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Hominy with Bacon
Mold two cups of cooked hominy in a low dish of suitable size, first rinsing the dish with cold water. When ready to use turn it out on a bakingdish that can be sent to the table. Cover the hominy with thin slices of bacon and cook in a very hot oven until the bacon is crisp. Pour off the superfluous fat, surround with a border of poached eggs, and serve at once.
A leftover-breakfast dish that depends on cold hominy being firm enough to unmold in one piece. Everything else is timing the bacon against the eggs.
- Hominy, then and nowSince the hominy has to mold and turn out in one piece, the book most likely means ground hominy (what would be sold today as grits) cooked to a stiff porridge and left to set; canned or dried whole hominy will not hold a cake. Instant grits set too softly to unmold; cook coarse grits thick and chill until firm.
- The rinsed dishWetting the mold with cold water is what lets the cake turn out whole: a film of water between the starch and the china keeps the hominy from bonding to it. Don't dry the dish after rinsing.
- "A very hot oven"Around 450–475°F. Anything cooler renders the bacon slowly and leaves it flabby over a softening hominy cake.
- Thin slicesStandard supermarket bacon tends to be thicker than the thin slices intended here and will need longer than the hominy wants to sit in a hot oven. Ask for thin-cut, or partly render the slices in a skillet before laying them on.
- Pouring off the fatDo this before the eggs go around the edge, not after, or the fat will slide under them. Tilt the dish with a folded towel and drain into a cup; the drippings are worth keeping.
- Poached eggsPoach while the dish is in the oven and hold them in warm water; drain each on a towel for a moment so no poaching water reaches the hominy.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; two cups of cooked hominy is a modest amount, probably two or three portions with an egg apiece.
Hominy is corn treated with an alkali — lime or wood-ash lye — to loosen the hulls, a process taken up from Native American cooking; the word itself is generally traced to an Algonquian term. By the time this book was written it was a common breakfast cereal, especially in the South, cooked in quantity and eaten with milk or molasses, which is precisely why a book about left-overs needed a chapter for it. Cold cereal sets firm, and molding, slicing and frying yesterday's porridge was a familiar second act — the same logic that gives us fried mush and grits cakes. Adding bacon and poached eggs turns a thrift measure into a dish that could be sent to the table in its baking dish, a small piece of economy dressed as a proper breakfast.