Home › Left-Over Vegetables › Corn Cakes
Corn Cakes
Take equal parts of mashed potato and cooked corn, add pepper, salt, and beaten egg to bind together. Dip the flat cakes in flour and sauté in hot butter or bacon fat, or form into balls, roll in bread-crumbs, in egg, and in crumbs again. Fry in deep fat. A tomato sauce may be served with these (see page 71).
A leftovers formula rather than a fixed recipe: the proportions are the instruction, and the only real variable is how wet your mashed potato is.
- Quantities"Equal parts" is unspecified in the original; read as volume it works out to roughly two cups mashed potato to two cups corn with one beaten egg, which would give around eight cakes.
- Dry the mixtureCold, stiff mashed potato binds; warm or milky potato will slump in the pan. Corn cut from the cob or drained canned kernels both work, but pat them dry first and add the egg only after the mixture is cool.
- Sauté temperatureSaut embacon fat over medium-high heat -- the book says only "hot" -- until a crust forms before the cake is moved. Three to four minutes a side is enough, since the potato and corn are already cooked.
- Deep fryingFor the crumbed balls, fry in hot deep fat only until golden; the interior is already cooked. Chilling the formed balls after the second crumbing helps the coating stay put.
- The double crumbCrumb, then egg, then crumb again, as the recipe directs; the extra layer gives a sturdier shell for a soft, loose interior.
- SeasoningLeftover mashed potato is usually already salted, so taste before adding more. A little grated onion or chopped parsley is in keeping with the book's approach.
- Tomato sauceThe cross-reference points to the book's own tomato sauce on page 71. Any tomato sauce with some acidity serves the same purpose, which is to cut the starch and fat.
The Cook Book of Left Overs belongs to a genre that flourished in American and British kitchens from the 1890s through the two world wars, when domestic economy was taught as a discipline and throwing out cooked food was treated as a small moral failure. Cakes of this kind, bound with egg and either pan-fried or crumbed and deep-fried, are the workhorse of that literature: the same template turns up for fish, rice, hominy, meat hash and every cooked vegetable in the pantry. Corn appears here as sweet corn, fresh in season and canned year-round after the canning industry expanded in the later nineteenth century. The recipe simply offers a choice between the flat sautéed cake and the crumbed fried ball.