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Cornfield "Maple Syrup
Soak 18 cobs red corn in 6 quarts of water for 1/2 hour, put on fire and boil 1/2 hour, strain off liquid, add 6 pounds light brown sugar, cook, and skim until right consistency.
An imitation maple syrup built on the faint caramel flavor that boils out of dried corn cobs. The technique is straightforward sugar work; the only real skill is judging when to stop reducing.
- Which cobs"red corn" here most likely means a red-cobbed field or dent corn, stripped of kernels and dried, rather than fresh sweet corn. Dry, clean cobs are the usual source for syrups of this kind. The recipe does not say whether to break the cobs up, though 18 whole cobs will not sit easily under the water.
- Scale of the potSix quarts of water plus 18 cobs wants a large stockpot, on the order of 10 quarts. The cobs float, so a plate or other weight to hold them under the water helps.
- StrainingStrain twice, the second time through a damp cloth or coffee filter. Cob liquid carries fine silt and bits of pith that will cloud the finished syrup and scorch on the pot bottom during reduction.
- Sugar ratioSix pounds of light brown sugar to what remains of the six quarts is roughly a 1:2 sugar-to-liquid ratio by weight, which means a long boil, likely well over an hour.
- "Right consistency"The hinge of the recipe. Syrup of about maple density is usually reckoned at roughly 219F at sea level, or when it sheets from a cold spoon; a thermometer removes some of the guesswork. Under-reduced syrup keeps poorly; carried much further, it risks crystallizing in the jar as it cools.
- SkimmingBrown sugar throws a persistent foam. Skim it off rather than stirring it back in, and keeping the sides of the pot washed down helps prevent stray crystals seeding the batch.
- Yield and keepingBottle hot into clean jars, cool, and refrigerate; a properly reduced syrup keeps for months, an under-reduced one does not.
Corn cob syrup and its cousin corncob jelly belong to a long American habit of extracting flavor from what would otherwise be swept into the stove. Real maple syrup was regional, seasonal and expensive, and cooks well outside the sugar-maple belt made stand-ins from sorghum, from brown sugar, and from cobs left after shelling. The call for red cobs may have had as much to do with color as with flavor, and syrups of this sort are generally presented as an economical substitute rather than a delicacy.