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Preserved Corn
Scald corn just enough to set the milk, cut from cob, to every four pints of corn add one pint salt, mix thoroughly, pack in jars, with a cloth and weight over corn; when wanted for use put in a stew-pan or kettle, cover with cold water; as soon as it comes to a boil pour off and put on cold again, and repeat until it is fresh enough for taste, then add a very little sugar, sweet cream, or butter, etc., to suit taste. - Mrs. S. M. Guy.
A dry-salt cure for sweet corn from the years before reliable home canning. The salt ratio is the whole recipe — everything else is technique.
- Do not lighten the saltOne pint of salt to four pints of cut corn works out to roughly a third salt by weight, which is what keeps the crock safe at cellar temperature. Reducing it, as people are often tempted to do because the corn tastes ferociously salty, removes the only thing preserving it.
- Which saltUse plain pickling or kosher salt. Iodized table salt and the anticaking agents in it will cloud the brine and can darken the corn; neither was present in 1877 salt.
- "Scald just enough to set the milk"A brief dip of the whole ears in boiling water, a minute or two, until the kernel liquid turns from watery to opaque. A scald this short slows, but will not fully inactivate, the enzymes that turn stored corn starchy and flat. Longer scalding cooks the kernels and they slump in the crock.
- Cutting from the cobCut the kernels at about two-thirds their depth, then scrape the cob with the back of the knife to get the milk. The milk carries most of the sweetness and helps draw the brine.
- "Jars" here means a crockAn open stoneware crock or a food-grade plastic bucket, not a sealing Mason jar. The cloth and weight hold the corn under the brine that the salt draws out within a day; if it does not cover the corn completely, top up with a saturated salt solution rather than plain water.
- StorageKeep it cold — under about 50F, which is what a stone cellar gave. Skim any surface film, keep the cloth clean, and discard the batch outright if it smells putrid rather than sharply salty, or if the corn goes slimy or pink.
- The freshening soakTwo or three changes of water brought to a boil and poured off will usually do it, but taste at each stage rather than counting. The corn goes from inedible to bland in one change too many, and there is no getting the flavor back.
- Finishing and yieldCream and butter are not garnish here; they are what makes desalted corn taste like corn again. Four pints of cut kernels is about eight to ten large ears and serves roughly eight once freshened.
- If you would rather notBlanched cut corn freezes better than it salts, holds its sugar, and needs no soaking. The salt crock is worth doing for the flavor of the thing, not for convenience.
Buckeye Cookery came out of Ohio in the late 1870s, when the safe canning of low-acid vegetables was still unsettled technology and a household with a good corn patch needed some way to carry August into February. Salting was the oldest answer and the least dependent on equipment: a crock, a weight, and enough salt that nothing would grow. The alternative in the same region was dried corn, cut and sun- or oven-dried, and the two methods sat side by side in farm cellars. The freshening ritual described here — boil, pour off, boil again — is the same one applied to salt cod and salt pork, and it explains why so many nineteenth-century vegetable dishes finish with cream, butter and a pinch of sugar. Those were not enrichments so much as repairs. The attribution to Mrs. S. M. Guy is typical of the book, which was assembled from contributions by named local women rather than written by a single author.