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Corn Oysters

Corn fritters are small fried cakes made from grated green corn, egg, flour, butter, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and wheat match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 465 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells green, grassy. The science ↓

Corn Oysters

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Grate the corn while it is green and tender into a deep dish.

  2. Beat the egg whites and yolk separately, then add them to the corn.

  3. Mix in the wheat flour, butter, salt, and pepper.

Fry

  1. Heat butter in a skillet, then drop spoonfuls of the mixture into the hot butter.

  2. Fry until golden brown on both sides.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Corn + wheattop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together465 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  2. Corn + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Wheat + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Corn + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Corn
Forms the bulk of the fritter, supplying sweetness and moisture to the batter.
Egg
Binds the batter together and helps the fritters set as they cook.
Wheat flour
Provides starch that thickens the batter so it holds its shape in the pan.
Butter
Adds fat for frying, promoting browning and a rich flavour.

The step that matters

Frying in hot butter. If the butter is not hot enough, the spoonfuls soak up fat and turn greasy instead of crisping. Hot fat sets the outside quickly and drives browning, so the fritters stay tender inside.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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