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Fried Corn
3 cups corn. 1 tablespoon crisco or butter.
Cut corn and scrape the pulp. Put drippings in spider. When hot add corn. Stir well and cook twenty minutes. Season with salt and pepper and serve in baking dish while warm. A little sugar added to corn helps the taste.
A three-line recipe that depends almost entirely on one step the text passes over quickly: scraping the cobs. Get that right and the dish thickens itself.
- Cut and scrapeStand each ear in a bowl, slice off the kernel tops, then run the back of the knife down the cob to press out the milky pulp. That starch is what binds the dish; kernels cut off whole and dumped in a pan fry rather than cream.
- SpiderAn old name for a cast-iron skillet, originally one with legs for hearth cooking. Any heavy skillet works, and cast iron is still the right choice here for even heat.
- How much cornThree cups of cut kernels plus pulp is roughly four to six medium ears, depending on size. Serves four as a side.
- FatOne tablespoon for three cups is thin coverage. Butter alone will brown before twenty minutes are up, so use a well-seasoned pan and keep the heat moderate, or add a second spoonful. Note that the recipe says Crisco or butter, then calls for drippings in the pan; bacon fat is entirely in keeping with the dish.
- The twenty minutesThat timing suits a slow, occasional-stir cook over low to moderate heat, where the milk reduces and the bottom catches slightly. Over high heat, corn is done in eight to ten minutes and will scorch well before twenty. Judge by the corn thickening and losing its raw starchy taste.
- CriscoHydrogenated vegetable shortening was still a relatively new presence in American kitchens when this book was written, which is likely why it appears here alongside butter. Modern Crisco has been reformulated and contributes little flavour; butter or bacon fat gives a better result.
- SugarSensible advice for late-season or storage corn, less so for sweet corn picked the same day. Add a scant teaspoon at the end and taste before adding more.
- ServingThe instruction to serve in a baking dish most likely means a warmed serving dish rather than a second trip to the oven, though the text does not say.
Fried corn, sometimes called fried creamed corn or skillet corn, belongs to a long American tradition of cooking fresh corn in its own milk rather than in cream or a white sauce, and is most strongly associated with Southern and Midwestern home cooking, where the scraped cob does the thickening. Mary A. Wilson's cookbook comes out of the period around the First World War; she is generally said to have written widely for newspapers and to have worked in the orbit of federal food-conservation campaigns, and the book has a habit of naming a branded shortening alongside butter and of treating a single tablespoon of fat as sufficient. The word spider for a frying pan is the giveaway of an older kitchen still: it named the three-legged pans that stood over hearth coals, and stuck to the flat-bottomed stove skillets that replaced them.