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Corn Fritters
1 can corn. 1 cup flour. 1 teaspoon baking powder 2 teaspoons salt ¼ teaspoon paprika 2 eggs Chop corn, drain, and add dry ingredients mixed and sifted, then add yolks of eggs beaten until thick, and fold in whites of eggs beaten stiff. Cook in a frying-pan in fresh hot lard. Drain on paper.
A soufflé-style fritter batter rather than a heavy one: the lift comes entirely from beaten egg whites plus a little baking powder, so it has to go into the fat as soon as it is mixed.
- Fold last, fry at onceThe stiff whites begin to weep within minutes of being folded in. Have the fat hot and the pan ready before the whites are beaten, and cook the batter immediately in batches.
- Chopping the cornThe corn is chopped to break the hulls and release the milky interior; the text as it survives does not say whether fresh or canned corn is meant. Drained canned or thawed frozen corn works, but pulse it briefly rather than pureeing it.
- Drain thoroughlyWet corn thins the batter and makes the fritters spread and absorb fat. Press the chopped corn in a sieve or blot it on a towel before it meets the dry ingredients.
- "Fresh hot lard"Lard was a common frying fat of the period; any neutral fat with a high smoke point serves. "Fresh" is the operative word, since reused fat carries over flavours. The recipe specifies a frying-pan, so shallow fat hot enough to brown the batter briskly rather than a deep-fat bath.
- PaprikaThe quantity is a quarter teaspoon. Paprika in American recipes of this period was generally the sweet sort, used for colour and mild warmth, not the smoked or hot varieties now common.
- SaltTwo teaspoons is heavy for a single pan of fritters by current taste. Season toward one teaspoon and correct with a test fritter before frying the rest.
- Draining"Drain on paper" would have meant plain unprinted paper, typically brown paper; a rack set over a tray keeps the underside from steaming soft.
Corn fritters belong to a family of dishes that made use of fresh corn in its brief midsummer season: chowder, pudding, oysters, and fritters. The technique itself is European - a beaten-egg batter, fried, of the sort French cookery calls beignets - applied to a native ingredient, which is a fair description of much of the Boston Cooking-School repertoire. The lightening method here, yolks beaten thick and whites folded in separately, was a common nineteenth-century way to get air into a batter and survived alongside chemical baking powder rather than being replaced by it. "Corn oysters," a near-identical batter dropped in small spoonfuls, appears in American cookbooks from the mid-1800s and is generally traced to the resemblance of the fried edges to a fried oyster.