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Corn Cakes
Mix thoroughly together one quart of Indian corn removed from the ear with a coarse grater, two teacupfuls of new milk, one teacupful of flour, and two well-beaten eggs; season the batter with salt and pepper, and bake in cakes upon a griddle. The corn should be in a condition most suitable for roasting or boiling. This is a very nice dish.
A savory fresh-corn griddle cake with no leavening and very little flour — closer to a corn fritter or a Southern corn oyster than to a pancake. Everything depends on the corn.
- The hinge: grate, don't cutGrating on a coarse grater ruptures the kernels and releases the milky starch that binds the batter; kernels sliced off whole will not hold the cakes together. Stand the ear over a bowl and grate down, then scrape the cob with the back of a knife to get the rest.
- How much cornA quart of grated corn is roughly 6 to 8 medium ears of sweet corn. "In a condition most suitable for roasting or boiling" means young milk-stage corn. Modern varieties may give a looser batter than the recipe assumes, so add flour by the spoonful if it will not hold shape.
- TeacupfulsTeacup measures were not standardised; a teacup in this period is usually reckoned at somewhere between 4 and 6 fluid ounces. Taking the larger figure, two teacupfuls of milk is about 1 1/2 cups and one of flour about 3/4 cup. If the batter runs on the griddle, hold back some of the milk.
- New milk"New milk" is fresh whole milk straight from the cow, not skimmed and not soured. Whole milk is the right substitute; the small amount of cream in it matters here.
- No leaveningThere is no baking powder or soda, so these will be dense and custardy rather than fluffy. Spread them thin — three inches across and no more than about a quarter inch thick — or the centers stay raw.
- Griddle heat and fatModerate heat -- roughly 350F if you can measure it -- with a film of butter or bacon fat. Too hot and the exterior sets before the corn starch cooks through; give each side three to four minutes and do not press them down.
- Yield and servingA generous batch -- well over a dozen small cakes, enough for six or more as a side dish. Savory, not sweet: they belong beside ham, fried chicken or roast birds, though sour cream works well.
"Indian corn" is simply maize — the qualifier survived in American cookbooks long after there was any real chance of confusion with English "corn," meaning wheat or grain in general. Grated green-corn cakes, sometimes called corn oysters, were a fixture of late-summer American cooking through the nineteenth century, when sweet corn was strictly seasonal and had to be used within a day or two of picking; the technique of grating rather than cutting the ear appears in household books decades before Oscar Tschirky's, and he reproduces it here in a plain, unfussy register. The closing line, "This is a very nice dish," is characteristic of the compilation: much of the volume reads as recipes gathered and passed along rather than composed.