Home › Camp Vegs › Indian Green Corn Bread
Indian Green Corn Bread
This is a good way to get rid of ears that are too old and hard to munch off the cob.
Scrape corn from cob, beat it to a paste in squaw fashion, whip in an egg and bake in shallow pan.
A three-sentence camp recipe that assumes a cook who already knows what a corn cake should look like. The essentials it leaves out are the salt, the fat and the oven heat.
- "Green corn" and "too old"Green corn means fresh corn in the milk stage, not unripe or coloured corn. The recipe is aimed at ears that have gone starchy and tough on the plant; the extra starch helps the pulp bind.
- Scraping the cobSplit each kernel row lengthwise with a knife tip, then scrape the cob with the back of the blade to push out the pulp and milk. Cutting whole kernels off instead leaves the hulls in and gives a loose, watery mixture.
- QuantitySix to eight large ears yield roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups of pulp, which is one 8- or 9-inch pan and serves four as a side.
- Beating to a pasteThe pounding described is what releases the starch that holds the cake together. A food processor does it in fifteen seconds; stop while some texture remains, or the result is gluey rather than tender.
- EggsOne egg suits about two cups of pulp. Very starchy late corn may need only that; young, milky corn is looser and takes a second egg plus a spoonful of cornmeal.
- Salt and fat, both omittedAdd about 3/4 teaspoon salt per two cups of pulp, and grease the pan generously with bacon fat or butter — this batter sticks badly. A pool of hot fat in the pan before the batter goes in gives the crust the recipe is after.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Bake at 400-425F for 25-35 minutes, until set in the centre and browned at the edges. In camp, a reflector oven or a covered skillet set in coals with a few coals on the lid would have served.
- What to expectWith no flour or leavening this is closer to a firm corn pudding than to a quick bread. Cut it in wedges in the pan and serve hot; it turns dense and rubbery once cold.
Grating or scraping fresh corn from the cob and cooking the pulp with little more than an egg is a technique with Indigenous North American roots, and later American cookbooks used it under names like green corn bread, corn oysters and corn pudding. Sweet corn's window of tenderness is short — a matter of days on the stalk — so any household or camp with a corn patch faced the problem this recipe addresses: ears gone starchy and chewy that were still perfectly good food once broken down. Outdoor and camping manuals of this period often leaned on such salvage cookery, and their authors sometimes attached vague ethnographic labels to methods they judged primitive, which may account for the phrasing here rather than any specific tribal source.