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Fried Hominy
Boil the same quantity of hominy. Pour it into a pastry pan and let get thoroughly cold. Then cut the hominy into two-inch-square pieces, half inch in thickness. Gently pass each piece in flour, then in beaten eggs and lastly in fresh bread crumbs. Plunge them in boiling fat and fry until they have obtained a nice golden colour. Lift them up, drain thoroughly and serve.
A chilled-and-fried starch cake, made exactly like fried polenta or fried mush. The recipe assumes you have already read the boiled hominy entry that precedes it, which is where the missing quantities live.
- "The same quantity"This refers back to the preceding boiled hominy recipe in the book, so the amount is genuinely undefined here. As a working figure, 1 cup hominy grits cooked in 4 cups salted water gives enough to fill a small sheet pan to half an inch and yields a couple of dozen squares.
- Which hominyFor a mixture that can be poured and sliced you need fine or coarse hominy grits, not whole nixtamalized hominy kernels from a can. Cook it to a thick porridge that pulls away from the side of the pan; anything looser will not hold a cut edge.
- "Pastry pan"Any shallow rimmed tray. Line it or oil it lightly, spread the hot hominy half an inch deep, and smooth the top before it sets.
- Cold is the hingeThoroughly cold means several hours, ideally overnight in the refrigerator. Warm hominy will slump off the crumbs and can spit violently in the fat.
- BreadingFlour, then beaten egg, then crumbs, pressing the crumbs on gently. Chilling the coated squares another 15 minutes sets the crust and keeps it from sliding.
- "Boiling fat"Frying fat never boils; the phrase means fat at frying heat, 350-375F. At lower temperatures the squares soak and fall apart. Fry in batches so the temperature holds, two to three minutes a side.
- ServingCommonly a breakfast or supper side with ham, bacon or sausage, or with syrup, though the recipe says only "serve." Salt them as they come out of the fat and eat them hot; they turn leathery as they cool.
Hominy in American cookery of this period often meant corn treated with alkali to loosen its hulls, a technique generally traced to Indigenous nixtamalization and long naturalized in Southern and mid-Atlantic kitchens, though hominy was also made by pounding or mechanically hulling corn without lye or ash, and "grits" was frequently just coarsely ground corn. Boiling a grain to a mush, chilling it in a pan, slicing and frying is one of the oldest thrift manoeuvres in the book, and it appears across Europe and the Americas as fried polenta, fried semolina, fried mush and scrapple; the point was to make yesterday's cooked cereal into something worth putting on a breakfast plate.