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Corn Dumplings
Make a good biscuit dough, roll thin, cut in rounds. On each put I spoonful of seasoned corn pulp, draw and pinch the edges together and steam twenty minutes. Serve with chicken fricassee.
Corn, Tomatoes and Onions Thinly slice white onions and let stand in salt water for half an hour, then drain. Take an equal quantity of sliced tomatoes and twice as much corn cut from the cob. Put in layers in a buttered deep dish, seasoning well with salt and pepper. Bake in a moderate oven, covered, for an hour, then uncover and brown.
Corn Entrée Score and scrape i dozen raw ears, steam the pulp twenty minutes. Put 1 pound of raw chopped beef in a saucepan with 2 heaping tablespoonfuls of butter; heat slowly and stir until the juices are drawn out. Press out every drop of juice, using a small meat press if possible. Return the juice to the fire, season with salt, pepper, a suspicion of mace and thyme.
Stir in a little flour and water paste to make slightly thicker than cream-the exact quantity depending upon the amount of meat juice. Butter a baking dish, put in it the corn and over it pour the gravy. Over all put a layer of grated Swiss cheese and bake in a hot oven until well browned.
Three corn dishes run together on this page; all three assume fresh corn scraped from the cob rather than kernels cut whole. The dumplings themselves are a filled biscuit round, steamed rather than boiled, so the dough must be sealed properly or the filling washes out.
- Corn pulpScore each row of kernels down the middle with a knife point, then scrape the cob with the back of the blade to press out the milky pulp, leaving the tough hulls behind. Yield varies with the ears. Frozen whole kernels are not a direct substitute, since the point of the method is the milky pulp rather than the kernel itself.
- Seasoning the pulpThe original leaves this to the cook; salt, pepper and a little butter is the obvious minimum. The pulp is quite loose, so cook it down a few minutes first or the dumplings will leak.
- Sealing and steamingRoll the dough about 1/8 inch and cut 3-inch rounds. Dampen the edges before pinching and set the dumplings seam side up in a steamer basket, not touching, over simmering water for the full twenty minutes. Cutting one open is the only reliable test.
- YieldA standard biscuit dough of two cups flour gives about a dozen dumplings, enough for four to six alongside a fricassee.
- Onions in salt waterThe half-hour soak in salted water for the second dish draws out sharpness from raw white onions. Drain well and pat dry, or the layered dish turns soupy.
- Oven temperatures'Moderate' for the corn, tomato and onion casserole is usually taken as somewhere around 350F, covered for the hour, then uncovered until the top colours. A 'hot oven' is generally reckoned at roughly 400-450F, and the entree needs only long enough to brown the cheese, since the pulp has been steamed and the juice already cooked.
- The pressed meat juiceThat step extracts beef juice as a gravy base and discards the meat; it is essentially a thickened beef essence. A fine sieve pressed with the back of a ladle does the work of the meat press. Expect well under a cup of liquid from a pound of beef, so add the flour-and-water paste a little at a time.
- A suspicion of maceRead this as a pinch, well under 1/8 teaspoon. Mace is stronger than nutmeg and dominates a delicate corn dish quickly.
Corn scraped rather than cut is a distinctly American habit, and books of this kind treated a dozen ears of green corn as one of the cheapest substantial foods available in late summer. The dumplings belong to the wider family of steamed filled doughs that appear across nineteenth-century household cookery, made from the same biscuit dough that would otherwise top a stew; serving them with chicken fricassee stretches one modest fowl across a table. The third dish is more revealing of its period: pressing a pound of beef purely for its juice and throwing away the fibre reflects the then-current belief that the nutritive value of meat lay in its expressed "essence," the same thinking behind the commercial beef teas and meat extracts sold in that era.