Hominy Homily

05.07.07

Recently, I was lucky enough to eat three dinners in one week at Restaurant Eugene, a swank and intimate restaurant in Atlanta, where Linton Hopkins is the chef and co-owner. The best—the most primal and soulful—dish I tasted was trout with bacon and hominy, napped with hazelnut brown butter.

The trout was good. Crispy skin. Sweet flesh. You know the drill. But that hominy-bacon stuff was the bomb. Kind of like a super-sized succotash, albeit with monster hunks of Allan Benton's bacon. The hominy wasn't peroxide white. It had an earthy cast to it. And it was chewy, almost meaty in flavor. Think grits gone feral.

Inspired, I came home to cook a chicken stew for friends. I jettisoned the potatoes and loaded in canned hominy. The stew came out great. But it wasn't feral. Turns out that Hopkins doesn't buy canned hominy.

He makes his own with a kit from Anson Mills, using culinary lime and heirloom corn. Right now, Anson sells white, yellow, and blue Big Hominy Kits to the trade only, but they're pondering an everyman version.

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