ISSUE 89, SESAME, Part 2: Benne and Hominy

Benne and Hominy

The model for this dish is West African—a cooked grain base, thick and  porridge-like—dressed in an oil and a condiment.  The condiment can be a protein, a legume, or a thick sauce or paste made of nuts or vegetables.   There are always at least two components to it and the name in African languages or in English often features them:  red beans and rice, crab rice, shrimp and hominy (the 19^th-century name for shrimp and grits), or in the the dish that concerns us today, Benne & Hominy.

First a word about about hominy.  It originally was the designation for corn that had been lye treated—nixtamalized.  This process of soaking whole dried kernels in lye water made of green hickory ash, was Native in origin.  Ash played an important role in soil fertilization, food preservation, flavoring, and grain processing.  Most Native Communities in the Southeastern section of North America had a fire keeper, a person who kept fires stoked and oversaw the purity and storage of ash, and superintended its deployment in fields, in water soaks, and it medicines.  In the twentieth century food chemists discovered that nixtamalizing corn broke the chemical barriers in corn preventing the uptake of niacin.  Those who didn’t lye process corn, and ground untreated dried kernels into grist, and used that as the staple of their diets risked a vitamin deficiency disease, pellagra.  Hominy grits were made from lye processed corn that had been dried and coarse ground.  It was boiled in a container with three parts water to one part grits, some sort of fat (butter, lard, benne oil, olive oil, bacon fat), and salt.

In benne and hominy the benne seed was parched in a pan prior to being added to the hominy. 

The quantity added depended upon taste, as did whether the seed was stirred into the body of the grits to provide crunch, or crowned the mixture by being piled on top.  The preparation of the hominy could be simple—parched seeds and salt—the oiliness of the cooked seed providing sufficient lubrication to make the forkfuls slide down one’s throat.  Yet having witnessed in December 2016  the preparation of Benne Chutney by Leona Roberts in Trinidad as the condiment for Benne & Rice, we can see the elaborateness that might attend preparing benne. After she pan parched the seeds she put them into the mortar and ground them with garlic, salt, and shado beni (often found in Latin tiendas as “culantro” not “cilantro”), bird peppers and salt.  This she heaped on top of Moruga Hill Rice steamed in coconut milk. 

Benne and hominy was a standard dish of the 19^th-century South, found in the Southwest as well as the Southeast.  Here is a Texas testimony from 1908:  “I cook ‘bene and hominy,’ a dish which M.E.B. told us was a favorite with her when a child.  Bene candy is, also, as she said, delicious.  We raise bene for our chickens.  It is a small white seed, with very thin skin and just full of oily meat.  Chickens are very fond of it.”

As early as 1831 the New York agronomist, Judge Jesse Buel, in crop profiles of sesame, published the following assessment drawn from reports by informants in Carolina and Georgia:  “In the Southern States, the seeds are extensively used by the blacks, boiled with their hominy, and are sometimes made into pudding, like millet or rice.”  Buel grew his own sesame, derived from Asia, with a stature of only 2 feet. African Americans were growing benne, with plants growing five feet tall. 

The information that sesame was being cooked with the hominy is quite interesting.  What is not forthcoming in the report is whether the seeds were mashed prior to incorporation into the boiling hominy pot, enabling the released oil to spread through the grain, or whether the seeds were toasted.  The report of a sesame porridge, similar to the porridges made from grain sorghum (broomcorn or guinea corn as it was called in the West Indies), or from finger millet, is quite interesting, since Charleston’s Brown Benne and Oyster stew derives from this.  This was often made with mashed seed after the first pressing of oil had been extracted.  It operated similarly to a roux, forming the base thickening the soup/stew.

Benne and hominy was a preparation that encompassed a range of styles: a dish with a parched benne topping in one incarnation, a porridge with grits and boiled raw benne seed in another.  In neither preparation was the benne seed hulled.  The removal of the husk from the seeds became the fixation of confectioners in the late 1800s making benne candy that featured a contrast between the stark white of the hulled seed against the caramel brown of the sugar matrix.