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Hominy (Teaspoons salt cups boiling)
1 cup hominy. 2 teaspoons salt 4½ cups boiling water Soak the hominy over night, keeping it in a warm place if possible. Drain and add boiling water. Boil fifteen minutes and place in the cooker all day.
A fireless-cooker recipe, meaning the pot is brought to a hard boil on the stove and then sealed in an insulated box to coast for hours on stored heat. Everything depends on getting enough heat into the pot before it goes into the cooker.
- The missing ingredientThe ingredient list as printed gives only salt and water; the quantity of hominy has dropped out. Something on the order of a cup of dry whole hominy would suit 4 1/2 cups of water, but the original is genuinely silent on the amount.
- What hominy meant hereWhole dried hominy, the large nixtamalized corn kernels sold today as posole or pozole corn, not hominy grits and not the canned wet product. Canned hominy is already cooked and needs none of this treatment.
- The fireless cookerAn insulated wooden or metal chest, sometimes fitted with soapstone or iron discs heated red-hot on the range. The pot goes in boiling, the lid is clamped down, and the food finishes on retained heat. A modern slow cooker on low, or a vacuum thermal cooker, does the same job.
- The hinge: the fifteen-minute boilThat boil is the main heat supply for the day, unless the cooker is one of the sorts fitted with heated discs. The pot must be full, tightly lidded, and at a rolling boil when it goes in, and the cooker must be closed at once. A half-hearted simmer leaves the grain hard at supper.
- Holding food warm all dayA well-loaded fireless cooker can hold food hot for hours, but a poorly insulated or half-filled one drifts down into the range where Bacillus cereus thrives in cooked starches. If you improvise the insulation rather than using a slow cooker, check the temperature and refrigerate promptly once it falls.
- The overnight soakKeeping it "in a warm place" speeds hydration but is the same warm-holding problem in miniature. Soak in the refrigerator overnight instead; the grain absorbs water just as well, only slower.
- Yield and servingYield depends on the missing quantity of hominy; a cup of dry grain would give roughly three cups cooked. In this period it went to the table for breakfast with butter, cream and sugar, or alongside meat as a starch in place of potatoes.
Fireless cookery was a genuine enthusiasm in American households between roughly 1905 and 1920, promoted as a fuel saver and a way to free the cook from tending a range on a hot day; the same principle survives in the European hay box and in today's vacuum flask cookers. It suited exactly this kind of dish, a tough dried grain that wants many hours of gentle heat and no attention. Hominy itself is far older than the cooker: the word is generally traced to Virginia Algonquian, and the process behind it, simmering field corn with wood ash or lime to loosen the hulls, is Mesoamerican in origin and thousands of years old. By Mrs. Fryer's day it was a breakfast staple in some regions of the United States, cheap enough to be worth the trouble of an overnight soak and a day in the box.