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Hominy Pudding
2 tablespoons ground hominy 1 quart milk Pinch of salt 4 tablespoons sugar 3 eggs 1 teaspoon flavoring Pick over the hominy and let it soak in the milk for half an hour. cook in a double boiler for forty-five minutes; pour over the beaten yolks and sugar; add flavoring and beaten whites; bake in a slow oven for about twenty minutes. Serve with lemon, chocolate or other sauce.
A milk-and-grits custard of the sort that closed a plain dinner in the early 1900s. Two details decide whether it succeeds: the hominy must be fully softened before the eggs go in, and the eggs must be tempered rather than shocked.
- Ground hominyThis is what a modern market sells as hominy grits — dried nixtamalized corn, ground fine or medium, not instant. Fine grind gives the smoothest pudding; instant grits will turn to paste in the double boiler.
- The proportion looks wrong but isn'tTwo tablespoons of grits to a quart of milk is deliberate. The result is a loose, spoonable custard barely thickened by starch, not a firm cornmeal pudding. Adding more grits gives you a stiff porridge that weeps in the oven.
- Tempering the yolks"Pour over the beaten yolks" means adding the hot milk-and-hominy mixture to the yolk-and-sugar mixture in a slow stream while whisking hard. Dumping it in at once risks scrambling them, and baking will not smooth out curds once they form.
- Slow ovenConventionally taken as somewhere around 300-325°F. At that heat twenty minutes will set the surface and firm the whites through; the centre should still wobble slightly when you take it out. A hotter oven curdles the custard and collapses the beaten whites.
- A water bath helpsSet the dish in a pan of hot water to keep the edges from setting hard before the middle catches up.
- FlavoringLeft open, as such recipes often were; vanilla was among the commonest choices, or lemon extract if you plan to serve the lemon sauce. Grated nutmeg over the top is period-appropriate.
- YieldA quart of milk plus three eggs fills a 1½-quart baking dish and serves six. Best eaten warm — the starch firms noticeably as it chills.
Hominy puddings belong to a large family of nineteenth-century American "grain custards" — rice, sago, tapioca, farina, Indian meal — in which a spoonful of starch stretched a quart of milk and a few eggs into a dessert for a whole table. Hominy, corn treated with alkali to loosen the hulls, was adopted by European settlers from Indigenous nixtamalization practice and was cheap and ubiquitous across the South and the Midwest; sending it to the dessert course rather than the breakfast table was a way of dressing up a pantry staple. The instruction to finish with "lemon, chocolate or other sauce" suggests that puddings were treated as a base to be varied rather than a fixed dish.