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Corn Put Up in Brine
Late as possible in the fall prepare tender roasting cars for winter use. Strip off the outer shuck, leaving the inner, silky ones next to the grain. Have ready a nice clean wooden firkin or tub, properly scalded and sunned. Sprinkle salt over the bottom. Pack closely with corn. Wash a large flat rock and lay on the top, when nearly full. Pour strong brine over the corn, covering it well. The day before using, strip off the shuck and silk, place in a bucket of cold water (renewing the water once, or twice), and let it stand till ready to use it. Two ears soaked thus, and shaved into a pot of soup with other veg etables, will impart a delicious flavor.-Mrs. S. T.
This is a method for keeping green corn through the winter in salt brine, written for a household with a cold cellar and no other option. The vocabulary is worth decoding even though the preservation itself is not something to attempt.
- Why not to make itCorn is a low-acid vegetable, and packing it under brine in a weighted vessel creates a largely oxygen-free, low-acid environment of the kind in which Clostridium botulinum can produce toxin. Nothing in the method acidifies the corn or brings it to a temperature that would destroy spores, and "strong brine" gives no salt concentration to work from — a very heavy brine would inhibit the organism, but there is no way to know what was used. Salt-brining of vegetables is only safe when the salt percentage, the temperature and the acidity are measured and controlled; use a current, tested preserving recipe if you want to put corn by.
- "Roasting ears"Southern usage for corn picked at the green, milky eating stage rather than left to dry for meal. The recipe calls for the last tender ears, taken as late in the fall as possible.
- FirkinA small wooden cask or tub, historically about nine gallons. Wooden vessels are hard to sanitise thoroughly — the grain can harbour bacteria and residues of previous brines — which may be why the original insists on scalding and sunning it; modern practice generally favours glass and food-grade plastic.
- The flat rockA follower weight, laid on to keep the corn submerged beneath the brine. The principle is sound and still used in fermentation; the rock is not, since porous stone cannot be cleaned.
- "Strong brine"In nineteenth-century usage this generally meant salt added until a fresh egg floated, which corresponds to a brine of roughly ten per cent salt, well short of saturation. It is an eyeball test with a wide margin of error, and the salt would also have been unrefined and variable.
- The soaking stepThe day-long freshening in changed cold water tells you how salty the corn came out — heavily enough that it functioned as a seasoning agent, which is why two ears flavour a whole pot of soup rather than serving as a vegetable in their own right.
- The inner shucksLeaving the silky inner husks on would have kept the kernels from direct contact with the salt and slowed drying at the surface, though the recipe does not say why. It also traps debris and silk against the grain.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, gathered contributions from Virginia households and printed them under initials — the "Mrs. S. T." here is one of some 250 named and half-named contributors. Salt-brining was the workhorse of the pre-canning Southern larder: string beans, cabbage, cucumbers and green corn all went into tubs of brine in the autumn to be freshened out over the winter, a practice inherited from British and Northern European salting traditions and carried on in rural households long after commercial canning arrived. What the recipe records is less a dish than an economy — the last tender ears of the season, too good to leave to the field and impossible to keep any other way, converted into a seasoning that would carry the taste of summer corn into a February soup pot.