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Corn Fritters
3 dozen ears corn. 6 eggs, beaten well. 3 tablespoonfuls flour Salt to the taste.
Grate the corn, add to it the flour, and gradually mix with the eggs. Beat all hard together. Drop in oval shapes, three inches long, into a pan, in which fry them brown, in equal parts of lard and butter. A batter cake-turner is convenient for turning them.--Mrs. Dr. J.
Corn Fritters. 8 large ears of corn, cut three times (not grated). 2 eggs. 1 teacup sweet milk (or more, if the corn is not juicy). 2 teaspoonfuls flour. Salt and pepper to taste. Make the mixture the consistency of a soft batter, and fry in lard or butter.--Mrs. A. W.
Two versions of the same dish from two contributors: one grated to a pulp and bound with egg alone, the other cut from the cob and loosened with milk. Both depend on very fresh corn, which is the whole point of the recipe.
- Scale it downThree dozen ears is banquet quantity. A sixth of Mrs. Dr. J.'s recipe — 6 ears, 1 egg, a scant half-tablespoon of flour — makes a small panful.
- Grated versus cutGrating means running the cut face of the ear across a coarse grater so the kernels burst and leave the hulls behind, giving a starchy pulp that binds itself. "Cut three times" means slicing down through the rows of kernels three times, then scraping — coarser, juicier, and why the second recipe needs milk and the first does not.
- Corn must be youngBoth recipes assume green corn at the milk stage, as fresh as possible. Corn that has been stored a while converts some of its sugar to starch and gives up less milk; if the pulp looks dry, add liquid as Mrs. A. W. allows.
- Teacup and teaspoonfulsA period teacup is usually reckoned at around 6 fluid ounces, though the measure was not standardized, so roughly three-quarters of a cup of milk. Note how little flour either recipe uses — these are corn held together by egg and starch, not flour batters, and adding more makes them stodgy.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, as distinct from the buttermilk or clabber that a nineteenth-century kitchen also kept on hand. Whole milk is the equivalent.
- The frying fatEqual lard and butter gets the higher smoke point of lard with the flavor of butter. Modern equivalents are a neutral oil with a knob of butter, or clarified butter. Keep the fat at about 350F and shallow, a quarter inch or so; the milk solids in whole butter will scorch if the pan runs hotter.
- Shaping and turningThe oval three inches long is set with a spoon rather than formed by hand — the mixture is loose. Do not crowd the pan; the fritters need to set on the underside before the "batter cake-turner" (a pancake spatula) goes near them, or they tear.
- ServingNeither cook says how these were served, but the salt and pepper of the second version point to a hot savory dish rather than a sweet one.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia was compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1877, gathering contributions from women across the state and printing them under initials — hence "Mrs. Dr. J." and "Mrs. A. W." appearing back to back with rival methods, a tendency the book shows with a number of popular dishes. Green corn fritters belong to the older American habit of cooking corn at the milk stage, a use of the crop often traced to Native practice and said to have been carried into Southern kitchens; the grating technique in the first recipe is the same one used for corn pudding and "corn oysters," a related fritter named for its shape and size rather than any seafood. Because sweet corn at that stage keeps only hours, recipes like this one mark a genuinely seasonal dish in a book otherwise full of preserved and stored foods.