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Southern Corn Cakes
1 tablespoonful but- 1 cup boiled hominy 1/2 cup milk, warm, but ter 2 eggs not hot teaspoonful salt cup cornmeal Add the warm milk to the hominy slowly, beating until the mixture is very smooth, then stir in the butter, salt, well-beaten eggs, and cornmeal.
The batter should look like thick cream. If too thick add a little more milk, or if too thin a little more cornmeal. Bake in thin sheets in wellbuttered flat pans about twenty-five minutes. Cut into suitable-sized pieces before serving.
A batter cake baked in a sheet rather than griddled, built to use up yesterday's pot of hominy. The original gives no oven temperature, so that is the first gap to fill.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as was normal for the period. Twenty-five minutes in a thin sheet suggests a fairly brisk oven; somewhere around 400F is a reasonable modern guess, and the cake is done when the surface is set and browned at the edges.
- What "boiled hominy" meansIn American books the term can mean cooked hominy grits, soft and porridge-like, or whole hulled hominy boiled and eaten as such. Either works if it is soft enough to beat smooth; whole kernels should be mashed first.
- Add the milk slowlyThis is the hinge. Cold or fast-added liquid leaves the hominy in lumps that will not beat out later. Warm milk, added in stages with hard beating, gives the smooth batter the recipe asks for.
- Milk temperature"Warm, but not hot" matters because the eggs go in soon after. Blood heat is enough; hot milk will begin to set them.
- Consistency over measurementThe stated test, thick cream, is more reliable than the cup measures, since left-over hominy varies enormously in stiffness. Adjust with milk or cornmeal until it pours thickly from the spoon.
- CornmealUse fine or medium yellow or white meal. Coarse stone-ground meal will not hydrate in the time given and leaves the cake gritty.
- The panA flat pan means a shallow rimmed sheet or jelly-roll pan, buttered generously. Spread the batter about half an inch deep; thicker and the centre stays wet at twenty-five minutes.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; the sheet is cut into "suitable-sized pieces" as wanted. Serve hot with butter, syrup or alongside eggs and bacon.
Hominy, corn treated with an alkaline solution to loosen its hulls, came to Southern and Northern American kitchens from Native cooking, and by the late nineteenth century boiled hominy was a standard breakfast dish across much of the country. A pot of it made in quantity nearly always left a surplus. Sheet-baked corn cakes of this kind, cut into squares after baking, were an economical alternative to griddling batter one cake at a time, and the addition of beaten eggs and butter to soft hominy is the same logic that produces spoonbread: cooked grain rehydrated with milk, lightened with egg, and set by oven heat rather than a hot iron.