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Corn Fritters
1 tablespoonful melted Crisco 1 can crushed corn 1 cupful flour 1 teaspoonful baking powder 2 teaspoonfuls salt 1/4 teaspoonful white pepper 3 tablespoonfuls milk Put corn into bowl, add Crisco, salt, pepper, flour, baking powder, and milk. Mix well and drop in spoonfuls on a Criscoed griddle. Fire brown on both sides. These fritters are a palatable accompaniment to roast chicken. Sufficient for twelve fritters.
Corn, Okra and Tomatoes 2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 2 tablespoonfuls sugar Salt and pepper to taste 6 ears corn 6 okra pods 6 tomatoes 2 cupfuls water Cut corn from cob, put into saucepan, cover with water and bring to boil. Scald and skin tomatoes and cut okra into cross sections half inch long. Add both to corn with Crisco and seasonings. Stir and cook until tender. Serve hot.
Two quick corn dishes from a Crisco-sponsored menu book, written when canned corn and vegetable shortening were both novelties worth naming. Both need only small adjustments.
- Cut the saltTwo teaspoonfuls of salt in a batter yielding twelve small fritters is far more than modern palates accept, especially with canned corn that is already salted. Start with half a teaspoon and taste the raw batter.
- "1 can crushed corn"Most likely the mashed/crushed canned corn that corresponds roughly to what is now sold as cream-style corn; note that the period can was larger than a modern 14 to 15 oz tin, so start with the modern can and add more if the batter is dry. Drained whole-kernel corn will not bind the batter; if that is all you have, pulse half of it in a food processor with a spoonful of its liquid.
- "Fire brown"Most likely a misprint for "fry brown." Use a moderate griddle heat, filmed with fat: hot enough to set the outside in two or three minutes a side without the interior staying raw.
- Crisco and its substitutesCrisco was hydrogenated cottonseed shortening, the product this whole book exists to sell. Any neutral oil, modern shortening or clarified butter works; butter alone will brown faster, so drop the heat slightly.
- No eggThe batter is bound only by flour and the corn's starch, so it is loose and the fritters spread. Keep them to a rounded tablespoon each and turn them once, gently.
- Okra proportionsSix pods to six tomatoes and six ears is a token amount of okra, there mainly to thicken. Use a generous handful if you want the dish to read as okra rather than as stewed corn, and simmer until the pods lose their bite.
- The sugarTwo tablespoonfuls is a great deal of sugar for six tomatoes. With ripe summer tomatoes begin with one teaspoon and add only if the pan tastes sharp.
- YieldThe fritters make twelve, or four servings alongside chicken. The corn, okra and tomatoes serves four to six as a side.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre of cookbook that was really an advertisement: Procter & Gamble published it to promote Crisco, which had been introduced in 1911, and the shortening appears in nearly every recipe, capitalized and often used as a verb ("a Criscoed griddle"). The two dishes themselves are older than the book by a long way. Corn fritters descend from the batter cakes early American cooks made from green corn scraped off the cob, and the second recipe is a plain rendering of the corn, okra and tomato stews long cooked in the Lowcountry and the Gulf South, a combination usually linked to West African okra cookery meeting American maize. The can is the page's modern note: "1 can crushed corn" stands where a nineteenth-century book would have specified so many ears, evidence of how quickly commercial canning had reordered the vegetable chapter.