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Hominy Pudding
cup boiled hominy 1 tablespoonful melt- 1 cup milk 2 teaspoonfuls sugar 1/2 teaspoonful salt 2 eggs ed butter Break the hominy apart with a fork and add the milk gradually to it. Stir in the butter, salt, sugar, and beaten yolks of eggs. Then fold in the stiffly beaten whites. Bake in an earthen dish Serve as a vegetable with about twenty minutes. veal.
A soufflé-style pudding built on leftover cooked hominy, meant as a side dish rather than a dessert. The ingredient column has been jumbled in printing, but the working proportions are clear enough: roughly a cup of cooked hominy, a cup of milk, a tablespoon of melted butter, two eggs separated, two teaspoons sugar, half a teaspoon salt.
- The hinge: fold, don't stirThe whites are what lift this above a bowl of wet grits. Beat them stiff, as the recipe directs, and fold in with a spatula in three additions, stopping while streaks are still faintly visible.
- What hominy means hereBoiled hominy in this period is whole or coarsely broken nixtamalized corn, cooked soft — closer to canned hominy or coarse grits than to modern instant grits. Cooked coarse grits, cooled and firm, will stand in, though many modern grits are not nixtamalized and taste correspondingly milder.
- Breaking it apartCold cooked hominy sets into a solid block. Mash it with a fork before adding milk, adding the milk in stages, or you get lumps suspended in liquid rather than a smooth base.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. A pudding of this type wants a moderate oven, 350F, for the twenty minutes stated; check that the centre is set and the top puffed and lightly browned.
- Earthen dishA stoneware or glazed earthenware baking dish of about a quart. Any ceramic or glass dish of that size works; metal heats faster and will brown the edges before the middle sets.
- Sugar levelTwo teaspoons in a quart-sized pudding is seasoning, not sweetening — it is there to round out the corn, the way a pinch of sugar goes into cornbread. Leave it as written if serving with meat.
- Yield and servingServes three to four as a side. It falls as it cools, like any soufflé-adjacent pudding, so bring it to the table straight from the oven.
Cookery books of the early twentieth century treated the breakfast cereal pot as a standing resource: hominy, oatmeal and cornmeal mush were boiled in quantity and the surplus turned into fried cakes, croquettes or baked puddings for later meals. Hominy is corn treated with alkali to loosen the hull, a process taken into American kitchens from Indigenous practice, and it was a staple grain across much of the country long before it became regionally identified with the South. Pairing it with veal matches a mild white meat with a mild, starchy, lightly enriched accompaniment rather than a sharply flavoured one, though what lay behind the combination is a matter of interpretation.