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Hominy Cakes
Boil one quart or so of hominy very soft and add to it one pound of corn meal and one teaspoonful of salt. Mix into it three well-beaten eggs and sufficient milk to make a thin batter. Beat the batter well for a few minutes, then bake it on a griddle, dropping it on in large spoonfuls and making it very thin, or they may be baked in waffle-irons. Serve maple syrup with them. Yeast may be used instead of eggs, putting one tablespoonful in the batter and allowing it to stand for several hours in a warm place to rise.
A big, plain griddle batter of the kind hotel kitchens turned out by the hundred. The proportions are generous and loose, and the batter's thinness matters more than any measurement.
- What hominy means hereWhole hulled corn kernels treated with alkali, boiled until they collapse, not the dry quick grits sold today. Canned hominy, drained and mashed or briefly blitzed, is the closest ready substitute; a quart of cooked hominy is roughly two 29-oz cans.
- A pound of corn mealAbout 3 to 3 1/4 cups of stone-ground yellow or white meal. Weigh it rather than scoop it, since meal packs unevenly and the batter is already on the stiff side before the milk goes in.
- Milk quantity is left to youExpect to need 3 to 4 cups. The batter should pour and spread on its own; anything that holds a mound will bake into a heavy, gritty cake.
- Let it stand brieflyEven in the egg version, five or ten minutes off the heat lets the meal hydrate. Check the consistency again afterward and thin with more milk, as it will have tightened.
- Griddle heatMedium, around 375F, lightly greased. Corn batters brown faster than wheat ones and scorch before the centre sets if the pan is too hot.
- The yeast versionOne tablespoon likely means a compressed or homemade liquid yeast rather than modern instant. About one packet (2 1/4 tsp) of active dry is a reasonable stand-in, and note that once yeast replaces the eggs the batter needs its several hours in a warm place before it will cook light.
- Scale and yieldAs written this feeds a dining room: well over three dozen thin cakes. Quartering the recipe gives a reasonable household batch.
- Waffle ironsThe batter works in an iron, but hominy batters stick badly. Grease well and let the waffle set fully before lifting the lid.
Hominy is nixtamalized corn, an Indigenous American technique adopted wholesale by colonial and later Southern cooks, and by the late nineteenth century it was standard breakfast material in hotels along the Eastern seaboard as much as in home kitchens. Combining soft-boiled hominy with dry meal gave a griddle cake that was moister and less sandy than one made from meal alone, a trick that appears in American cookbooks of the period. That such a recipe should turn up in a grand New York hotel's repertoire, alongside the French dishes such hotels were famous for, is a reminder that they still had to serve an American breakfast: griddle cakes and maple syrup, the syrup itself a Northeastern product.