Lon Hitch and his son, Dempsey, in the early 1950’s.
Usually on the coldest day of the year “when the snow was a-flyin’,” (Lorena and Edna guess because it was cold to do anything else!), Dad took the Hickory Cane corn that he had grown, shucked, and shelled to the well to rinse it. Then, he put it in a huge cast iron pot to cook over an open fire. (Hickory Cane corn was the best because it had big grains.) He cooked it with water and the ashes of burnt hickory or oak trees bound in a cloth. These ashes contained lye and that made the husk of the corn grains come off. After rinsing the corn many times to ensure all the lye and corn many times to ensure all the lye and corn husks were washed away, he took it inside, took the caps off the woodstove, set the feet of the iron pot down in the holes and cooked the hominy until it was tender. It was stored in a ten pound stone jar. “It would keep until we ate it up,” Lorena states, “I used to eat it cold-straight out of the jar. And Mom always fried some in a skillet.”
Lagniappe, 2004