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Corn Omelet
1 pint of grated corn 1 gill of cream 5 eggs 1 teaspoonful of salt 1/4 teaspoonful of pepper Throw the corn into a kettle of boiling water, cook five minutes, take out, score and press as directed in preceding recipes. Separate the eggs, beat the yolks until light, add to them the cream, and then add gradually to the corn, mixing carefully.
Add the salt and pepper. Whisk the whites to a very stiff froth, stir them carefully into the corn. Put a tablespoonful of butter into a frying pan, and when very hot, turn in one half the mixture. Cook quickly, watching and shaking until the omelet is set. Turn on a heated dish and serve at once. Fry the remaining half in the same way.
A puffed, separated-egg omelet built around the milky pulp of fresh sweet corn. Everything depends on getting real corn pulp rather than whole kernels, and on folding the whites in with a light hand.
- A gill of creamHalf a cup, 4 fluid ounces. Use heavy or light cream; half-and-half works and keeps the mixture from being heavy.
- A pint of grated cornThat is 2 cups of pulp, which takes something like 4 to 8 medium ears depending on size and how thoroughly they are scraped. This is a volume of scraped pulp, not of whole kernels.
- Score and pressThe technique referred to in the earlier recipes: run a sharp knife down the centre of each row of kernels, then press the pulp and milk out with the back of the knife, leaving the tough hulls on the cob. This is the whole point of the dish, and cutting kernels off whole gives a different, chewier result.
- The five-minute boilBlanching the ears is presumably meant to set the milk so it scrapes out cleanly and to take the raw edge off the starch. Drop the whole ears in, five minutes, then cool enough to handle before scoring.
- Frozen cornFrozen kernels have no milky pulp left in them. If fresh corn is out of season, pulse thawed kernels briefly in a food processor with the cream to approximate the texture; the flavour will be flatter.
- Folding the whitesWhisk to stiff but not dry peaks and fold in three additions with a spatula, stopping while streaks are still faintly visible. Overmixing collapses the foam and you get scrambled corn.
- Cook quicklyAn 8- to 9-inch pan over medium-high heat, and shake it as directed so the base does not scorch before the interior sets. The recipe uses no oven, but if the top is still loose when the bottom is browned, a few minutes in a moderate oven is easier than trying to flip it.
- SaltThe teaspoon seasons the whole mixture, which is then fried in two halves. It is on the generous side by current taste; three-quarters of a teaspoon is closer to modern seasoning.
- YieldTwo omelets, each serving two as a light course; four in all. Cook and serve them one at a time, as the recipe insists, because a puffed omelet begins sinking within a minute of leaving the pan.
Hot Weather Dishes belongs to the summer-cookery genre that flourished in American kitchen literature in the 1880s and 1890s, when a coal range in July made heavy cooking miserable and cookery-school teachers built menus around dishes that were quick on the stove and used what the markets had. Sweet corn was exactly that: cheap, abundant from midsummer, and best the day it was picked. Grated or scraped corn appears constantly in nineteenth-century American cookbooks, in puddings, fritters, oysters and soups, because the scored-and-pressed pulp gave a creamy body no other vegetable offered. The separated-egg omelet, puffed with beaten whites and often finished under heat, was standard cooking-school technique of the period and was often said to be a French method, though the American version was frequently used as a vehicle for a native vegetable rather than served plain.