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Green-Corn Patties
Six ears of corn grated.
Three eggs-little salt.
One and one-half cups fresh milk.
One teaspoonful baking powder.
Beat all well together and drop by the spoonful in boiling fat.
A plain fritter batter from the days when sweet corn came into the market for a few weeks and was used hard. The recipe assumes a cook who can judge batter by eye, and it needs a little help.
- "Green corn" means fresh cornNot a green variety — green in the old sense of unripe, corn cut at the milk stage rather than dried for meal. Modern sweet corn varieties are generally sweeter than those available when this was written.
- Grating, not cuttingScore down each row with a knife tip and scrape the cob with the back of the blade so the milky pulp comes out and the tough hulls stay behind. A box grater over a bowl works, but the scraping method gives a smoother batter. Six ears yields roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups of pulp.
- The batter will be too thinThe batter will be thin -- Three eggs and 1 1/2 cups of milk against no flour at all gives something much looser than a usual fritter batter, and spoonfuls may spread or break up in the fat. Cutting the milk to about 1/2 cup and working in 1/2 to 3/4 cup flour until the batter mounds on the spoon will give a batter that holds together.
- Fat temperature"Boiling fat" means deep fat hot enough to fry briskly, by modern reckoning somewhere around 360-375F — a cube of bread should brown in roughly a minute. Cooler than that and the patties soak; much hotter and the outside colors before the egg sets.
- Or cook them as griddle cakesWith the thicker batter these fry well in a shallow film of butter or oil in a skillet, two to three minutes a side, which avoids the loose-batter problem entirely.
- Seasoning"Little salt" is about 3/4 teaspoon for this quantity. Black pepper is a natural addition.
- YieldAbout 16 to 18 patties, serving four to six as a vegetable side.
Corn fritters in one form or another run through nineteenth-century American cookery under many names — green-corn patties, corn oysters, corn puffs — and the "corn oyster" name is usually explained by the size and shape of the fried spoonfuls. The technique depends entirely on the corn's own starch and milk for body, which is why the old books insist on grating or scraping rather than cutting off whole kernels. Its place in a vegetable chapter reflects a short, intense season: sweet corn had a few weeks in late summer, and household books of the period offered a dozen ways to use it before the sugars turned to starch.