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Corn Cakes
Make a custard from 2 eggs well beaten, 1/2 cup milk, 1/2 tablespoon Crisco, and 1/2 tablespoon sugar; beat into this 3/4 of cup of canned corn. Sift together twice, 7/8 cup of flour, 1 tablespoon baking powder, and 1/2 teaspoon salt; beat into other mixture, and drop in Criscoed muffin rings by the tablespoon; set in a Criscoed dripping pan, and bake in a moderate oven until done.
A drop batter of canned corn baked in rings rather than fried on a griddle. The method is straightforward; the vocabulary and the leavening are what need translating.
- "Custard" here means the wet mixNothing is cooked or thickened at this stage. Beat the eggs, milk, melted shortening and sugar together cold, then stir in the corn.
- CriscoThe book was written to sell it, and it appears in nearly every recipe. Any neutral solid shortening, or an equal amount of melted butter or oil, behaves the same way here. Melt it before adding so it disperses rather than seizing in the cold milk.
- Baking powderA tablespoon to 7/8 cup of flour is heavy by current standards; period powders were less consistent than modern ones and could lose strength on the shelf. Two teaspoons of modern double-acting powder gives a good rise.
- 7/8 cup flourA cup less two tablespoons, roughly 110 g. Sifting twice with the powder and salt matters more than the exact volume, since the batter is stiff and the leavening has to be evenly distributed.
- Canned cornDrain it well. Period canned corn may well have been packed wetter than most current whole-kernel corn; if yours is very juicy, the batter will slump. Three-quarters of a cup drained is roughly a small (about 7 oz) can's worth.
- Muffin rings and dripping panBottomless metal rings set on a flat roasting or sheet pan; they were used alongside the gem or muffin pan that later displaced them. A standard 12-cup muffin tin, greased, does the job; fill each cup about two-thirds.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperatures; 'moderate' is conventionally read as about 350-375F. Expect roughly 18 to 22 minutes for small cakes in rings, a little longer in deeper muffin cups. They are done when set in the centre and lightly coloured at the edge.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; expect somewhere around eight to a dozen small cakes depending on the size of the rings, enough for two to three people. They were meant as a hot bread alongside the main dish, not as a sweet; the half tablespoon of sugar is seasoning, not sweetening.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre of cookbook that was really an advertisement: Procter & Gamble commissioned menus and recipes to demonstrate Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening the company launched in 1911, and the word appears in nearly every line, verb as well as noun. Corn cakes themselves long predate the book — batters of cornmeal or cut green corn were standard American griddle fare through the nineteenth century — but this version is a product of two newer conveniences, canned sweet corn and chemical baking powder, which together let a cook make a corn bread quickly from a shelf. Baking the batter in muffin rings on a dripping pan rather than frying it on a griddle also reflects a preference for a bread that could go to table hot and upright.<a href=