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Dried Corn
For a family of eight, wash a pint of corn through one water, and put to soak over night in clean cold water (if impossible to soak so long, place over a kettle of hot water for two or three hours); when softened, cook five to ten minutes in water in which it was soaked, adding as soon as boiling, two table-spoons butter, one of flour, and a little salt and pepper. Another good way to finish is the following: Take the yolk of one egg, one table-spoon milk, pinch of salt, thicken with flour quite stiff so as to take out with a tea-spoon, and drop in little dumplings not larger than an acorn; cover tightly and cook five or ten minutes; have enough water in kettle before adding dumplings, as cover should not be removed until dumplings are done.
This is dried sweet corn, not popcorn, hominy or dent corn, and the distinction governs everything about how it behaves. The recipe is really two: a buttered corn in its own liquor, and the same corn with drop dumplings cooked on top.
- What the corn isDried sweet corn is sweet corn cut from the cob and dried, sold today by Amish and Pennsylvania Dutch suppliers and some bulk-food shops. Do not substitute dried field corn or posole, which are alkali-treated or far starchier and need an hour or more of cooking.
- A pint is a volumeA pint of dried sweet corn kernels weighs roughly 10 to 12 oz, and swells to something like two or three times its dry bulk on soaking. That is a generous vegetable dish for eight, as stated.
- Soaking, and the soaking waterOvernight in cold water is right, and the instruction to cook it in that same water matters: the sugars and corn flavour leach out during the soak, and pouring it off leaves the dish flat.
- Cooking timeFive to ten minutes assumes corn dried at low heat and fully rehydrated. Modern dried corn, particularly the toasted-tasting kind, often wants 30 to 45 minutes at a bare simmer before it loses its chewiness. Taste a kernel before you commit to thickening.
- The flourA tablespoon of flour dropped into boiling liquid will lump. Work it into the two tablespoons of softened butter first and stir that paste in, or slake it in a little cold milk.
- The dumpling doughYolk, a tablespoon of milk and flour "quite stiff" gives a firm noodle-like dumpling rather than a fluffy one; the recipe gives no flour quantity, so work to the stated stiffness. It belongs to the same family as spaetzle, though stiffer, and will not rise; there is no leavening in it.
- The hingeKeep the lid on. The dumplings cook in steam as much as in liquid, and lifting the cover drops the temperature and leaves them raw in the middle. Make sure there is enough liquid in the pot before they go in, since you cannot check partway.
Drying was a common way for nineteenth-century Ohio households to keep sweet corn past September, and farm kitchens are often described as giving over a summer week to cutting kernels from boiled cobs and spreading them on sheets in the sun or in a cooling bread oven. Buckeye Cookery (1877), compiled from contributions by Midwestern housewives, treats dried corn as a winter staple rather than a novelty, and the recipe opens with a family-of-eight quantity and a note on what to do if you forgot to soak it. The dumpling finish points to the German-speaking settlers who were numerous in Ohio and Pennsylvania; a stiff egg-and-flour dough dropped into a simmering pot appears across that tradition under names like Kn cpfle and rivvels, and it turned a plain vegetable into a filling dish without meat.