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Hominy Balls
1 cup cooked hominy 1 egg yolk Slight grating nutmeg Salt as needed Mix all well together and form into smooth balls the size of large English walnuts. If the hominy is very stiff it should be beaten up with two tablespoonfuls of hot milk before the other things are added. Roll the balls in sifted white breadcrumbs, then in slightly beaten egg-white, and again in crumbs. Brown lightly in deep, hot fat.
This amount will make six balls.
A small, tidy recipe for using up the breakfast pot of hominy. The whole thing hinges on the stiffness of the cold cereal — if it will not hold a shape between your palms, nothing in the frying will save it.
- What hominy means hereWhole or coarsely cracked corn treated with alkali to remove the hull, cooked as a porridge. Cooked hominy grits work identically; canned whole hominy will need to be drained, mashed and cooked down until stiff, or the balls will slump.
- Consistency is the whole jobCold leftover hominy should be firm enough to mound. The two tablespoons of hot milk are for the opposite problem, a mass gone gluey and dense — add them a little at a time, since milk is easy to add and impossible to take back.
- Chill before shapingCold leftover hominy shapes best, though the recipe does not say so. If the hominy has warmed at all, spread it on a plate and chill it thoroughly first, then shape; the balls hold together better going into hot fat cold.
- Nutmeg"Slight grating" means a genuine whisper, perhaps around an eighth of a teaspoon from a whole nutmeg. Pre-ground nutmeg tends to taste flatter and staler; adjust to taste.
- The breading orderCrumb, then egg white, then crumb again. The first dry coat gives the wet white something to grip on a slick surface; note also that the yolk has already gone into the mixture, so the white is what is left to coat with.
- Fat temperature"Deep, hot fat" is not specified in the recipe; for something already cooked, roughly 350-375F is the usual modern range. Cooler and the crumbs drink oil before they colour; hotter and the coating darkens before the centre is warmed through. A minute or so is generally enough.
- Yield and servingSix walnut-sized balls, which is a garnish or a side for two people rather than a course. Drain on paper and salt them the moment they come out of the fat.
Hominy is corn that has been steeped in an alkaline solution — wood-ash lye or slaked lime — to loosen and remove the hull, a process taken up by European settlers from Indigenous peoples of the Americas, where it is long established; the modern name for it, nixtamalization, is a later coinage built on a Nahuatl root. In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American households it was a standard breakfast cereal, boiled by the potful, and a potful reliably outlasted the appetite for it. That is why it appears in a book like this one: The Cook Book of Left Overs belongs to a genre of thrift cookery that flourished in the early decades of the twentieth century, when wasting food carried a moral weight, and its solution to nearly every cold starch is the same one applied here — bind it, crumb it, fry it, and send it back to the table looking like something else. Fried croquettes of leftover grain or potato were the workhorse of that approach, cheap enough to make daily and respectable enough to serve with a roast.