Modern Hill Woman

People’s diets have changed considerably since I was a kid. Nearly everything was homegrown and homemade. Our diet was varied and we tried everything that mom sat on the table. Most younger people haven’t eaten, or even heard of, sauerkraut, radishes, chow-chow, pickled beets or hominy. I asked my granddaughter Faith if she’d ever heard of hominy. Her response was “Hominy who?”

My mom made hominy. It’s corn, but not straight off the cob. Whole kernels of dried field corn have been nixtamalized, a process that cooks have been doing since ancient times.

Mom began by making lye out of hardwood ashes from the woodstove. As hardwood trees are growing, they draw potassium from the ground. The potassium is still present in ashes and can be leeched out with water then used to create lye.

The hominy making process began early in the morning with a wood fire started under a large cast-iron kettle in the backyard. Dried field corn had been soaked overnight in lye water. The alkalinity of the lye helps dissolve the outer cell walls of the corn, loosens the hulls from the kernel, and softens and enlarges the corn. Soaking the grain in lye also kills the seed’s germ, which keeps it from sprouting while in storage. This was very important in the old days. By removing the outer husk, the nutrient niacin (B-3), can be absorbed by the digestive tract and is more nutritious than regular corn.

The grain was cooked for a few hours until tender. It was then washed several times to remove the bitter flavor of the lye. Hominy is canned in intact kernels or dried and sold much like beans, dried and ground into sand-sized particles for grits, or into flour for tortillas. Mom always pressure canned her hominy which was stored in the sawdust cellar until needed.