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Preserved Corn
Scald corn just enough to set the milk, cut from cob, to every four pints of corn add one pint salt, mix thoroughly, pack in jars, with a cloth and weight over corn; when wanted for use put in a stew-pan or kettle, cover with cold water; as soon as it comes to a boil pour off and put on cold again, and repeat until it is fresh enough for taste, then add a very little sugar, sweet cream, or butter, etc., to suit taste. -Mrs. S. M. Guy .
This is dry-salting, the pre-canning method for holding a low-acid vegetable through winter, and it cannot be recommended today. The points below explain where it fails rather than how to repeat it.
- No heat process at any stageCorn is scalded only "enough to set the milk" — a few seconds' blanch that firms the kernels and does nothing to sterilise them or the jar. Nothing in the method ever reaches a temperature that destroys bacterial spores, and corn is a low-acid food that requires pressure processing at 240F to be made shelf-stable.
- The salt is the only barrier, and it is unverifiableOne pint of salt to four pints of cut corn works out at roughly a pound or so of salt to something over two pounds of corn, depending on how coarse the salt was and how the kernels packed down — a heavy cure by any reading. But the kernels release their own liquid at an unpredictable rate, and there is no way in a home kitchen to confirm that the water-phase salt stays high enough throughout the jar. Pockets of diluted brine in an anaerobic, weighted pack are exactly the conditions Clostridium botulinum favours.
- An open crock at unstated temperatureAn open pack at unstated temperature -- The recipe specifies a cloth and a weight, not a seal, and says nothing about where the jar is kept or for how long. Surface mould and yeast growth on such a pack raise the pH of the brine underneath, which undoes what the salt was doing. Packs like this would presumably have gone into a cold cellar, though the recipe does not say so; a modern pantry is not one.
- Freshening throws away the preservativeThe repeated boil-and-drain step exists because the corn is inedibly salty. It also means any judgement about whether the pack was safe has to be made before cooking, by smell and appearance alone — and botulinum toxin gives no reliable warning of either.
- Reading the measuresPints here are volume measures of cut kernels, not weights, and the salt was probably a coarse dairy or barrel salt rather than fine table salt, in which case the same pint measure would carry less sodium than it would today. That ambiguity is part of the problem: the actual cure strength cannot be reconstructed from the text.
- If you want to keep summer cornUse a current tested procedure from a food-safety extension service — freezing after a proper blanch, or pressure canning to published times. Leave the salt crock as a historical document.
Salting was one of the ways American households held vegetables before glass jars and reliable pressure processing arrived: green beans, cabbage and corn all went down in barrels or stone crocks under weighted cloths, and were "freshened" in changes of water at the table end of the process. The Dixie Cook-Book, compiled in the 1880s from the same stock of contributed receipts that produced Buckeye Cookery, prints such methods alongside newer canning instructions, which is a fair picture of a decade in which both coexisted in the same kitchen. The signed attribution to Mrs. S. M. Guy is typical of the book's construction — a community collection in which each method carried the name of the woman who vouched for it, her own cellar and her own palate being the only tests it had passed.