Home › Vegetables › Salted Corn
Salted Corn
Cut the corn from the cob uncooked. Put a layer in the bottom of a cask, then a layer of salt, another layer of corn, another layer of salt and so continue until the cask is full. Place a board on top of the corn, on which put a heavy stone and keep it below the brine. This cask may be filled at intervals by lifting the board, adding more corn and replacing it. After packing the corn, if you find in two or three days that there is not sufficient moisture to moisten the salt, add about one pint of water. Then as the juice comes from the corn there will be sufficient brine to cover it thoroughly. When the cask is filled, put a few horse-radish tops underneath the board; this will prevent souring and molding. Cover the cask with a cloth, tucking it in closely around the edges. Then put the board over the whole.
I have known corn, if properly packed, to keep perfectly for two years. In the winter this may be cooked and served the same as fresh corn. Of course it must be soaked over night in water to remove the salt. This is by far a more wholesome way of preserving corn than canning.
This is a dry-salt preservation method for a low-acid vegetable held at cellar temperature for months, and it gives no ratio of salt to corn, no brine strength, and no storage temperature. Those omissions are the whole problem, and they cannot be patched by adjusting the instructions.
- The missing number is the salt ratioSafe salt-cured vegetables depend on reaching and holding a known brine concentration — historically in the region of 20 to 25 percent salt by weight for a true dry-salt pack. The recipe says only "a layer of salt," which in practice varied from cook to cook and from cask to cask. Without a weighed ratio there is no way to know whether the pack ever became inhospitable to bacteria.
- Corn is low-acid and the pack is anaerobicSubmerged sweet corn under a weighted board, covered with cloth, is close to the low-acid, oxygen-poor environment in which Clostridium botulinum can produce toxin. Unlike cucumbers or cabbage, corn does not reliably ferment to a protective acidity; the sugars and the low natural acid work against you. Corn is among the standard examples of a low-acid vegetable that requires pressure processing.
- The added pint of water works the wrong wayThe instruction to add water if the salt has not gone damp dilutes whatever concentration was there. It addresses a visible problem — dry salt — at the cost of the only actual preservative in the cask, and with no weighed salt figure to start from the resulting brine strength is unknowable.
- Horse-radish tops are not a controlHorseradish leaves were a standard crock addition and do contain mustard-oil compounds with some antimicrobial effect, which is why generations of cooks believed they "prevented souring and molding." They do not inhibit botulinum in a low-acid pack, and a surface free of visible mold says nothing about toxin below the brine.
- "Two years" and no temperatureKeeping quality is asserted from experience, with no storage temperature stated anywhere in the recipe. Cool cellar or outbuilding storage is the likely assumption, and the same cask in a warm kitchen would behave very differently.
- The overnight soak does not sterilise anythingSoaking removes salt, not toxin. Botulinum toxin is heat-labile, but relying on the subsequent boil to make an unknown pack safe is not a margin any current guidance accepts.
- The closing claim is backwardsThe author's confidence that salting is "more wholesome" than canning is unexplained, and does not reflect the state of knowledge now. For putting up corn at home, use a current tested pressure-canning or freezing procedure from a reliable modern source.
- VesselA "cask" here is a wooden barrel, filled progressively as the crop came in, with a weighted follower board to keep the contents under liquid. The recipe never states its size, so even the total volume of corn is unknown.
Salting was one of the older American ways of keeping garden produce. Layered dry-salt packs in wooden casks or stoneware crocks — for beans, cabbage, and corn — were common farm practice in the nineteenth century, generally worked by feel rather than by weighed measurement, and passed along as personal testimony of the kind offered here: "I have known corn, if properly packed, to keep perfectly for two years." Horseradish leaves tucked under the follower board were a widespread crock tradition, credited with keeping the surface clean. Suspicion of canning as less wholesome appears elsewhere in household writing of the period, when commercial tinned goods had a poor reputation for adulteration and spoilage. The bacteriology that would eventually explain why low-acid vegetables need pressure processing was not yet available to domestic cooks.