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Hominy Gems
1/4 cup hominy 1 cup corn meal 1/2 teaspoon salt 3 tablespoons sugar ½ cup boiling water 3 tablespoons butter 1 cup scalded milk 2 eggs 3 teaspoons baking powder Add hominy mixed with salt to boiling water and let stand until hominy absorbs water. Add scalded milk to corn meal, then add sugar and butter. Combine mixtures, cool slightly, add yolks of eggs beaten until thick, and whites of eggs beaten until stiff. Sift in baking powder and beat thoroughly. Bake in hot buttered gem pans. ½ cup corn meal ½ cup flour ½ cup cooked rice 2 tablespoons sugar
A cornmeal muffin lightened with beaten egg whites and enriched with cooked hominy. Fannie Farmer's directions assume a cast-iron gem pan heated on the stove or in the oven before the batter goes in, and that preheating is the difference between a crisp shell and a pale, damp muffin.
- What "hominy" means hereThe instruction that the hominy absorb the boiling water points to dry ground hominy, close to what a modern shop sells as hominy grits, rather than whole canned kernels. The quarter cup is uncooked; canned hominy will not absorb liquid the same way and gives a wet batter.
- Heat the pans first"Hot buttered gem pans" is the hinge. Set the buttered cast-iron pan in the oven while it preheats, pour the batter into the sizzling cups, and return it at once. A cold pan produces a soft-sided muffin with no crust.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives no numbered oven temperatures, and this recipe specifies only hot pans. A hot oven of roughly 425F for 20 to 25 minutes, until the tops are browned and spring back, is a workable modern equivalent.
- Order of operationsCool the cornmeal-and-milk mixture until it is only warm before the yolks go in, or they will scramble. Fold the whites in gently rather than following the instruction to "beat thoroughly" too literally; the lift comes from both the baking powder and the air in the whites.
- Sifting in the baking powderAdding a dry chemical leaven to a batter that is already wet is awkward. Sift it over the surface in two or three additions and fold, so it does not sit in pockets.
- The stray lines at the endThe last four items are not part of this formula. They appear to belong to a neighbouring recipe using cooked rice and have been carried over onto this page. Ignore them.
- YieldRoughly a dozen standard muffins, or eight to nine in a deep cast-iron gem pan. Best eaten within an hour of baking; cornmeal batters like this stale quickly.
Cast-iron gem pans -- shallow-cupped plates that could be heated over a fire or in the oven so that the batter began to set the moment it was poured -- were sold from the mid-nineteenth century onward, and the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book gives a run of gem recipes, from plain flour gems through this hominy version to the rice one whose ingredients trail off the end of the page. Hominy itself is a much older thing, corn treated with alkali to loosen the hull, a technique taken from Indigenous cooks of the Americas, and by the 1890s dry ground hominy was a common grocery item eaten as a breakfast cereal.