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Corn Drop Cakes
2 cups grated corn. 2 eggs or 4 yolks, beaten. 1/4 cup flour. 1 scant teaspoon baking powder. 1 tablespoon melted butter. Season with salt. Beat eggs. Add corn. Sift baking powder with flour and fold into the mixture. Add butter and drop by spoonfuls into hot fat and brown.
A fresh-corn fritter reduced to its essentials: corn, egg, just enough flour to bind. The batter is looser than most fritter batters, so the frying matters more than the mixing.
- "Grated corn" means scraped earsSplit the kernels down the row with a knife tip, then scrape the cob with the back of the blade to release the milky pulp. That starchy liquid is what holds these together; whole kernels cut off cleanly will not bind the same way. Two cups is roughly four to six medium ears.
- Frozen and canned cornFrozen kernels, thawed and pulsed briefly in a food processor, are the closest stand-in. Canned corn is wetter and sweeter; drain it well and expect to add another spoonful of flour.
- The eggsTwo whole eggs give a lighter, more open cake; four yolks give a richer, denser one that browns faster. The recipe offers them as equal alternatives, and four yolks would suit a kitchen with whites already spoken for.
- Fat and temperature'Hot fat' is not specified further; either a shallow pan of neutral oil or clarified butter or a deeper pot will work. Aim for fat hot enough to set the batter on contact, in the region of 365-375F. Cooler than that and the loose batter spreads and soaks; hotter and the exterior colors before the egg sets.
- Drop smallA rounded tablespoon per cake. Larger spoonfuls stay wet in the middle because there is so little flour to set the interior. About two minutes a side.
- SaltHalf a teaspoon for the full batch. Modern supersweet hybrids are sweeter than the sweet-corn varieties available in Mrs. Wilson's day, so a little more salt may be wanted to balance them.
- Yield and servingTwelve to sixteen small cakes, enough for four as a side. They belong beside meat as a savory accompaniment, not as a sweet.
Corn fritters in this style have a long history in American cooking with green corn, and the technique of scraping the cob rather than cutting the kernels whole is a long-standing kitchen practice for extracting the starchy "milk" that binds the batter. Mary A. Wilson wrote during and just after the First World War, when the U.S. Food Administration was pressing households to lean on corn and spare wheat, and a fritter using two cups of corn to a quarter cup of flour fits that thinking neatly, whether or not it was written with the campaign in mind.