Home › Bread And Bread Making › Raised Hominy Muffins
Raised Hominy Muffins
1 cup warm cooked hominy ¼ cup butter 1 cup scalded milk 3 tablespoons sugar 1 teaspoon salt ¼ yeast cake ¼ cup lukewarm water 3¼ cups flour Mix first five ingredients; when lukewarm add yeast cake, dissolved in lukewarm water and flour. Cover, and let rise over night. In the morning cut down, fill buttered gem pans two-thirds full, let rise, one hour, and bake in a moderate oven. Unless cooked hominy is rather stiff more flour will be needed.
An overnight sponge batter thickened with cooked hominy, baked in gem pans. The dough is soft rather than stiff, and the hominy's moisture content controls everything about it.
- HominyHere it means whole or coarsely broken hulled corn kernels, cooked soft, not the fine grits sold under that name today. Canned hominy, drained and warmed, works; if using grits, cook them thick enough to hold a shape on a spoon.
- The hingeThe closing sentence is the whole recipe: loose, wet hominy will slacken the dough and it will not hold a muffin shape. Add flour until the mass is a thick, sticky drop batter that clings to the spoon.
- Yeast cakeCompressed yeast came in small cakes; a modern compressed cake is about 0.6 oz, though period sizes varied. A quarter of one, dissolved in lukewarm water, is on the order of half a teaspoon of active dry yeast -- a deliberately small amount for a slow overnight rise in a cool kitchen. Modern kitchens are warmer, so keep it minimal or the sponge may overproof by morning.
- Fractional amountsThe butter, yeast, water and flour quantities are written with the fractions run together. Read them as 1/4 cup butter, 1/4 yeast cake, 1/4 cup lukewarm water and 3 1/4 cups flour, and adjust the flour to the dough as the final sentence directs.
- Scalded milkScalding was held to deactivate something in raw milk that slackened dough; it also denatures whey proteins. With pasteurized milk it is generally unnecessary; simply warm it, then let the mixture cool to lukewarm before adding the yeast so the heat does not kill it.
- Cut downDeflate the risen sponge by stirring it down with a spoon rather than kneading. This is a batter, not a kneaded dough.
- Gem pansCast-iron gem pans held cups a little smaller than a standard muffin tin. A 12-cup muffin pan filled two-thirds is the right substitute; grease it well, as this batter sticks.
- Oven and timeA moderate oven is 350–375F. Expect 20 to 25 minutes for muffin-sized gems, until well browned and firm at the center.
- YieldA dozen or more, depending on pan size. Best warm from the oven; the hominy keeps them moist but they stale quickly.
Hominy -- corn soaked in an alkaline solution to loosen the hulls, a technique taken from Native American cooking (some hominy was also hulled mechanically) -- was widely used in nineteenth-century American kitchens, and leftover breakfast hominy could be worked into the next day's bread. Fannie Farmer's bread chapter includes several such dishes: cooked cereal, rice, potato and hominy appear as partial substitutes for flour, adding moisture and softness while stretching a more expensive ingredient. The overnight sponge belongs to the same domestic economy, letting a very small quantity of yeast do its work overnight so that hot bread could reach the breakfast table.