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Fried Hominy
Take some cold boiled hominy and make it into a soft paste by stirring in one beaten egg, two tablespoonfuls of warmed butter, and a small quantity of milk; stir the mixture over the fire until well incorporated and hot, then turn it onto a dish and leave until cold. Divide it into small round cakes and dredge them lightly with flour; put a large lump of butter into a flat stewpan, and when boiling, put in the cakes and fry until equally browned. Drain them, pile on a hot dish over which has been spread a folded napkin, and serve with cream and sugar,
A breakfast dish built on leftovers, and the one thing it depends on is temperature: the paste must be genuinely cold and firm before you try to shape and fry it.
- Chill it hardWarm or barely cool hominy paste will slump in the pan and refuse to brown into a cake. Spread it no more than half an inch thick on a plate and refrigerate at least two hours, or overnight; cut or shape the cakes cold, straight from the fridge.
- What hominy means hereHulled corn kernels treated with alkali, sold today as canned or dried hominy; grits are ground corn, and only 'hominy grits' are ground from the alkali-treated kind. Either works, but it must be cooked stiff — soupy grits will not hold. The recipe gives no quantity; something in the region of 2 cups of cold cooked hominy suits the one egg and two tablespoons of butter.
- Flat stewpanA shallow, straight-sided pan — a modern 10-inch skillet, ideally cast iron or heavy stainless. Nonstick browns these less well.
- "When boiling"Applied to butter this means foaming and singing, not smoking or browned. Medium heat, and give the cakes three to four minutes a side without moving them so a crust sets.
- Butter alone will scorchA "large lump" of butter over the time needed will darken past pleasant. Clarified butter, or butter cut with a spoonful of neutral oil, holds up better.
- The dredgeFlour lightly and shake off the excess. A heavy coating turns pasty rather than crisp; fine cornmeal is a reasonable substitute and gives more crunch.
- The napkinA period plating convention — the folded linen absorbed frying butter at table. A wire rack or paper does the job and the cakes stay crisper.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantity of hominy, so yield is guesswork; from about 2 cups you might get eight small cakes, two or three servings. Cream and sugar makes it a sweet breakfast plate; the same cakes take well to maple syrup, or to salt and pepper alongside eggs and ham.
Hominy — corn hulled with lye or wood ash, a technique taken from Native American cooks along with the word itself, generally traced to a Virginia Algonquian term — was a staple of the American table long before it was a Waldorf side dish. Fried cakes of leftover cooked grain were standard nineteenth-century household economy: cold mush, cold rice, cold hominy all went the same route, bound with egg, chilled, sliced and browned in butter for breakfast. That Oscar Tschirky records this one at all says something about the range of the Waldorf kitchen around 1896, which served European haute cuisine at dinner and unabashedly American breakfasts in the morning. The cream and sugar finish places it firmly in that breakfast tradition, where fried mush was treated much as pancakes are now.