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Corn Oysters
Grate raw corn from cobs. To one cup pulp add one wellbeaten egg, one-fourth cup flour, and season highly with salt and pepper. Drop by spoonfuls and fry in deep fat, or cook on a hot, well-greased griddle. They should be made about the size of large oysters. 1 can corn 1 cup flour
A two-line batter that depends almost entirely on the corn itself, so the choice of corn and the way you get it off the cob decide the result.
- Grating, not cuttingGrating (on a grater, or by scoring each row and scraping the cob) releases the milky pulp and leaves the tough hulls behind. That pulp is what binds the batter; kernels used whole give a looser mixture that holds together less readily.
- Corn to useFresh sweet corn at the milk stage, when a pressed kernel squirts. Modern supersweet varieties are sweeter than the garden corn of the period; if the pulp looks loose, add flour a spoonful at a time rather than following the quarter-cup blindly.
- That trailing line'1 can corn 1 cup flour' appears to be a canned-corn variant printed as a stub, with no egg or seasoning given. It is probably best read as a proportion for drained, chopped canned corn, carrying over the egg and seasoning from the main method; it is not a second complete recipe.
- Deep fat temperaturePeriod books judged fat by how fast a bread cube browned, roughly the mid-300s Fahrenheit. Too cool and the batter drinks fat; too hot and the outside colors before the corn inside loses its raw starchy taste.
- Size and timing"About the size of large oysters" means a rounded tablespoon, roughly two inches across. In deep fat that is two to three minutes with one turn; on a greased griddle, three minutes a side over medium heat.
- Season highly, and mean itCorn pulp mutes salt badly. The instruction is not a flourish -- taste a small test cake and correct before frying the batch.
- No leaveningThere is no baking powder here; the egg and the fat do the lifting. The cakes are meant to be dense and custardy in the middle rather than puffed. Note that the recipe's own oyster comparison is about size, not texture.
- YieldOne cup of pulp gives about ten to twelve cakes -- a vegetable side for three or four, or two servings if they are the main event with bacon.
Corn oysters belong to a family of American dishes named for what they imitate rather than what they contain, alongside mock turtle soup and the various "mock oyster" preparations made from salsify, which was itself commonly called the oyster plant. What the name points to is not settled: green corn pulp, bound with egg and fried until the edges frill, has been likened to oysters both for its soft slippery center and simply for the size and shape of the finished fritter. Recipes under this name circulate in American cookbooks well before Fannie Farmer, and they made practical sense in inland households where oysters were an expensive shipped luxury and sweet corn was a few weeks of glut.