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Boiled Hominy

Boiled hominy is a dish of soaked hominy cooked in salted water, served with butter, pepper, cream, and optionally sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Boiled Hominy

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and cook

  1. Soak the hominy overnight.

  2. Boil the soaked hominy in salted water for 3 hours.

Serve

  1. For a breakfast dish, serve with sugar and cream.

  2. For a vegetable dish, stir in butter, pepper, and cream while hot.

  3. For a vegetable dish, serve in a warm dish.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Pepper + creamtop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together21,449 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Pepper and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 21,449 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 main body of the dish, softening into tender kernels during long boiling.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel when stirred into the hot hominy.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, softening the flavor and texture of the hominy.

The step that matters

Boil the soaked hominy in salted water for 3 hours. Dried hominy is hard and dense. A long simmer in water gelatinizes its starches and breaks down the tough kernel, so soaking first and boiling long enough keeps the grains from staying chewy or firm.

“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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