Corn Fritters
1 cup corn. 1 egg. 1 tablespoon cream or rich milk. 1 teaspoon butter. 1 tablespoon flour.
Mix all together and fry in hot fat.
A bare-bones formula of the kind Mrs. Wilson often printed: it assumes the cook already knows what a fritter should look like coming off the spoon. A few gaps are worth filling before you start.
- What kind of cornThe recipe means cooked or canned kernels, or fresh corn cut and scraped from the cob so the milky pulp comes with it. Drain canned corn well; excess liquid will loosen the batter and make it spit in the fat.
- No salt is listedAdd about 1/4 teaspoon of salt, and pepper if you like. Period recipes frequently left seasoning to the cook's judgment, but corn fritters are flat without it.
- Batter consistencyOne tablespoon of flour to a cup of corn gives a batter that is little more than egg-bound kernels. That is the hinge of the dish: it should just hold together on the spoon. If it runs off freely, add flour a teaspoon at a time rather than by the spoonful.
- "Hot fat" means 365-375F"Hot fat" -- the recipe gives no temperature. A modern frying range of roughly 365-375F suits them: cooler and the fritters absorb grease; much hotter and the outside colors before the egg sets. Use about an inch of fat for shallow frying, or a deeper pan if you want them to puff and turn themselves.
- The butterMelt the teaspoon of butter before mixing so it disperses rather than sitting in one lump. Cold butter in this small a quantity of batter will not blend.
- Cooking timeTwo to three minutes total, turning once when the edges set and brown. They are done when the center is no longer wet-looking; a fritter this small cooks through quickly.
- YieldRoughly six to eight small fritters, enough for two people. The proportions scale up cleanly if you keep one egg to each cup of corn.
- ServingDrain on paper and serve hot. They were served both as a vegetable alongside dishes like fried chicken or ham and, sweetened, with syrup.
Corn fritters belong to the long American habit of stretching a summer vegetable with egg and a spoonful of flour, and they turn up in printed cookbooks through the nineteenth century under names like corn oysters — traditionally explained as a spoonful of grated green corn that, fried, was thought to resemble a fried oyster in shape and even faintly in taste. Her terseness is characteristic. Writing for newspaper readers in the years around the First World War, when she was associated with government food-conservation campaigns, she favored short formulas that a cook could scan once and carry to the stove, with the assumption that basic technique needed no explaining.