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Corn Griddle Cakes
1 quart of scraped corn, 1/2 pint of milk, 1/2 pint of flour, 1 tablespoonful of melted butter, 4 eggs, ½ teaspoonful of salt.
Scrape the corn and press out as previously directed on Page 40, Corn Fritters; add the yolks of the eggs, milk, salt, melted butter and flour. Beat well, then stir in carefully the stiffly beaten whites of the eggs and bake at once on a hot griddle. Do not add baking powder or extra flour, if you can possibly handle them.
A batter held together by scraped corn and beaten egg white rather than by flour and leavening, which makes it delicate to turn but far better tasting than a stiffer cake. The instruction that matters is the last line: resist the urge to thicken.
- The measuresA half pint is 1 cup, so this is 1 cup milk and 1 cup flour. A quart of scraped corn is the pulp from something on the order of six to ten medium ears, depending on size and how thoroughly they are scraped.
- Scraping the cornThe standard method of the period, which the reference on Page 40 presumably describes, is to split each row of kernels lengthwise with a knife point, then scrape the pulp and milk out with the back of the blade, leaving the tough hulls on the cob. Cutting whole kernels off instead gives a coarser batter that binds poorly.
- No leavening, on purposeThe stiffly beaten whites are the only lift. Fold them in with a spatula in two additions and stop while streaks are still faintly visible; beating them through kills the aeration the recipe depends on.
- Bake at once"Bake" here means cook on the griddle, not in an oven. The batter must go on immediately, as the corn pulp continues to weep liquid and the whites deflate within a few minutes of standing.
- Griddle heatThe recipe asks for a hot griddle, lightly greased, but not a scorching one: too hot and the exterior sets before the wet corn interior cooks; too cool and the cakes spread and stick.
- HandlingUse a small ladle for cakes no more than three inches across and turn once, with a thin wide spatula. Larger cakes tear.
- Corn has changedModern supersweet varieties are noticeably sweeter than the sweet corn of the period and may give a wetter pulp, in which case the batter can run looser. If so, draining the scraped pulp briefly in a sieve is truer to the original than adding the flour the recipe warns against.
- YieldRoughly twenty small cakes, enough for four to six.
Corn griddle cakes belong to a large American family of dishes built on scraped green corn, the milky pulp pressed from ears at the roasting stage rather than dried kernels or meal. The technique is generally traced to Native American practice and was absorbed early into colonial cooking, surviving in nineteenth-century books as corn oysters, corn fritters and cakes like this one. Such dishes reflect the short, intense late-summer corn season before canning and freezing made the ingredient a year-round staple.