Hominy Grits
This is the ordinary preparation. Soak all night; cover with slightly salted water in the morning, and cook one hour.
When the nominy is tender, the water may be poured off and cold milk substituted; then bring to a boil and serve.
A bare-bones formula from the days when grits came coarse, stone-ground and undegerminated, and needed both an overnight soak and a long simmer. Nearly everything about the timing depends on which grits you buy.
- What "hominy grits" meant hereIn this period grits were coarsely cracked hominy — corn treated with lye or wood-ash to slip the hull — ground far coarser than most supermarket grits today. Stone-ground grits are the closest match; instant and quick grits are a different product entirely.
- No quantities givenThe original assumes you know your household's portion. A workable ratio is 1 cup grits to 4 cups liquid, which serves four; stone-ground may want 5 cups. Do not try to scale the vague "cover with water" instruction literally, as grits swell to several times their volume.
- The soak is optional nowSoaking overnight softened coarse old-style grits and shortened cooking. Modern stone-ground grits benefit from it but do not require it; quick grits should never be soaked, as they turn to paste.
- Real cooking timesAn hour is right for coarse stone-ground grits over low heat. Regular grits take 20 to 30 minutes, quick grits 5 to 7. Judge by texture: no chalky grain left in the centre.
- Stir, and keep the heat lowThe instruction the recipe leaves out. Grits scorch and lump readily; a heavy-bottomed pan, low heat and frequent stirring matter more than exact timing.
- The milk finishPouring off the cooking water discards starch and flavour. If you want a milk porridge, cook the grits in a mixture of water and milk from the start, or stir warm milk in at the end — cold milk added to hot grits sets up lumps, and milk brought to a hard boil catches on the pan.
- "Nominy"Either a misprint for hominy or a dialect variant of it; left as printed.
- Salt"Slightly salted" is understated for grain this bland. About a teaspoon of salt per cup of dry grits, added to the cooking liquid rather than at the table.
Hominy is a Native American technique — soaking maize in an alkaline solution of lye or wood ash to loosen the hulls, the process now generally called nixtamalization — adopted by European settlers in the American South and carried into nineteenth-century northern cookbooks as a breakfast cereal. Hot grain porridges were a common morning dish in this period, and the long simmer and overnight soak here suit an unrefined meal that had not been degerminated for shelf life. The suggestion of pouring off the water and substituting milk belongs to the same era's fondness for a milky, spoonable finish.