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Ok, ok…technically hominy is not a vegetable – it is a “grain” that eaten as a vegetable. Hominy comes is two colors, white and yellow and looks like a large individual corn kernels. Hominy is dried maize kernels that are treated with lime or lye to remove the germ and hulls, making them tastier and easier to digest. Commercial canned hominy has a slightly stronger scent compared to the traditionally prepared hominy.
Hominy is used to make grits, mashed fine to make masa or tamale dough. Used in menudo (tripe and hominy soup), bread, chili, casseroles and of course my ROM – Pozole.
Historically hominy has been around South America for a long time. Hominy has been documented from south Mexico and Guatemala from 1200 BC. Hominy was known as nixtamal because the process they used to treat the maize with an alkali is called nixtamalization. This is the corn that returned to Europe with Columbus. In Mexico they use lime water (calcium hydroxide) and in the USA they use lye water (sodium or potassium hydroxide) to achieve the same results.
In the USA early colonists were baffled by corn. They often would keep a samp mill and an ash hopper at hand. The samp mill was like a giant mortar and pestle made from a tree stump and wood block hung from a tree branch. The branch acted as a spring to crack the hard kernels of maize into a coarse meal. The ash hopper was a V shaped wooden funnel, they would pack wood ashes in the funnel and run water through to make lye – the lye was used to soften the hulls and make hominy. The colonists used the word samp commonly instead of hominy. The book below is an interesting read about the entire process.
