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Corn Fritters
1 dozen ears of corn 2 eggs 1 teaspoonful of baking powder 1 cup of flour ½ pint of milk 1/2 teaspoonful of salt 2 dashes of black pepper Score the corn down the centre of each row of grains, then with the back of the knife press out the pulp, leaving the hull on the cob. Do not grate the corn, as in that way you get the hull. To this pulp add the milk, the yolks of the eggs, salt, pepper and flour; beat well. Beat the whites of the eggs to a stiff froth, and stir them and the baking powder carefully into the mixture. Put lard or dripping into a frying pan; when hot, drop the mixture by spoonfuls into the fat. When brown on one side, turn and brown the other. Take out with a skimmer (do not pierce them with a fork, as it makes them heavy), drain on brown paper and serve very hot.
A pan-fried corn fritter from a period when the whole point was to extract the sweet pulp and leave the tough hull behind. That scoring-and-scraping step is the hinge of the recipe.
- Scoring, not gratingRun a knife tip down the centre of each row of kernels, then scrape with the dull edge of the blade so the pulp and milk come out and the skins stay on the cob. Grating drags the hulls into the batter and gives a gritty, papery fritter.
- The milk quantityThe printed page was checked: the recipe calls for half a pint of milk, as our text now gives. With a dozen ears of corn that yields a thick, spoonable batter rather than a pourable one.
- A dozen earsTwelve ears scrape down to roughly 3 to 4 cups of pulp, depending on their size; if yours are small, judge by volume rather than count.
- Baking powder and beaten whitesFold the powder in with the whites at the very end and fry promptly. Held on the counter, the batter deflates and the leavening spends itself before it hits the fat.
- Fat and temperatureLard or beef dripping both work, as does a neutral oil; a quarter inch in a heavy skillet at 350-360F browns the outside before the centre turns gummy. Fry in small batches so the fat does not drop below temperature.
- Do not pierce themThe instruction is sound. Piercing punctures the set crust; that may be what the author means by "heavy." Lift them out with a skimmer or slotted spoon.
- DrainingBrown paper was the period blotter; use a rack set over a sheet pan, which keeps the underside from steaming soft.
- YieldAbout 18 to 24 fritters, serving six as a vegetable side. They collapse and toughen on standing, so cook them last and send them straight to the table.
Corn fritters belong to the large American family of dishes built on scraped green corn, a technique with roots in Indigenous foodways and repeated throughout nineteenth-century household manuals as corn oysters, corn pudding and cakes of this sort. The insistence on scoring rather than grating is characteristic of the careful, teacherly American cookery writing of the later nineteenth century, which treated the hull as the difference between a good fritter and a bad one. Sweet corn was a brief high-summer crop, and frying on top of the stove spared the cook the heat of a lit oven.