Do you enjoy grits?

[Claude Mathis]

Making hominy removes the hull, plus...

Lye, lime and ash are highly alkaline: the alkalinity helps the dissolution of hemicellulose, the major glue-like component of the maize cell walls, and loosens the hulls from the kernels and softens the corn. Some of the corn oil is broken down into emulsifying agents (monoglycerides and diglycerides), while bonding of the corn proteins to each other is also facilitated. The divalent calcium in lime acts as a cross-linking agent for protein and polysaccharide acidic side chains. As a result, while cornmeal made from untreated ground corn is unable by itself to form a dough with the addition of water, the chemical changes in masa allow dough formation, which is essential to the ability to fashion dough into tortillas. Also, soaking the corn in lime[1] kills the seed's germ, which keeps it from sprouting while in storage. Finally, in addition to providing a source of dietary calcium, the lime reacts with the corn so that the nutrient niacin can be assimilated by the digestive tract.

Previously the consumption of untreated corn was thought to cause pellagra. It was thought that the cause was from the corn or some infectious element carried by untreated corn. However, further advancements have shown that it is merely a correlational relationship not causal. In the 1700 and 1800s, areas highly dependent on corn as a staple diet were more likely to have pellagra. This is due to the fact that the niacin (the deficiency present in pellagra) found in untreated corn is not available for absorption in humans. The process of nixtamalization frees niacin into a state where it can be absorbed into the intestines. This was primarily elucidated by exploring why persons in Mexico, whom depended on maize in their diet, did not develop pellagra compared to other cultures during this time period. One reason was that Mayans treated corn in an alkaline solution to soften it. Thus, they freed niacin for absorption. This is process that we now refer to as nixtamalization.

 

[George]

Sorry, crockett, I can't answer those questions. The only succotash I'm familiar with uses green lima beans, but I've read that some modern people use green beans in the pod. I don't have any info about the NAs use of hominy except what I posted above. The only succotash reference I've collected comes from 1788, journal of John May:

"Tuesday, May 27. I dined to day with General Harmer, by invitation, had an elegant dinner. amongst the variety was allamode and boiled fish Bear steak roast venison et.c excellent sacketosh salads and cramberry sauce, grog and wine after dinner."

Corn made into hominy makes niacin available to the body which the whites didn't understand, but whether the NAs made hominy for that reason I don't know.

Spence

 

[Claude Mathis]

According to one source...

Succotash became a traditional Thanksgiving dish thanks to the Old Colony Club, created in Plymouth, Mass., in 1769. The group favored this dish as part of their annual Forefather’s Day dinner, which was celebrated in early winter.

Plymouth Succotash. Credit: Courtesy of Culinary Historians of Boston
Plymouth Succotash. Credit: Courtesy of Culinary Historians of Boston
The original succotash is a descendant of a local Native American meal based on a corn soup made with beans, unripe corn, and various meats, especially bear or fish. Over time it has evolved into a kind of boiled dinner with corned beef, chicken, salt pork, white Cape Cod turnips, potato, hulled corn and boiled beans with some salt pork. Originally, the beans used were actually dried peas, but over time lima beans have become popular.

The word succotash derives from Narragansett, a branch of the Algonquin language, the word being msiquatash. Hominy are kernels of corn that have been treated in a special way, usually soaked in a caustic solution and then washed to remove the hulls. There are different kinds of hominy with different tastes.

Plymouth Succotash
Serves 4

Ingredients

½ cup dried split peas

2 cups whole grain hominy

1 Cornish game hen (about 1½ pounds), cut in half or 2 chicken thighs and leg

1 pound beef brisket in one piece

2 ounces salt pork in one piece

1 cup water

Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

1 boiling potato (about ½ pound), such as Yukon gold, red or white potatoes, boiled and diced

1 small turnip, boiled and diced

Directions

1. Place the peas in a pot with cold water to cover by several inches. Bring to a boil and cook until very tender, about 3 hours. Drain, and pass through a food mill or mash until it looks like mashed potatoes. Set aside until needed.

2. Meanwhile, bring a saucepan filled with water to a boil and add the hominy. Cook until it is half cooked, about 3 hours. Drain and set aside, saving 2¼ cups of the liquid.

3. Place the game hen or chicken, beef, salt pork and hominy in a large flameproof casserole or Dutch oven and cover with the reserved broth and the water. Season with salt and pepper and bring to just below a boil and let simmer, uncovered, until very tender, about 4 hours, adding small amounts of water if it looks like it’s drying out. The water should never reach a boil, though.

4. Add the pea purée to the meats and stir so all the fat is absorbed. Add the potato and turnip, stir and cook until the potato is soft and the hominy fully cooked, about 1 hour. Serve hot. Do not boil at any time.

 

[TNGhost]

Never have had it, have had balute kimchi and haggis, if ever in minnisota would give it a try. I have had some Scandinavian dishes and enjoyed the most, after all funnel cakes are just big rosettes

It has a delicate flavor, the texture is quite gelatinous though. The reason I mentioned it is that it is treated with lye as well, like hominy grits.

 

[tenngun]

Before lots of cross breaking and later hybreding corn what was grown had awful tough hulls. Masa and pica flour, hominy ect was a way of treating the corn to make it easier to eat. I don't know how people stumbled on odd food preps, like lyeing, or leaching acorns or hog hicory nuts, or blowfish and barracuda.
Mushrooms have always confused me. 70% will make you sick, 10% will kill you out right. I'm glad some one found the ones we could eat.
At some point in time some one had to say " gee, wet ashes burn my skin, and takes the hair off a hide, I wonder what it will do to corn?.... Or cod fish :haha:

 

[coloradoclyde]

Food uses of lye include washing or chemical peeling of fruits and vegetables, chocolate and cocoa processing, caramel color production, poultry scalding, soft drink processing, and thickening ice cream. Olives are often soaked in lye to soften them, while pretzels and German lye rolls are glazed with a lye solution before baking to make them crisp.

Specific foods processed with lye include:
ӢThe Scandinavian delicacy known as lutefisk (from lutfisk, "lye fish").
ӢHominy is dried maize (corn) kernels reconstituted by soaking in lye-water. These expand considerably in size and may be further processed by cooking in hot oil and salting to form corn nuts. Nixtamal is similar, but uses calcium hydroxide instead of sodium hydroxide.
ӢHominy is also known in some areas of the Southeastern United States, as the breakfast food grits, dried and ground into a coarse powder. They are prepared by boiling in water, with the addition of butter and other ingredient to suit the tastes of the preparer.
ӢSodium hydroxide is also the chemical that causes gelling of egg whites in the production of Century eggs.
ӢGerman pretzels are poached in a boiling sodium hydroxide solution before baking, which contributes to their unique crust.

Also; Lye may not have been solely produced from wood ashes.

"In 1783, King Louis XVI of France and the French Academy of Sciences offered a prize of 2400 livres for a method to produce alkali from sea salt (sodium chloride). In 1791, Nicolas Leblanc, physician to Louis Philip II, Duke of Orléans, patented a solution. That same year he built the first Leblanc plant for the Duke at Saint-Denis, and this began to produce 320 tons of soda per year.[4] He was denied his prize money because of the French Revolution."

 

[Loyalist Dave]

Last year at Christmas a local Kosher deli sent a coldcut platter to my station, and I got there a couple of hours after its arrival. All that was left was Swiss cheese, kosher dills, and beef tongue...a lot of tongue....well it didn't go to waste. :grin:

LD

 

[tenngun]

Don't you wonder how it was discovered. " Gee, this burns my skin, I better put it on food"... "Bob died after eating all of the blow fish, I bet if we don't eat the liver we will be ok"..." Well that made me sick, a wonder if this mushroom will make me sick"....' Um this milk went rotten and turned in to a lumpy mass, I wonder what this nasty smelly stuff taste like" ect.
Even things like " this copper is pretty but mostly useless this tin is even worse, I wonder what would happen if I get them hot enough to melt and mix them together"

 

[coloradoclyde]

Don't you wonder how it was discovered.

Always!....The more I study the past the more I challenge my assumptions about the present.

Imagine what our level of understanding would be if they had our current record keeping ability thousands of years ago.

It's always interesting to look back at inventions, developments and events.....But, more interesting are the stories behind the people involved.

 

[Loyalist Dave]

Yep...,

I'm pretty sure some of the stuff was tried "on a bet".

I also think Paleo-Humans observed animals, and quickly learned which animals ate food we could also nosh, and which did not.

Take the oyster, if you see a sea otter cracking one open and eating one, you might think to open one up, BUT you still might not think it edible. On the other hand human males I think have been the same for many millennia, so perhaps once the first oyster was opened by a man, his buddy standing next to him said, "Hey, I bet you one stone spear point you won't eat that."
:shocked2:
The same might have been the case for lumpy, spoiled milk.

Pigs eat certain mushrooms, and avoid the deadly ones as they are equally deadly to them, so perhaps early pigs kept in the woods (as they do in Spain today) clued folks in on certain mushrooms, vs. toad stools???

LD

 

[George]

I also think Paleo-Humans observed animals, and quickly learned which animals ate food we could also nosh, and which did not.

That idea was still working for the early Kentucky pioneers. Rev. John Dabney Shane interview of William Clinkenbeard, late 18th century:

"The women the first spring we came out followed their cows to see what they eat, that they might know what greens to get."

Spence

 

[tenngun]

At a rendezvous along the stlanore creek near Mountian view Arkansas, a girl showed up with a book on ozark wild plants. She went along the creek and returned with a basket of greens. She offered them to everyone in camp. I didn't take any . I don't think any one else did. I heard her later in the evening puking her guts up and she looked a might green in the gills the next morning.
There are a few wild plants I eat but I'm awful careful. I do think rabbits are Gods way of thinking greens in to something etible.

 

[tenngun]

So wrong it seems, but it reflected public mores and the limits of technology.
During the Second World War the Germans lost a lot of men to hypothermia in Russia. They experimented on Jews to learn effective treatments. In the 1980s that info was discovered and after questioning the ethics the info on what the Germans had discovered it was distroyed. What a nightmare to think about.

 

[coloradoclyde]

Sorry tenngun, upon reflection I deleted my post. To grizzly....
I will just say that people have often been used as guinea pigs going back probably to the beginning of time.

Wittings go back at least as far as Herophilos in the 3rd century BC

 

[zimmerstutzen]

Unlike many northerners, I like grits. Salt and pepper and nearly every other way. Had an uncle that hated grits as normally served, but he always had a bag of grits in the soup kitchen where he volunteered as a cook. Found out, he used grits to thicken soups, chili, stews etc. To stretch ground beef in tacos. A trick he learned as a cook in the Army. If the 10 gallons of chili looked like it wouldn't feed the crowd, another couple gallons of water and a few handfuls of grits went in the pot. My mother did the same thing with oatmeal in meatloaf, and stews.

 

[crockett]

Well I'm impressed that the NDN's figured out how to use lye to make hominy.

 

[Nativearizonan]

Recently they started calling ashes used in foods by the term "culinary ash", and it has been somewhat of a rave among chefs looking for something different. They have experimented with different kinds of ash.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskCulinary/comments/3ust17/using_ash_in_cooking/

I guess just about anything is poisonous if you get too much of it, and I definitely would not use the ash from a poisonous plant.

I only know of the two plants the Hopi and Navajo use, and that is Chamisa (four-wing saltbush) and Juniper. They do not use the ash from large pieces of wood, just from the leaves and small twigs.

 

[Alden]

Castor Oil down one end and thermometers up the other, neti pots and being nursed till they're five is how they are traditionally nurtured; it's not nature. Add grits to that list of abuse. Grits is animal feed. It's how trash sharecroppers slopped the pigs, cows, sheep and chickens of the South. I suppose an innocent and ignorant child with even the most basic instinct for survival can be beaten with a switch till they say "thank you Sir" for anything though. As Johnson said...

"Much may be made of a Scotchman, if he be CAUGHT young."

 

[Wes/Tex]

My, my my...what are we going to do with you? :haha:

 

[crockett]

It must be the name GRITS. We have to re-title the stuff American Polenta and charge $6 a pound.
All the pinky up crowd will be fighting each other to get it.