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Hominy Bread for Breakfast
3 cupfuls cooked hominy 2 tablespoonfuls melted Crisco 1½ cupfuls cornmeal 1 teaspoonful salt 2 eggs 2 cupfuls 2 teaspoonfuls baking powder milk Beat eggs, add milk and hominy. Sift in cornmeal, add baking powder and salt; add Crisco. Beat all together three minutes. Pour into deep Criscoed pan and bake one hour in slow oven. Serve hot. Sufficient for one large loaf.
The ingredient list has been scrambled by the original two-column typesetting; read it as 3 cups cooked hominy, 2 tablespoons melted Crisco, 1½ cups cornmeal, 2 cups flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder, 1 teaspoon salt, 2 eggs and 2 cups milk. The flour is stranded at the end of the paragraph but belongs with the cornmeal.
- Slow ovenBake at 300-325F. At that temperature a full hour is right for a deep loaf this wet; a hotter oven sets the crust before the centre cooks and the middle sinks.
- What hominy means hereIn American cookbooks of this period "cooked hominy" usually means cooked hominy grits, soft and porridge-like, rather than whole nixtamalized kernels. Grits give the smooth batter the method assumes. Whole hominy, drained and coarsely mashed, also works but makes a chunkier loaf.
- Cool the hominyLet the grits cool to lukewarm before they go into the beaten eggs and milk, so the eggs do not scramble. The original does not mention it.
- CriscoCrisco is still sold and is the authentic choice for a book published to promote it. Any neutral solid shortening, or melted butter, substitutes directly at 2 tablespoons.
- Beat three minutesTaken literally with modern baking powder this is too long once the leavening is in. Beat the eggs, milk and hominy well, then fold the dry ingredients through only until combined.
- The pan"Deep Criscoed pan" means a well-greased pan with high sides. Note that the quantities make a great deal of batter -- close to eight cups -- so a 9x5 loaf pan or 2-quart dish will not take it at three-quarters full; use a deeper dish of about three quarts, or divide between two pans.
- Texture and yieldOne large loaf, roughly 8 to 10 servings. Expect something between cornbread and spoonbread: moist, sliceable warm, and best eaten the day it is made. It will not hold as a cold sandwich bread.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach cooks what to do with a brand-new product: a hydrogenated cottonseed shortening that behaved like lard but kept without refrigeration and carried no animal flavour. The recipes were chosen to show Crisco doing every job in the kitchen, which is why a Southern breakfast bread turns up with two tablespoons of shortening in it. Hominy bread itself is much older than the book - batter breads built on cooked grits or leftover mush were a standard way of stretching a breakfast table in the South, and the same idea appears in nineteenth-century collections as spoonbread, batter bread or awendaw, the last generally traced to the Charleston area. Using yesterday's cooked grits rather than raw meal was thrift, not novelty; the flour and baking powder here are the later, more genteel additions that turn a spooned pudding into a loaf you can slice.