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Hominy (Cup hominy quarts water)
1 cup hominy 2 quarts water 2 tablespoons butter 1 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons cream Get the unbroken hominy and after careful washing soak it twenty-four hours in the water. Cook slowly in the same water in a covered vessel for eight hours or until all the water has been absorbed by the hominy; add the butter, salt and cream and serve as a vegetable or as a cereal with sugar and cream.
A straightforward dish of whole hominy, but everything depends on buying the right corn and giving it the long, unhurried cooking the recipe assumes.
- "Unbroken hominy"This means whole nixtamalized corn kernels, sold dried today as pozole or hominy corn, not grits and not the canned product. Canned hominy is already fully cooked and needs only warming; using it here would turn the eight hours into mush.
- The soak is not optionalDried whole hominy is very hard. Twenty-four hours in the two quarts of cold water is what makes the eight-hour simmer work, and the soaking water is kept and cooked in, so no starch or flavour is thrown away.
- Cooking time and vesselEight hours at a bare simmer in a covered pot is consistent with dried whole hominy on an old range. A heavy Dutch oven at the lowest burner setting, or a slow cooker on low, will do the same job; a pressure cooker will cut the time to well under an hour, depending on how hard and how old the corn is.
- Watch the water at the endThe instruction to cook "until all the water has been absorbed" leaves no margin for error in the last hour. Check from about six hours on and add a little boiling water if the pot threatens to catch, since scorched hominy taints the whole batch.
- Salt at the endThe salt goes in with the butter and cream, after cooking, rather than into the pot at the start. The recipe does not say why.
- CreamUnqualified "cream" in books of this period covered a wide range of fat contents, from something like today's light cream up to thick or whipping cream; either will work in the small quantity called for here.
- YieldOne cup of dried whole hominy swells to roughly three or four cups cooked, though the recipe's claim that all two quarts are absorbed makes the finished quantity hard to fix; enough for a small side dish or a couple of breakfast bowls.
Hominy is corn that has been steeped in an alkaline solution of wood ash or slaked lime, which loosens the hulls and swells the kernels; the process is Mesoamerican in origin and was long established across Native North America before European contact. The English word is generally traced to an Algonquian term recorded in early Virginia sources, and colonists adopted both the food and the name. By the time of a cook book like this one, hominy appeared in two forms: broken into grits, or whole and dried as here, the latter demanding the sort of overnight soak and all-day pot that a coal or wood range made easy and a modern schedule does not. The instruction to serve it either as a vegetable or as a sweetened cereal reflects how flexibly corn sat on the American table, moving between the dinner plate and the breakfast bowl without changing its preparation.