Porridge, Hominy
INGREDIENTS.-Hominy, water, butter.
The night before the porridge is required, pour boiling water on a sufficient quantity of hominy, and let it stand till morning.
Should it have absorbed the water, add a little more and boil for half an hour, or rather more. Just before serving, stir in a little butter, about a teaspoonful to each person.
SEASONABLE. -A good breakfast dish in winter.
A skeleton recipe even by Beeton's standards: no quantities, no salt, no pot size. The important thing to settle before you start is what kind of hominy you have, because the cooking time swings from twenty minutes to three hours.
- What hominy isDried corn treated with alkali (nixtamalized) so the hull slips off. Whole or pearl hominy is the intact kernel; grits are traditionally the same kernel cracked or ground, though much modern grit is milled from untreated corn. Canned hominy is already cooked and is not what this recipe means.
- Which one to buyBeeton's "hominy" soaked overnight and boiled half an hour is closest to a coarse grit or small hominy. Whole dried hominy needs soaking overnight and then two to three hours of simmering, not thirty minutes. Modern quick grits need about five minutes and should not be soaked at all.
- ProportionsThe recipe gives none. For coarse stone-ground grits, work to roughly 1 part grain to 4 parts water by volume, adding more hot water as it thickens. Soaking overnight means the grain has already taken up some of that liquid, so judge by consistency rather than measuring.
- SaltOmitted entirely here, as it is in a number of Victorian breakfast-cereal recipes. Salt the water at the start; grain salted only at the end tastes flat.
- ScorchingThe hinge of the dish. Coarse hominy settles and catches on the bottom of a thin pan over direct heat. Use a heavy pot on the lowest possible flame and stir often, or set it in a double boiler and forget about it for an hour.
- The butterA teaspoon a head is about 5 g, stirred in off the heat so it emulsifies rather than pooling. This is the whole seasoning of the dish; treacle, brown sugar or cream would be plausible additions at table.
- YieldAbout 1 cup of dry coarse grits, soaked and cooked, feeds four at breakfast.
Hominy is one of the clearest American loans in a British cookery book. The word comes from Virginia Algonquian — forms such as uskatahomen and rockahominie are recorded by early English colonists — and the technique behind it, soaking maize in wood-ash lye or lime to loosen the hull and make its niacin available, is far older, developed in Mesoamerica millennia before European contact. By the later nineteenth century Beeton's household editions had absorbed hominy and hominy grits alongside oatmeal porridge and Indian-meal mush, presenting them as a plain winter breakfast.