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Hominy
Soak one quart of ground hominy over night, put over the fire in a tin pail, set in boiling water with water enough to cover, boil gently for five hours, as it can not be hurried. After the grains begin to soften on no account stir it. The water put in at first ought to be enough to finish it, but if it proves too little, add more carefully, as too much makes it sloppy. Salt just before taking from the stove, as too early salting makes it dark. If properly done, the grains will stand out snowy and well done, but round and separate.
This is a double-boiler method for coarse grits, and the whole recipe hinges on the fact that the pot never touches direct heat. Everything else follows from that.
- The tin pail is a double boilerA pail set inside a kettle of boiling water is a bain-marie. Use the top of a double boiler, or a metal bowl over a pan of simmering water, and keep the lower water topped up over the long cook. Direct heat will scorch the bottom and force you to stir, which is exactly what the recipe forbids.
- What "ground hominy" meansIn this period the term covers coarse grits — dried corn cracked into gritty fragments — rather than the whole hulled kernels sold canned as hominy today. Look for stone-ground coarse grits or samp. Instant grits are precooked and quick grits are very finely ground; either will turn to paste under this treatment.
- QuantitiesA quart of dry grits is roughly 1.5 to 1.75 lb, which is a great deal: figure 10 to 14 servings. Halve or quarter it unless you are feeding a table. Water "enough to cover" means just that: the grains will have already drunk a fair amount overnight, so they take less than dry grain would.
- Five hours is not a misprintOver indirect heat the mixture never exceeds boiling and barely simmers, so the starch hydrates slowly and the grains hold their shape. Coarse grits cooked over direct heat are done in 45 to 90 minutes, but they break down into porridge. The long gentle cook is what produces the "round and separate" texture described.
- Do not stirStirring ruptures softened grains and releases starch, which is what makes grits gluey. Because nothing can catch on the bottom in a double boiler, there is no reason to disturb it. Lift the lid, look, replace the lid.
- Salting at the endThe darkening claim is hard to verify, but there is a plausible reason to hold the salt: salt can slow starch gelatinization, so salted grains may take longer to soften. Stir the salt in gently once the grains are tender and let it stand five minutes.
- Adding waterIf you must add liquid, add boiling water, a little at a time, poured down the side rather than into the middle. Cold water arrests the cook and thins the finished dish, which is the "sloppy" result being warned against.
- ServingSent to table hot with butter, or spread in a pan, chilled overnight, sliced and fried in bacon fat the next morning — a common use for the leftovers of a pot this size.
Hominy takes its name from an Algonquian word, generally traced to something like rockahominie, and the dish reached English-speaking settlers from Native cooks along the Atlantic seaboard; the true article is corn steeped in wood-ash lye or slaked lime, which loosens the hulls and, as later nutrition science showed, frees up the niacin in the grain. By the time The Dixie Cook Book was compiled in the 1880s, "hominy" in a Southern kitchen covered a spectrum from whole hulled kernels down to the coarse cracked grits meant here, and it was a daily breakfast food across the region rather than anything special. The instruction to cook it in a pail set in boiling water tells you something about the stove it was written for: a wood range with an unreliable, uneven firebox, where a pot of anything starchy left directly on the plate for five hours would have been ruined long before dinner.