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Luncheon Relish of Sardines
Dip slices of cold hominy in milk and eggs beaten together. Lay them in a buttered pan and put one sardine on each slice. Brown lightly in a hot oven.
A leftovers dish built on two things nearly every early twentieth-century pantry had: a pan of cooked hominy set up firm in the cold larder, and a tin of sardines. The whole thing takes ten minutes once the hominy is cold.
- Cold hominyThis most likely means cooked hominy or hominy grits poured into a loaf pan, chilled solid, and turned out to be cut in slabs; the recipe's "slices" rules out loose canned whole hominy, though period cooks used both forms of hominy. To reproduce it, cook grits stiff, pour into a greased pan, and chill several hours before slicing.
- The hinge: the hominy must be genuinely coldWarm or barely set hominy will slump the moment it hits the egg and milk, and you will have porridge in the pan. Chill it overnight if you can, and cut the slices thick enough to handle.
- Milk and eggs beaten togetherNo quantities are given. One egg to a quarter cup of milk will coat about six slices; season the wash to taste, bearing in mind the sardines bring their own salt.
- A hot ovenRoughly 400-450F. The point is to set the egg wash and colour the top quickly, not to cook anything through — everything on the pan is already cooked.
- SardinesOil-packed sardines, drained, one per slice. Period sardines were commonly skin-on and bone-in; modern skinless-boneless fillets work but are blander, so a squeeze of lemon over the finished dish is worth adding.
- TimingEight to twelve minutes. Watch the sardines rather than the hominy; they dry out and toughen well before the coating browns properly, so pull the pan as soon as the surface is set and lightly gold.
- Yield and servingFigure two slices a person as a light lunch, and serve immediately — the coating softens as it sits. A green salad or sliced tomato is the natural companion.
Hominy — maize treated with alkali to loosen the hulls, a technique taken from Indigenous cooks of the Americas — was a staple starch in American households well beyond the South, and cookbooks of the period regularly give directions for slicing and frying or baking cold cooked hominy, so surplus hominy had an established second use. That habit is the logic of this dish, and of the book it sits in: the cook book of left overs belongs to a large family of turn-of-the-century volumes preaching thrift as a domestic virtue. Sardines earn their place because canned fish was one of the few reliably shelf-stable protein foods a household could keep to hand, and "relish" here carries its older sense of something savoury and appetising served in small quantity, rather than a condiment in a jar.