Corn Oysters: Grand Parents, disasters, and tea cups

Our purchases this week demonstrate how this season partakes of several times and places.  It's now too hot in the Davis area for peas and blueberries, but farmers  from cooler parts of the state — nearer the ocean or nearer the mountains — are still bringing them to the market.  Peaches, squash, tomatoes and sweet corn are plentiful, and we're starting to get the eggplants that (along with the peppers that have not yet arrived) are for us the very symbols or figures of high summer. And yet, among all this, the first grapes of the season (from Sheletewitz Family Farms) are already hinting that fall is not far behind.  

For D., who grew up in the Midwest, corn was one of the first vegetables that registered as “seasonal.”  Her father’s brother, an early foodie, grew corn in their tiny Chicago backyard.  A neighbor who grew corn and tomatoes next door touted them as superior to anything available in stores.  And corn was the one thing you’d find on Illinois roadside stands.  We chose the yellow corn from Busalacchi Farms as a nod to the corn of a midwestern youth.

While our shopping and cooking are grounded in this place and this season, we are also unstuck in time, collaborating with the ideas, wisdom, and practitioners we encounter in books and haunted, in the best sense, by all of those we’ve cooked with and for, as well as ancestors we know only through stories. This week we tried a recipe that was inspired both by this moment—and the fleeting treat of fresh corn—and by two of our great grandmothers.  

One of the rarest cookbooks in the Huntington Library’s collection is a slim pamphlet published after the San Francisco Earthquake in 1906.  It is called The Refugees' Cook Book:  Compiled by One of Them, Hattie P. Bowman, and it offers 50 recipes for 50 cents. As its Preface explains, "This little book of recipes has been compiled for the benefit of those who have lost their cook books in our great disaster."  

Displaced victims of the SF earthquake, in front of a temporary tent shelter (from Wikipedia Commons)

One of those may have been S.'s great great grandmother, whose very name is now unknown to us.  Born in Ireland, she had reportedly been brought to San Francisco from her second home in Virginia City, Nevada by her grand-daughter Ellen, S.'s grandmother.  By some accounts, she smoked a corncob pipe, to the shame of her family, and used to eat a baked potato for lunch every day.  According to another old family story that S. has never been able to verify, she perished in the quake and fire of 1906 and was buried in one of several mass graves for the estimated 3000 victims. 

One might not imagine that the first thing one would think of in the wake of such a monumental disaster would be lost cookbooks, but Miss Bowman rose to the occasion as she understood it, and her book provides a fascinating glimpse into what was available in the ruins of San Francisco.  We find recipes for vegetable salads, the ingredients kept cold "in an ice chest,” as well as lots of oysters, crab, and clams, as well as, surprisingly, a recipe for scallop of veal.  On the last page, instructions for a “refugee filter” (using cotton batting and pulverized charcoal) for purifying water and a trick for clearing your tent of flies (burning cayenne pepper) return the reader to the grim circumstances from which some of the more unlikely recipes might distract us.

The recipe we chose to make first is for “corn oysters,” a kind of hushpuppy or corn cake made with fresh corn instead of cornmeal. 

Here is the recipe in full:  "Grate the young corn into a dish--to one pint add one egg well beaten, one small teacup of flour, one cup of cream, teaspoon of salt, drop into a hot buttered pan a teaspoonful at a time and brown well."

We chose to use the teacup of another Irish great grandmother.  This one came to Chicago at eleven years old and, to her horror, at first resided in the “Home of the Friendless,” whose name she took as a lasting affront.  She eventually got a job as a stenographer at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, where she met her husband, a telegrapher.  In time, she acquired the set of Haviland china that represented, for her, that she had arrived at prosperous gentility.  Despite that china, however, she never quite achieved a Victorian ideal of domestic femininity.  No angel in the house, she.  For one thing, she was what D's mother Mary describes as "the world's worst cook," someone who, among other things, "brewed tea that would take the skin off your feet."  At her husband’s graveside, she is said to have pronounced, “Well Joe, you were a pal in your day, and now goodbye.”  Laura’s tea cups look fragile but they have proved as tough as she, surviving a century and travelling to California to be pressed into service in this recipe.

We weighed the amount of flour the teacup held—4.35 ounces, or a little over half a cup.  We used the same teacup to measure the cream.  

So we combined in a bowl:

2 cups corn kernels (we gave up on the grater, cut these off with a knife, and briefly pureed them in a food processor but didn’t try to get them too fine)

1 teacup (or generous half cup) white flour

1 teacup (or ¾ cup) cream

1 teaspoon salt

1 beaten egg

We then dropped generous teaspoonsful of the batter onto a buttered cast iron skillet over medium high heat (because they’d be easier to turn with a metal spatula and those refugees didn’t have teflon). They spread out and, as a result, resemble oysters not at all.  But they were light as a feather, despite having no leavening, and delicately sweet from the corn.

Although we made these as a lark, we were astonished by how delicious they were.  We served them with grilled skirt steak and a salad of tomatoes and corn — after a toast to the comic or tragic memory of all those who are no longer here, especially to what Milton wittily calls our "Grand Parents."