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Corn Fritters
Drain well half pint can sweet corn; place it in a bowl, season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper, adding three tablespoons flour, two whole eggs, three tablespoons cold milk, one teaspoon chopped parsley and two saltspoons baking powder. Mix the whole well together with a wooden spoon for two minutes.
Heat in a large frying pan four tablespoons leaf lard, then with a tablespoon take up as much of the preparation as the spoon can hold and drop into the pan, in round shape; repeat the same process with the rest of the preparation and gently fry for three minutes on each side. Lift up with a skimmer, drain on a cloth thoroughly and use as required.
A plain drop-batter fritter that hinges on frying temperature: too cool and the batter drinks fat, too hot and the outside colours before the egg sets. Aim for fat at about 350-360F and expect three minutes a side.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So the seasoning is 1/2 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp white pepper and 1/2 tsp baking powder.
- Half pint can sweet cornAn eight-ounce can, about one cup drained; a modern small (roughly 8 to 9 ounce) can is the nearer match, not a 15-ounce one. Drain it hard and blot it; wet kernels loosen the batter and the fritters spread.
- Leaf lardThe rendered fat from around the pig's kidneys, prized for its neutral flavour. Ordinary lard, shortening or a refined vegetable oil all work; butter alone will brown too fast at this temperature.
- Batter consistencyThree tablespoons flour to two eggs and three tablespoons milk gives a loose batter held together mostly by egg. It should mound on the spoon rather than pour. If it runs, add flour a teaspoon at a time.
- Fat depthFour tablespoons in a large pan is shallow frying, not deep. Keep the fritters small so they cook through in the stated time, and top up the fat between batches.
- Draining"Drain on a cloth" means a clean kitchen towel; paper towel or a rack over a tray does the same job. Do not stack them or the crust softens.
- YieldNot stated; on these quantities expect roughly ten to a dozen tablespoon-sized fritters, a side dish for three or four. They are best within minutes of frying.
Corn fritters belong to the long American tradition of using maize in wheat-flour batters, and by the time this book was compiled the canned kernel had made the dish a year-round one rather than a late-summer treat. Commercial canned sweet corn was widely available in the United States from the second half of the nineteenth century, and its appearance here — specified by can size rather than by ears — places the recipe firmly in the canned-goods era. The parsley and white pepper, and the instruction to lift the fritters with a skimmer and drain them on a cloth, read as the habits of professional hotel cookery. Fritters of this kind were commonly served alongside fried chicken or ham as well as on their own. Leaf lard, called for by name, was a common frying fat of the period, before vegetable shortenings became widespread in the following decades.