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Hominy Loaf
One pint hominy, one cupful of milk, two eggs, salt, pepper, a piece of butter the size of an egg, two-thirds of a cupful of flour.
This is an ingredient list rather than a set of instructions, which was normal in turn-of-the-century books where the cook was assumed to know what a loaf batter looked like. The gaps are worth naming before you start.
- What is missingThe original gives no mixing order, pan, oven temperature or time. Anything you see below for those is inference from comparable loaf recipes of the period, not from the text.
- Hominy means cooked hominyA pint here is cooked, soft hominy — whole nixtamalized corn kernels boiled down, or leftover hominy porridge — not dry kernels and not raw grits. Canned hominy, drained and mashed, is the closest supermarket equivalent; a pint will take rather more than one 15 oz can, whose drained yield is nearer a cup and a half.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. Period cookbooks used egg-, walnut- and hickory-nut-sized butter as standard units.
- No leaveningThere is no baking powder or soda in the list, so the two eggs are doing all the lifting. The result is a dense, sliceable loaf closer to a corn pudding set firm than to a quick bread.
- OvenNothing is specified. A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern choice for a batter this wet: a greased loaf pan, roughly 45 minutes to an hour, until the centre is set and a tester comes out clean. All of this is guesswork, not from the text.
- Why it sits in the sandwich chapterWhy it might sit in the sandwich chapter -- A firm loaf of this kind slices better cold than warm, and thin cold slices or thick slices fried in butter are both plausible uses. Cutting it warm will crumble it.
- SeasoningSalt and pepper are given without quantity. Hominy is bland and the loaf needs more salt than instinct suggests — something near a teaspoon for the full quantity is a sensible starting point. Don't taste the raw batter; it contains two raw eggs.
- YieldProbably one small loaf, though nothing in the text says so.
Hominy is corn that has been steeped in an alkaline solution — wood-ash lye or slaked lime — to loosen the hulls and soften the kernel, a technique developed in Mesoamerica and carried into Anglo-American cooking through Native American practice; the word itself is generally traced to a Virginia Algonquian term. By 1900 hominy was a cheap pantry staple in the American South and a common breakfast dish elsewhere, and cookbooks of the period are full of ways to use up the pot of it left from yesterday: hominy croquettes, hominy muffins, hominy fried in cakes. A loaf bound with eggs, milk and a little flour is squarely in that economy tradition.