Hominy Mush
1/2 cup fine hominy 3 cups boiling water 1/2 teaspoon salt Put all the ingredients in a double boiler, and cook two hours. Add more water if the mush is too thick.
A plain boiled cereal that depends almost entirely on the grind of the corn and on patient, indirect heat. Two points decide whether it works: what you buy, and that the pot never sits over direct flame.
- "Fine hominy" is gritsWhole hominy is the puffy, nixtamalized corn kernel sold canned or dried; fine hominy is that same corn dried and ground, which today is sold as hominy grits. Buy stone-ground or old-fashioned grits, not instant, and not polenta, which is ground from untreated corn and tastes different.
- The ratioHalf a cup of grits to three cups of water is 6:1 by volume, far wetter than the 4:1 most modern packages give. That is correct for a double boiler, where almost nothing evaporates. Cooked over direct heat with a lid off, the same ratio will thicken and need watching.
- Why the double boilerGrits scorch and lump the moment they touch a hot pan bottom. The upper pan of a double boiler never exceeds about 212F, so the mush can be left largely alone. A heatproof bowl over a pan of simmering water does the same job; keep the water topped up over two hours.
- Two hours is not a misprintStone-ground grits genuinely want an hour or more to soften fully and lose their raw-starch edge. Modern quick grits, which are much more finely ground, cook in about five minutes and do not need this treatment.
- Whisk at the startThe recipe says only to combine everything, but it helps to add the grits to the boiling water in a thin stream, whisking, before the pan goes over the water bath. Lumps formed at this stage are hard to break up later.
- SeasoningHalf a teaspoon of salt for three cups of liquid is light by current taste. Salt at the beginning rather than the end; grains seasoned only after cooking taste flat.
- Yield and servingRoughly three cups cooked, enough for two to four as a breakfast cereal. It was commonly eaten hot with milk and sugar or molasses, or poured into a loaf pan, chilled overnight, sliced and fried in fat until crisp — a familiar second-day use.
Hominy is corn treated with an alkali — wood-ash lye or slaked lime — to loosen the hulls and soften the grain, a process taken directly from Indigenous cooking in the Americas; the English word is generally traced to an Algonquian term recorded by early Virginia colonists. Ground fine, it became grits, one of the cheapest hot breakfasts available in an American kitchen and a fixture of Southern tables. The two-hour double-boiler method belongs to a kitchen with a stove burning all morning anyway, where long unattended cooking cost nothing.