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Fine Hominy Pudding
2 large cupfuls of cooked fine hominy--hominy grits or samp. Butter size of an egg--1 1/2 ounces. 2 tablespoonfuls of sugar--2 ounces. 2 yolks or 1 egg. 1 small cupful of milk.
The hominy grits already cooked, should be dry and firm, otherwise use less milk or none. Mix all the ingredients together, the butter softened first, and bake in a buttered pudding pan about fifteen minutes. It takes a quart pan to bake it in. Use yolks of eggs if a rich pudding is wanted. Serve with a sauce. If no hominy ready put on a large half cupful in full cup of water, and when it has boiled nearly dry add a small cup of milk and pinch of salt; never stir it, but let cook with a lid on one half hour longer, at the back of the range.
A thrifty leftover-porridge pudding of the sort that filled out a nineteenth-century supper table. Everything hinges on the texture of the cooked grain going in.
- Start with dry, firm gritsThe recipe says it plainly and it is the one instruction that matters: stiff cooked grain rather than loose porridge. If yours are soft, the recipe itself says to use less milk or none, otherwise the pudding bakes into a puddle.
- Hominy, grits and sampIn this book they are treated as the same family of dried corn, milled at different degrees. "Fine hominy" means fine grits; samp is the coarsest grind. Modern stone-ground grits are the closest match; instant grits set up too soft and gluey for this.
- Butter size of an eggThe author gives the conversion himself, 1 1/2 ounces, which is about 3 tablespoons. His reckoning of two tablespoonfuls of sugar as 2 ounces does not convert cleanly (two level tablespoons is nearer an ounce by weight), so treat the book's ounce figures as approximate.
- CupfulsA cupful in books of this period is usually the half-pint, 8 fl oz, though this page does not say so, and the recipe asks for 'large' ones. On that reckoning two cupfuls of cooked grits is roughly a pound of cooked grain.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as was normal, and the recipe uses no oven term either. A modern moderate oven, about 350F, suits an egg-bound pudding; hotter and the custard curdles at the edges before the middle sets.
- TimingFifteen minutes is short for a quart of egg-bound pudding, and the recipe says nothing about the oven's heat or the temperature of the grits going in. In a modern oven expect to need longer, baking until the centre is just set and no longer wobbles as a liquid.
- The panA quart pan is a 1-quart baking dish, about 7 by 5 inches or a small round casserole. Butter it well; the sugar and milk will stick.
- Salt and sauceSalt is only mentioned in the fallback cooking method, so add a pinch to the mixture if your grits were cooked unsalted. "A sauce" in this period means a sweet pudding sauce: hard sauce, a thin vanilla or lemon sauce, or simply cream and maple syrup.
- YieldA quart pan serves four modestly, three generously. With two yolks it is noticeably richer and softer than with one whole egg.
Hominy pudding belongs to the long American habit of turning yesterday's boiled grain into today's dessert, the same impulse behind rice pudding and Indian pudding. Grits reached the colonial kitchen from Native practice, and cookbooks of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries use "hominy" loosely for both nixtamalized whole corn and the dried, cracked grain we now call grits, with samp reserved for the coarsest break. That the recipe is carried at all says something about how such kitchens worked: a stiff pan of cold grits was raw material rather than waste. The closing note, to set fresh grits at the back of the range with the lid on and never stir them, is an instruction for a wood- or coal-fired range, the cool rear of the stovetop standing in for the low burner or double boiler a modern cook would reach for.