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Hominy
Half pint hominy, one pint water, half pint milk, one teaspoon butter and half teaspoon salt. Wash the hominy in cold water and drain well. Boil the water and milk in an enamelled saucepan together, then add the hominy, salt and butter, and slowly cook for forty-five minutes, stirring with a wooden spoon once in a while to prevent burning at the bottom. Pour into a hot tureen and serve with cream or milk separately.
A plain breakfast porridge whose only difficulty is knowing what the author meant by "hominy." Everything else is a matter of ratio and patience.
- Which hominyIn American cookbooks of this period "hominy" covers both whole hulled corn and the coarsely cracked form sold today as grits. A 1:3 dry-to-liquid ratio cooked for 45 minutes points firmly at coarse grits; whole hominy kernels need hours of simmering or a pressure cooker, and would still be hard at 45 minutes.
- MeasuresA half pint is 1 cup, a pint is 2 cups. So: 1 cup hominy grits, 2 cups water, 1 cup milk, 1 teaspoon butter, 1/2 teaspoon salt.
- Not instant, not quickThe 45-minute time assumes stone-ground coarse grits. Modern quick grits are done in 5-7 minutes and instant in one; using them here will produce glue. Buy coarse or stone-ground if you want the recipe to behave as written.
- The enamelled saucepanProbably specified because milk scorches and because reactive metal pans can discolour starchy cereal. Any heavy-bottomed nonreactive pan works. Heavy is the operative word: the milk sugars catch quickly over direct heat.
- Stirring"Once in a while" is optimistic with a milk-based porridge. Stir every few minutes, reaching into the corners of the pan, and keep the heat low enough that the surface barely moves.
- Washing the gritsWorth doing with stone-ground meal, which carries loose chaff and bran flecks. Cover with cold water, stir, and pour off what floats before draining.
- YieldAbout four servings as a breakfast cereal, two as a substantial dish. It thickens sharply as it stands, which is part of why cream or milk is passed separately at the table.
Hominy is corn treated with an alkali he process now generally known by its Nahuatl-derived name, nixtamalization til the tough hulls slip off and the kernel softens; the word itself comes into English from an Algonquian source, recorded by early Virginia colonists. The technique is Indigenous to the Americas and predates European contact by millennia, and it does more than soften the grain: alkali treatment makes the corn's niacin available, which is why cultures that adopted maize without the lye step suffered pellagra and those that kept it did not. By the time this book was compiled, hominy in its cracked form was standard American breakfast food, especially in the South, and appeared in general cookbooks alongside oatmeal and cracked wheat as one of the expected morning cereals. The instruction to serve cream or milk separately places it squarely in that company a porridge, not yet the buttered, cheesed side dish grits would later become.