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Samp or Coarse Hominy
One pint of coarse hominy will measure one quart after soaking. Wash hominy and soak over night in cold water. In the morning, put it over a slow fire, and as fast as the water absorbs, add fresh boiling water. Cook slowly for five hours. Allow one teaspoon of salt to one pint of the dry grain.
A straightforward long-cook grain that assumes a coal range with a permanently warm spot. The instructions are sound; only the vessel and the timing need translating.
- What samp actually isThe recipe treats samp and coarse hominy as the same thing. Both mean dried corn kernels cracked coarsely rather than finely ground; hominy proper has also been hulled with alkali (nixtamalized), while samp historically was often just coarsely broken corn. Either way this is not the fine grind sold as grits, and not canned hominy, which is already cooked. Look for whole or coarse-cracked hominy or posole in Latin American groceries.
- Volume after soakingThe opening line is a yield note, not a step: 1 pint dry (2 cups) swells to about 1 quart soaked, and finishes at roughly 6 cups cooked. That serves six to eight as a side or breakfast cereal.
- The soak mattersOvernight in cold water, with water covering by two or three inches. Skipping it will lengthen the cooking, and the kernels are likelier to break up on the outside before the centre is done.
- Slow fire, in modern termsA bare simmer with the surface barely trembling. On a gas or induction burner that is the lowest setting under a heavy pot, and a heat diffuser is worth using. A very low oven or a slow cooker on low is another way to hold a steady low heat.
- Always add boiling waterThe instruction to top up with fresh boiling water matters: cold water drops the pot off the simmer, and the kernels take correspondingly longer to open.
- Five hours is realWhole hulled corn genuinely takes four to six hours at a simmer to bloom open and go tender. Judge by the kernel, not the clock: it should be soft through with no hard core. A pressure cooker does the same job in 35-45 minutes at high pressure.
- SaltOne teaspoon per pint of dry grain is about half a teaspoon per cup, on the modest side by current taste. The recipe does not say when to add it; correct the seasoning at the end.
- ServingPeriod practice was to eat it hot with milk or cream and sugar or molasses at breakfast, or as a starch beside pork and game. Leftovers set firm in a loaf pan, slice, and fry in butter or bacon fat.
Samp comes from Narragansett nasaump, a word for cracked corn boiled soft; Roger Williams recorded a form of it in his 1643 key to the Narragansett language, noting that the English took their word from it. Hominy derives from another Algonquian root and refers to corn hulled with wood ash or lime before cracking. Both preserved a Native American technique inside the New England and Mid-Atlantic kitchen, where corn was cheap and long, slow cooking on a banked fire cost little.