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On Hominy Toast
(This saves bread toast.) Use left-over hominy grits or prepare fresh hominy. When cooked, turn into a bread pan and when cold cut into slices like toast. Brown on both sides in a little cooking oil. Cook one cupful diced celery in two cupfuls of water until almost tender and the liquid is reduced to about one-half cupful. Melt two tablespoonfuls butter substitute, stir in three tablespoonfuls flour or barley flour (or one and one-half tablespoonfuls cornstarch) and when smooth, add gradually, stirring constantly, one and one-half cupfuls milk. When beginning to thicken, add gradually the celery water and liquor from a can of minced or whole clams. Cook and stir until thickened. Add clams and celery, season highly with salt, pepper and a little paprika and pour over the browned hominy slices.
Creamed canned clams over fried grits — a wartime dish built to spare bread and butter. Nothing here is difficult, but two details decide whether it works: the grits must be stiff enough to slice, and the clams go in at the very end.
- Hominy grits, not hominyThe recipe means cooked grits, poured into a loaf pan and chilled until firm. Regular stone-ground or coarse grits cooked thick (about 4 parts water to 1 part grits) will set solidly overnight; quick grits set softer and are more likely to fall apart in the pan. Whole canned hominy will not slice.
- Chill it properlyRefrigerate the pan at least 4 hours, ideally overnight. Warm grits will not hold a slice. Cut slices about 1/2 inch thick and pat the cut faces dry before they meet the oil, or they will steam rather than brown.
- Butter substituteIn this period this meant oleomargarine or a vegetable shortening, in line with wartime pressure to conserve dairy fat. Use butter or margarine as you prefer; the sauce is better with butter.
- Barley flour and cornstarchBarley flour appears here as a wheat-saving measure, and it thickens a little less firmly than wheat flour. With the cornstarch option you may find it easier to whisk it into a little cold milk first rather than cooking it in the fat, which reduces the chance of lumps.
- Add the clams lastThis is the hinge. Canned clams are already cooked; folded in at the end and warmed through for a minute or two they stay tender, while any real simmering turns them to erasers. Take the pan off the heat as soon as they are hot.
- The clam liquorDrain a 6.5 oz can (or two, for a more assertive sauce) and reserve every drop of liquid. It is salty, so season at the end, after the liquor and celery water are in. "Season highly" is meant literally — the grits underneath are bland.
- Celery waterReducing 2 cups of water down to 1/2 cup around the diced celery takes 15-20 minutes uncovered and is doing real work: the celery is the dish's main aromatic. Do not shortcut it with plain stock.
- YieldServes 4 as a light supper — roughly two slices of fried grits each under about two cups of sauce. A green salad or stewed tomatoes would suit it.
The Bride's Cook Book belongs to the American home front of the First World War, and this recipe wears its date openly: the parenthetical "(This saves bread toast.)" reads naturally against the wheatless-day campaigns of the U.S. Food Administration, which urged households toward corn, barley and oats so that wheat could be shipped to Europe. "Butter substitute" and "barley flour" are the same argument made twice. Fried slices of set cornmeal or hominy were not an invention of the war, though — the technique is much older in Southern and Mid-Atlantic cooking, where cooled mush was routinely sliced and pan-browned for breakfast, and it is the same principle as Italian fried polenta. Here that homely breakfast starch serves as a dinner base for a creamed dish, and canned minced clams, cheap and shelf-stable, made a plausible shellfish course out of a pantry.