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Boiled Hominy
(1) Wash the hominy in cold water, and then soak it for ten or twelve hours in tepid water; put it over a slow fire with the water in which it has been soaking, and boil gently for from three to six hours, adding more water to keep it from burning. Use soft water, and do not add salt while cooking, as it hardens the hominy. (2) Wash the hominy well in cold water, put it into an earthenware pan or basin, pour over sufficient boiling water to cover, and let it remain all night. Then drain and place it over the fire with one quart of water to every pint of hominy, and boil for five to six hours, stirring frequently; then drain it quite dry in a colander or sieve, and serve hot in a deep dish. It is very palatable when eaten with pork, bacon or beef, or almost any kind of meat. Any cold hominy that may be left can be made into cakes the following day, with the addition of a little wheat flour, and fried in boiling lard, or it may be boiled for an hour, and served as at first.
Two methods for the same thing: dried whole hominy, soaked overnight and simmered until the kernels split and go tender. The long times are not padding — dried nixtamalized corn genuinely needs hours.
- What hominy is hereThis is whole hulled corn — field corn treated with lime or lye to loosen the skins, then dried. It is not grits or hominy grits, which are the same corn ground and cook in 30 to 45 minutes. Look for dried posole or maiz para pozole; a 6 to 8 hour simmer is right for that, not for anything ground.
- The canned shortcutCanned hominy is already fully cooked and needs only draining, rinsing and 10 minutes of heating. If you use it, ignore both methods above entirely.
- Salt at the endThe instruction not to salt during cooking follows a long-standing kitchen belief that salted water keeps the kernels firm longer; modern testing on dried beans casts some doubt on how much difference it makes. Salt once they are tender, and be generous — unsalted hominy is bland.
- "Soft water"Water low in calcium and magnesium. Hard water slows the softening of the kernels the same way it does with dried beans. Filtered or bottled water is enough if your tap water is very hard; there is no need for anything more elaborate.
- RatiosMethod two gives one quart water to one pint hominy — 4 cups to 2 cups by volume. That is a starting point only; expect to add boiling water several times over five or six hours. Keep the kernels covered throughout.
- Pressure cookerA pressure cooker or Instant Pot will bring soaked hominy to tenderness in roughly 40 minutes at high pressure with a natural release, though the timing varies with the corn. The texture comes close to the long simmer, if not always identical.
- YieldDried hominy roughly triples in volume. Two cups dry gives about six cups cooked — eight side servings, or the base of a large pot of posole.
- The leftover cakesMash the cold hominy coarsely, bind with a few tablespoons of flour as the recipe directs, form patties and fry in hot lard or bacon fat until crusted, about 3 minutes a side. 'Boiling lard' means fat hot enough to sizzle on contact — around 350-375F if you want to measure it.
Hominy came to American tables from Indigenous nixtamalization — soaking dried corn in an alkaline solution of wood ash or slaked lime, which loosens the hull, softens the kernel and, as later chemistry showed, makes the corn's niacin available to the body. The word itself is generally traced to an Algonquian root, borrowed into English by Virginia colonists in the early 1600s. By Oscar Tschirky's day it was standard cheap American starch, north and south alike, and the Waldorf-Astoria book treats it as a plain boiled side, noting that it goes with pork, bacon or beef and giving the frugal instruction to fry yesterday's leftovers into cakes. The recipe is also a fair record of how much slower dried whole corn was to prepare before pressure cooking and canning made it a pantry item.