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Dessert

Corn Oysters

Corn Oysters are fried corn fritters made with grated corn, eggs, flour, salt, pepper, and lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,324 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Corn Oysters

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Grate the corn and scrape it from the ears.

  2. Season the grated corn with salt and pepper.

  3. Add 1 cup of sifted flour to the corn, mixing to create a thin batter.

  4. Stir in the 5 well-beaten eggs.

Fry

  1. Fry spoonfuls of the mixture in hot lard until they puff up like oysters.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Corn + eggtop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,484 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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
Provides the bulk, sweetness and moisture of the batter.
Eggs
Bind the batter and set as they cook, helping the fritters hold their puffed shape.
Flour
Thickens the corn into a batter and gives the fritters structure as they cook.

The step that matters

Frying in hot lard. The fat must be hot enough to set the outside quickly. The moisture in the batter turns to steam, which makes the fritters puff. If the lard is cool, the batter soaks up grease and the fritters turn heavy and greasy.

“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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