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Hominy with Tomato Sauce

A preserved hominy dish flavored with tomato sauce, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Tomato and sauce are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,469 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Hominy with Tomato Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the hominy

  1. Soak the hominy in a solution of baking soda and water for 12 hours, then drain excess liquid.

  2. Place the hominy in a tank with cold water, bring to a boil, and simmer for 5 hours without stirring until soft.

  3. Drain the surplus water and mix in 2 gallons of the sauce for every 100 lbs. of hominy.

Make the sauce and can

  1. To make the sauce, combine tomato pulp, water, salt, and ground white pepper.

  2. Place the mixture in cans while hot, cap, tip, and process.

  3. Process No. 3 cans for 90 minutes at 240°F (115°C) or 2½ hours at 212°F (100°C).

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Tomato + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,469 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Tomato + white peppertop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together226 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl butyrate (fruity, apple).

  3. Sauce + white peppertop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together525 recipes

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Half-grain hominy
Provides the main body and starchy bulk of the dish, softening during long simmering.
Baking soda
Alkaline soak that loosens the hominy's outer skins and softens the kernels.
Tomato pulp
Supplies acidity, color, and the body of the sauce that coats the hominy.
Ground white pepper
Adds mild, sharp aroma and heat to the tomato sauce.

The step that matters

Simmer the hominy until soft without stirring. Hominy kernels need sustained gentle heat to soften fully. Stirring can break them apart and make the texture mushy, so the kernels are left undisturbed.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, sauce):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Oreganofits better
  3. Corianderfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, sauce. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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