Corn Salad
Drain one can corn and season with mustard and onion juice. Marinate with French Dressing, let stand one hour, then drain. Arrange on a bed of lettuce or chiccory.
A one-line salad from the era when canned corn was a novelty worth showing off. It works, but a few of Farmer's assumptions need translating.
- The canA period can of corn held roughly 2 cups drained; a modern 15-oz can gives about 1 1/2 cups, so allow for the difference.
- Rinse, not just drainTurn-of-the-century canned corn was packed in a starchy, often sweetened liquor. Rinse modern corn under cold water and drain well, or the dressing will slide off.
- Mustard"Mustard" here almost certainly means dry mustard powder rather than prepared condiment. Start with 1/4 teaspoon for two cups of corn and dissolve it into the dressing rather than sprinkling it dry.
- Onion juiceMade by halving an onion and pressing it on a reamer or grating it and squeezing the pulp through cheesecloth. A teaspoon is plenty; it is sharper than chopped onion.
- French DressingIn this book that means oil, vinegar, salt and pepper whisked to a temporary emulsion, with Farmer's own proportions running about two parts oil to one of vinegar. Nothing creamy and nothing sweet.
- The hour of marinatingCorn kernels have a tough skin and take up dressing slowly, so give them the full hour; less than that and the salad tastes of plain corn with a slick on it. Refrigerate while it stands.
- Draining againThe second draining presumably keeps the dressing from pooling and wilting the greens. Do it, and dress the lettuce separately with a spoonful of fresh dressing if you want it seasoned.
- ChiccoryA period spelling of chicory; in American usage of the time it most often meant curly endive or frisee rather than Belgian endive.
Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book appeared in 1896, at the point when commercially canned vegetables were becoming reliable enough for a respectable middle-class table, and canned corn was among the earliest and most widely available. The book is full of small salads like this one, built on the then-fashionable idea that a cold, dressed vegetable on a bed of greens was both refined and hygienic — a notion promoted by the domestic science movement Farmer belonged to. The marinate-and-drain method is a standard of the period, applied to string beans, beets and peas as readily as corn, and it reflects a kitchen culture that treated the can not as a compromise but as a modern convenience worth building recipes around.