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Corn Cakes (Grate one quart of corn three)
Grate one quart of corn; three tablespoonfuls of flour, the yolks of three eggs, a little salt. Have equal parts of butter and lard in the spider very hot, and drop them from a spoon in small cakes.
Turn when a handsome brown.
A fresh-corn fritter from the era when "corn" on a supper table meant kernels grated off the cob that morning. The batter is almost entirely corn, so the grating method is what decides whether it holds together.
- Grated cornSplit the kernels down each row with a knife tip and scrape the cob with the back of the blade so you get the milky pulp, not whole kernels. A quart of pulp takes roughly 8 to 10 ears of sweet corn; frozen kernels pulsed in a food processor are a workable substitute but give a looser batter.
- The spiderA spider was a cast-iron frying pan, originally with legs for hearth cooking. Any heavy skillet works; the point is even heat that will not drop when cold batter hits it.
- Equal parts butter and lardEnough to fry the cakes shallow, roughly a quarter-inch. Butter alone scorches readily and lard alone browns less; the recipe does not say why the two were combined. 'Very hot' is judged by eye: a drop of batter should sizzle at once, but the butter should not be blackening.
- Yolks onlyThree yolks bind the corn without the whites, giving a softer, more custardy interior. The recipe leaves three whites over and says nothing about their use.
- FlourThree tablespoons is deliberately little. If your corn is very milky the cakes may spread; add flour a spoonful at a time rather than starting with more.
- Size and turningDrop tablespoon-size cakes with room between them and leave them alone until the edges set, two to three minutes, before turning once. Moving them early is the usual cause of a cake that comes apart in the fat.
- Yield and servingA quart of corn makes a large batch, several dozen small cakes. Drain briefly on paper and serve hot, plain or with butter; they go limp within a few minutes of sitting.
Grated-corn cakes belong to the late-summer weeks when sweet corn was abundant and had to be used the day it was picked, before the sugars turned to starch. Recipes of this kind run through nineteenth-century American cookery under names like corn oysters, corn fritters and green corn cakes -- the "corn oyster" label is generally traced to the resemblance in size, shape and soft interior to a fried oyster, and cooks sometimes served them as a cheaper stand-in. Their place in a supper chapter is telling: supper was the light evening meal, taken after a heavy midday dinner, and it leaned on griddle cakes, cold meats and whatever the garden was producing. The pairing of butter with lard is a period signature, from a time when both were kept in the kitchen as a matter of course and each was used for what it did best.