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Hominy Croquettes
Make precisely as you would potato croquettes, beating vigorously until the mixture is free from lumps.
A one-line recipe that leans entirely on the potato croquette method elsewhere in the book. What it does not say is that hominy behaves quite differently from potato, and that is where the dish succeeds or fails.
- The hinge: get the mixture dryHominy holds far more water than boiled potato. Drain it well and dry it over low heat in the pan, stirring, until it stops steaming, or the croquettes will burst or soak up fat in the fryer.
- Which hominyPeriod recipes mean either whole hulled hominy or cooked hominy grits. Canned whole hominy, well drained, works; so does a batch of stiff grits cooked with about four parts water to one of grits and left to firm up. Instant grits are too soft to hold a shape.
- Beating out the lumpsUse a potato masher, ricer, or the back of a wooden spoon. A food processor turns cooked corn starch into glue in seconds.
- The potato croquette formula implied hereA typical proportion for croquettes of this type — the recipe itself gives none — is roughly two cups of the mashed base to one egg yolk and a tablespoon of butter, seasoned with salt, pepper and a little grated onion or nutmeg. Chill the mixture firm before shaping.
- Coating and fryingRoll in flour, then beaten egg thinned with a spoon of water, then fine dry crumbs. Fry at 365-375F until deep gold, about two to three minutes; the interior is already cooked, so you are only crisping the shell.
- YieldTwo cups of base makes about ten croquettes the size of a large egg, enough as a side dish for four.
Hominy is corn treated with an alkali to loosen the hull, a technique of long standing among Indigenous peoples of the Americas; the English word came into use in the seventeenth century from a Virginia Algonquian term. By the time the cook book generally attributed to the Butterick Publishing Company appeared in the early twentieth century, hominy and hominy grits were staple American breakfast and supper foods. The croquette itself is a French borrowing that is often said to have swept American cookery in the later nineteenth century: any cold starchy leftover, bound with egg, crumbed and fried, could be sent to the table as a hot garnish. That fashion explains the terseness here, since a household manual could assume the potato version was already understood and note only the difference that mattered.