No. 2731

Corn Cut Up, Succotash and Corn Pancakes

Mais Coupe, "Succotash," et Crepes de Mais

Cut-up Corn.—Boil the corn without the leaves the same as for on the cob (No. 2730); split the grains with a knife through the center their entire length; press down forcibly with the back of a knife to extract all the inside parts without the skin; season in a pan with salt, pepper and fresh butter; toss well, and serve very hot in a vegetable dish,

Succotash.—Use corn that has been cut the same as in the preceding paragraph, having as much lima beans or string beans. Saute both corn and beans together in butter, adding salt and pepper. The succotash can be thickened with a little veloute sauce (No. 415), or bechamel sauce (No. 409).

Corn Pancakes.—The same preparation as for ordinary unsweetened pancakes, mixing in as much cut-up and chopped corn. Make pancakes a quarter of an inch thick; color well, and serve them very hot.

← No. 2730 Corn on the Cob-Boiled Tomatoes, Corn & Garden Vegetables No. 2732 Cucumbers Fried, Breaded English Style and F →

For the Modern Kitchen

Three short preparations built on one technique: Ranhofer's corn is scored and scraped so the tough hulls stay behind. Get that step right and the rest follows.

The hinge: split and scrapeRun a knife down the center of each row of kernels, then press the pulp out with the back of the blade so the skins remain on the cob. This is what separates the dish from ordinary cut corn, which stays chewy. Six to eight ears gives roughly 2 to 3 cups of pulp.
Boiling first is optionalThe recipe sends you to No. 2730 and has you boil the ears whole before scraping. Modern sweet corn is bred for tenderness and high sugar; scraping raw ears and cooking the pulp in butter for three or four minutes gives a fresher result. If you do boil first, the pan stage is only long enough to heat through.
"Fresh butter"Nineteenth-century butter was often salted heavily for keeping, so fresh meant unsalted and recently churned. Use unsalted butter and season separately, as written.
Lima beans for succotashFresh shell limas were a summer market item and are now hard to find; frozen baby limas are the closest stand-in and want cooking through before they meet the corn. Equal volumes of beans and corn pulp is what "as much" means here.
The sauce cross-referencesVeloute (No. 415) is a light stock-based sauce, bechamel (No. 409) a milk one. Either is used here only as a binder "a little" means a few tablespoons, enough to coat, not to make creamed corn.
Corn pancakes, quantities"Ordinary unsweetened pancakes" in The Epicurean means a thin flour-egg-milk batter, closer to a crepe base than an American breakfast pancake. "As much" chopped corn again means an equal volume to the batter, giving a corn-heavy mixture that needs a well-buttered pan.
"Color well"Cook the quarter-inch cakes over medium-high heat until they take on real brown color on both sides. Pale corn cakes taste raw and starchy; the browning is the point.
YieldScraped corn from six ears serves four as a vegetable, or four to six as succotash once the beans are added. The recipe gives no batter quantities; a working batter of about three eggs and a cup of flour, plus the corn, makes about a dozen small cakes.

A Little History

Succotash comes from the Narragansett msickquatash, a word for boiled whole kernels, and the corn-and-bean pairing is long associated with the northeastern woodlands, adopted early and permanently by English colonists. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's for over thirty years, put it in The Epicurean (1894) alongside the French vegetable canon and gave it the treatment he gave everything else: a French heading, a cross-reference to a mother sauce, and a technique borrowed from restaurant practice. Scraping the pulp from the hulls turns a rustic dish into something that behaves like a puree and can be bound with veloute. The corn pancakes at the end are the same pulp pushed toward the French crepe, which is roughly how the whole book operates - American ingredients, kitchen-brigade method.