Skip to main content
Main

Fried Hominy

Fried cakes made from mashed hominy, eggs, flour, butter, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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

Prepare the batter

  1. Mash the cold boiled hominy as well as you can.

  2. Beat 1 or 2 eggs depending on the amount of hominy.

  3. Stir the eggs into the mashed hominy.

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

Fry

  1. Form the mixture into cakes.

  2. 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

Eggs
Bind the mashed hominy so the mixture holds together as cakes.
Flour
Adds body to the mixture, helping the cakes hold their shape.
Hominy
Forms the bulk of the cakes, giving the fritters their main texture.
Butter
Adds richness and flavour to the batter.

The step that matters

Fry the cakes in hot lard until golden brown. If the lard is not hot enough, the cakes absorb more fat and turn greasy rather than crisping. Frying until golden brown develops flavour through browning and sets the outside so the cakes hold together.

“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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes