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Sweet Corn, Saute
Heat in a frying pan one tablespoon melted butter, add half pint well-drained sweet corn. Season with half teaspoon salt and a saltspoon white pepper. Toss them well in the pan while cooking for six minutes; then use as directed.
A component preparation rather than a finished dish — the corn is seasoned and dried out in the pan so it can be folded into something else. Two conversions and one judgment call are all it needs.
- Half pint of cornThat is one cup of drained kernels, rather less than a standard 15-oz can once drained, or the yield of two to three ears cut fresh. Canned corn, a common pantry item by 1900, is the likeliest source, though the recipe only says "well-drained" and cooked fresh corn would serve.
- A saltspoonA quarter teaspoon. The saltspoon was a real piece of tableware, the smallest spoon in a Victorian silver service, and it standardised at about that volume in cookbooks of the period.
- Why white pepperLargely appearance: black specks were considered a flaw in pale dishes. Black pepper will do if looks do not matter, though the flavour is not identical.
- "Well-drained" is the hingeWet corn steams instead of sautéing and the six minutes produce a watery mush. Drain in a sieve, then blot with a towel if it still looks damp.
- Six minutesLong enough to drive off residual moisture. The recipe asks for constant tossing and says nothing about colouring the kernels.
- "Use as directed"The original expects you to have arrived here from another recipe — a croquette, a timbale, a garnish for a meat dish, a filling for peppers. On its own it serves two as a side.
- Butter quantityOne tablespoon for a cup of corn is lean by modern habit. A second tablespoon gives better browning and does no harm.
Canned corn was among the earliest commercially successful canned vegetables in the United States and was widespread in home pantries by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, which is why the recipe can simply say "well-drained" — kernels from a tin are already tender. The instruction to "use as directed" marks this as one of the small building-block preparations found in turn-of-the-century professional-style cookbooks, where the reader was expected to be assembling dishes from parts rather than following a single recipe start to finish.