On Hominy
Cheryl Unruh
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
I attended the Real Men Can Cook event last month at the Flint Hills Technical College. It was sponsored by the Hi-Noon Kiwanis.
The first real man I stepped up to was S. C. Dixon, who was offering spicy hominy.
“Hominy?” I asked, scrunching my face. “I don’t eat hominy.”
Dixon said that even people who don’t like hominy love his dish. He was persuasive and the serving was small, so I said, “OK, I’ll try it.”
After all, I had recently tried sauerkraut/Canadian bacon pizza at Pizza Ranch and liked it — even though sauerkraut had been on my lifelong list of hostile foods.
We all have our food histories. For me, hominy, sauerkraut, and anything with artificial cherry flavoring are gag-inducing foods.
I tried hominy once or twice when I was a child. I hated it.
Then at some point in my life, I discovered that lye was used to make hominy, which only increased my desire to avoid it — because I also have a childhood memory about lye.
When I was 6 or 7, my church friends and I were at the home of Lamont and Edith Smith, another Mennonite family in Pawnee Rock.
It was a lovely autumn day and the church men and women were making soap in the Smith’s backyard. Memories are fuzzy, but I’m thinking the ingredients were in a big ol’ vat that they were stirring with a pole, or maybe a broomstick.
Sure, you could purchase bath soap in stores in the 1960s, but the Mennonites are a frugal people, plus they liked doing things the old way. So, occasionally they made ordinary bar soap. Some would use it themselves, but they made it primarily to send to poor people overseas.
So, there we were: men tackling the heavy chores, women in their aprons doing their part in the soap-making process, and we kids were running around, I don’t know, chasing each other with sticks or something.
As I recall, the liquid soap was poured into pans sitting on a picnic table. The soap hardened and later would be cut it into rectangles.
Other than happily romping around in the yard, I don’t recall many details. Except this: we kids were warned in the most serious of voices to stay away from the lye, which was in some vague pile “over there,” because if we got anywhere near it, the lye it would absolutely, positively, kill and/or disfigure us.
OK, those threats associated with lye worked. It made me afraid to use soap made by the church people.
But then, time passes. Maybe a decade or two later, I happened to overhear someone saying that lye was used in the making of hominy.
Um, lye? Isn’t that caustic? Isn’t that the stuff that will turn youngsters belly-up and dead if they get anywhere near it?
It wasn’t that I needed a reason to stay away from hominy, the bad taste was enough, but now I had discovered that corn was soaked in lye to create this food item. And people thought this was a good thing to eat?
I know, plenty of people have eaten hominy and not died. As far as I know. Death by hominy is not in the top 20 causes of fatalities in America, and people keep eating it, so it must be safe.
Apparently, they’ve figured out a way to make hominy not kill you, but all I’m saying is first adults tell me that lye is dangerous; then they say, here, have some lye-soaked-corn-turned-into hominy.
Southerners eat hominy grits daily and there are still plenty of Southerners around. And yes, I, too, have eaten grits. My late step-father encouraged me to try some about 20 years ago in Georgia. A bowl of grits is OK, but nothing I’d go out of my way to eat.
Meanwhile, back at the Real Men Can Cook event, I told S. C. Dixon, “OK, I’ll try it.” I smiled weakly, placing the bowl of hominy on my tray and moving along.
P.S. Don’t tell anyone, but I liked Dixon’s spicy hominy. I liked it a lot.
No lie.
djdiablo (anonymous) says...
Mr. Dixon says,"Thank you," it seems that your story and his are not too far apart...he tried the dish on a dare and LOVED it...It just shows to go...
November 19, 2009 at 3:18 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )