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Corn Fritters (Cups grated corn cup milk cup)
2 cups grated corn. 1/4 cup milk. 1⅓ cup flour. 2 teaspoons sugar. 1/3 cup melted butter. 1 teaspoon salt. 1/8 teaspoon pepper. 3 eggs well beaten.
PROCESS: Mix corn, milk, flour, sugar and salt, add eggs. Drop by tablespoonfuls on a hot well-greased griddle and cook as griddle cakes until browned on one side; then turn and brown the other side.
A griddle fritter rather than a deep-fried one, and simple enough that the few gaps in the original are the only things worth flagging.
- The butter is orphanedA third of a cup of melted butter is listed but never appears in the process. Add it with the milk and eggs; without it the batter is stiff and the fritters dry.
- Grated cornThis means fresh ears split down each row with a knife tip and the pulp scraped out with the back of the blade, leaving the hulls on the cob. Roughly 4 to 5 medium ears gives 2 cups. Frozen kernels pulsed briefly in a processor are the nearest substitute; drained canned corn is wetter and will need less milk.
- No leaveningThere is no baking powder here — the lift comes entirely from three well-beaten eggs. Beat them until pale and thick, fold them in last, and cook the batter promptly rather than letting it stand.
- Batter consistencyA quarter cup of milk against a cup and a half of flour sounds impossibly dry, but sweet corn pulp carries a great deal of liquid. Judge by the batter: it should mound on a spoon and spread only slightly. Late-season or frozen corn may need another spoonful or two of milk.
- Griddle heatThe recipe says only 'hot'. A moderate griddle is safer than a fierce one: too high and the outside browns before the egg-rich centre sets.
- Yield and servingDropped by tablespoonfuls, this quantity of batter makes several dozen small fritters. They can be served beside a meat course, and they take maple syrup perfectly well.
Grated or scraped green corn — sweet corn taken at the milk stage — is a long-established American technique, and grated-corn dishes are often said to derive from Native practice, though the line of transmission is not documented in detail. By the nineteenth century grated green corn appears routinely in American cookbooks as a late-summer dish. The griddle method here differs from the deep fat used in many contemporaneous versions.