dry whole hominy or posole (hulled, alkali-treated corn kernels), or coarse hominy grits. Fine grits and cornmeal will not survive four hours of boiling; they turn to paste in twenty minutes. Canned hominy is already fully cooked and needs only heating.
- The cooking time is real, for dry whole cornThree and a half to four hours is correct for unsoaked-to-lightly-soaked dry hominy on a low boil. An overnight soak cuts it to roughly 90 minutes to 2 hours, and a pressure cooker to about 30 minutes at high pressure. Coarse grits want 40-60 minutes, not four hours.
- Salt proportionA dessertspoon is two teaspoons, so one and a half of them is about a tablespoon of salt to each half gallon (2 imperial quarts, a little over 2 litres) of water. That is a moderate seasoning for a bland starch; adjust if using coarse flake salt.
- Butter "the size of a walnut"Reckon roughly 1/2 to 1 oz (1-2 tablespoons); the old equivalence was never fixed. The recipe gives no quantity of hominy, but on any household batch this is restrained; the dish takes considerably more butter or cream happily.
- The instruction that mattersKeep the water at a genuine boil when the corn goes in and stir often, scraping the bottom. Hominy settles and scorches readily, and a burnt bottom flavours the whole pot.
- Water level"Plenty of fast-boiling water" means at least four times the volume of the corn, topped up as it evaporates. Dry hominy roughly triples in bulk, and kernels left uncovered stay hard.
- YieldOne pound of dry hominy gives about 6 cups cooked, serving six as a vegetable. The porridge version, thinned with milk, will stretch further.
- A claim to discountCornflour is starchy because the germ and bran are separated out in milling, not because protein and fat have been "washed away by alkaline solutions." Alkaline treatment is nixtamalization, a quite different process - though whether the hominy sold in Britain at this date was nixtamalized or simply hulled mechanically is not something the page tells us.
Hominy is one of the few American foods to enter English cookery under a borrowed Algonquian name - generally traced to Virginia Algonquian words recorded by early colonists as rockahominie and similar, meaning prepared or ground corn. The technique behind it is older and Mesoamerican: soaking dried maize in wood-ash lye or lime to loosen the hulls, which also, though the mechanism was unknown in 1900, frees the niacin the grain otherwise locks away. That chemistry is the hidden subject of this page. Maize-heavy diets were by then already associated with pellagra in southern Europe, an association that sat oddly beside maize as a "staff of life" in Mexico; and the enthusiastic proteid-and-carbohydrate percentages here belong to the era's confidence that a food could be prescribed by its analysis. The book's framing - hominy for brain workers, the physically exerted, and dyspeptics - is typical of the invalid-cookery tradition, where a bland, long-boiled cereal was as much a treatment as a meal. The aside on johnnycake as "journey cake" is a traditional folk etymology rather than a documented one; other accounts derive it from Shawnee or from Jonakin.