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Corn Fritters
2 eggs, 1/2 pound of flour, 1 teaspoonful of baking powder, 2 dashes of pepper.
Score the corn down the centre of each row of grains, then with a blunt knife press out the pulp, leaving the hull on the cob. Never grate corn, as in that way you get all
The text breaks off mid-sentence, so the frying instructions are missing and no quantity of corn is given. What survives is still useful: the ingredient list, and a strong opinion about how to get corn off the cob.
- The scoring method is the pointSplitting each row of kernels with the knife tip and then scraping out the pulp with the dull edge leaves the tough hulls behind on the cob. Grating drags the hulls into the batter, which is most likely where the cut-off sentence was heading. Expect this to be slower than grating.
- Weigh the flourHalf a pound of flour is about 1 3/4 cups by modern scoop-and-level measure, roughly 225 g. Scale by weight if you can; corn pulp varies enough in moisture that you will be adjusting anyway.
- Corn quantity is missingThe original never says how much corn. As a starting guess for two eggs and that much flour, the pulp from six to eight ears will make a batter that holds together; begin with less flour than the full amount and add until the batter just mounds on a spoon.
- Add saltThe seasoning here is pepper only, which reads as an omission rather than a preference. Salt is usual in comparable fritter recipes; about a teaspoon in this quantity of batter is a reasonable amount.
- No liquid is called forThe eggs and the corn pulp are the only moisture. Fresh milky corn scraped this way gives up a surprising amount of liquid; if the ears are older and starchy, a few tablespoons of milk brings it back to a droppable batter.
- Frying, since the text stopsThe recipe gives no cooking instruction. Fritters of this type are dropped by the spoonful into deep fat and turned once, or cooked on a greased griddle like thick pancakes. In deep fat at modern frying temperature they take roughly three to four minutes and want draining on paper.
- Baking powder timingMix and fry promptly, as the leavening in a wet batter begins working once wetted and a batter left standing will rise less well in the pan.
- YieldWorking from the assumed six to eight ears, something like eighteen to twenty fritters, enough for four to six as a side dish.
Corn fritters belong to the large American family of dishes built on the brief midsummer window when sweet corn is still milky enough to scrape. Nineteenth and early twentieth century cookbooks return again and again to the distinction this recipe insists on: grated corn versus scored and pressed corn. Before modern sweet corn varieties, the hulls are generally said to have been noticeably tougher, and a cook who grated her ears got a batter flecked with them. The blunt-knife method appears in kitchen manuals well before this one, though many period books cheerfully instruct the cook to grate, which is why this author bothers to argue against it. That a recipe collection gives fritters at all is characteristic of the period, when a vegetable course was expected to be substantial enough to stand near the meat.