The Etymology of Hominy
Hominy is a true colonial-American loanword. The English colonists in early 17th-century Virginia encountered local Algonquian-speaking peoples preparing maize by soaking the kernels in an alkaline solution of wood ashes or lime, which loosened the tough hulls and unlocked nutrients (a process modern food science calls nixtamalisation). The English settlers borrowed the indigenous word — recorded variously as uskatahomen or appuminneonash — and shortened it. By 1629 it appears in colonial writing as homine, and by the late 17th century it had stabilised as hominy. The food itself is far older than the word: Mesoamerican peoples developed nixtamalisation by at least 1500 BCE, and it remains the foundation of corn tortillas, Mexican posole, and the Cherokee dish that Southern US cuisine adopted as hominy and grits. Grits are hominy ground coarsely; cornmeal mush is hominy ground finer. The word is a small linguistic monument to a major culinary technology.