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Hominy Croquettes
1 quart hominy 1 cup milk 1 tablespoon flour 1 tablespoon butter 2 teaspoons salt 1/2 to 1 cup bread crumbs Drain the hominy, and put through a food chopper, or mash. Make a white sauce of the butter, flour and salt. Mix this with the hominy, and add bread crumbs sufficient to form into croquettes. Then have ready some dried bread crumbs to which two tablespoons of milk or water have been added. Dip the croquettes into the bread crumbs. Place in a buttered pan, and bake in a hot oven until evenly browned.
A straightforward binder-and-crumb croquette that stands or falls on how dry the hominy is before it goes into the sauce.
- What hominy means hereWhole hominy: dried field corn treated with lime or lye, then cooked until tender, sold canned or dried. Hominy grits are a different product and will not hold the shape the same way.
- Drain hardThe hinge of the recipe. Canned hominy holds a surprising amount of liquid; drain it, then spread it on a towel and blot before chopping or mashing. Wet hominy means the mixture never firms and you end up adding crumbs until the croquettes taste of nothing but bread.
- "A hot oven"Roughly 400-450F. Expect somewhere around 20-30 minutes, turning once, until the crumb coat is evenly coloured.
- The white sauce is deliberately thinOne tablespoon of flour to a cup of milk gives a pouring sauce, not a paste. It is there to moisten and season, with the bread crumbs doing the actual binding. Cook it a couple of minutes past the point where it thickens so the flour loses its raw taste.
- SaltTwo teaspoons for a quart of hominy is on the high side by current taste, especially with canned hominy that is already salted. Start with one and correct the mixture before shaping.
- The moistened crumb coatingAdding two tablespoons of liquid to dried crumbs makes them cling to a soft croquette without an egg wash. Keep the crumbs crumbly, not damp and clumping, or the coating will steam rather than brown.
- Chill before shapingNot in the original, but an hour in the refrigerator makes the mixture far easier to roll and helps the croquettes hold together in a dry oven.
- Yield and servingAbout 10 to 12 croquettes, enough for four as a main course. They want something moist alongside: tomato sauce, mushroom gravy, or stewed tomatoes.
Croquettes were one of the great workhorses of American household cookery from the 1880s through the 1920s, a way of turning almost any starch or scrap into a shaped, crumbed, browned course that could stand where a chop or cutlet would otherwise sit. Much of the appeal of a croquette lay in form rather than nutrition: give a diner something browned and cutlet-shaped on a plate with gravy and the absence of meat registered less sharply. The instruction to bake in a buttered pan rather than fry in deep fat may reflect the era's health-reform and wartime-economy kitchens, where fat was expensive, though that is an inference rather than something the recipe states. Hominy itself is nixtamalized corn, a technique developed in Mesoamerica and long since absorbed into Southern and general American cooking, where it appeared cheap, canned and year-round by the time this book was written.