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Fried Hominy

Fried hominy cakes made from mashed hominy, eggs, flour, butter, and salt, then fried in lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Fried Hominy

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cakes

  1. Mash the cold boiled hominy well.

  2. Beat 1 or 2 eggs and stir them into the hominy.

  3. Add a little flour, salt, and a small amount of butter.

  4. Form the mixture into cakes.

Fry

  1. Fry the cakes in hot lard until golden brown.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Hominy
Forms the bulk of the cakes and gives them a soft, starchy body.
Eggs
Bind the mashed hominy so the cakes hold their shape while frying.
Flour
Adds body and helps the cakes firm up and hold together.
Butter
Adds richness and flavor to the cakes.
Lard
Conducts heat for frying, producing a golden brown crust.

The step that matters

Fry the cakes in hot lard until golden brown. The lard must be hot before the cakes go in. Hot fat sears the outside quickly, forming a crust that helps the cakes hold together and brown evenly instead of soaking up grease and falling apart.

“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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