Matt’s plan for dinner didn’t work out. He asked if I could figure out something to make. Could I? Most assuredly. I love cooking with specialty ingredients, but I also love the challenge of whipping something up with whatever is in the cupboard. Cooking with canned goods and non-perishable staples seems is very much in the ethos of many of my favorite cookbooks. Plus, dinner gains a seasoning from frugal virtue.
Spying a can of corn back behind the boxes of spaghetti (why do we have three half finished boxes of spaghetti/) I immediately thought: Corn Fritters!
I really dislike canned corn except when it’s folded into light, airy batter and deep fried. Then canned corn is perfect, giving a little pop of sweet savory goodness in the pillowy fritter. I don’t think I’ve ever had corn fritters for breakfast, but because we always ate them with pancake syrup, they always had the camping-in-the-living-room-fun-time aura of Breakfast for Dinner. We had them regularly when I was a kid.
Korn Fritters with Honey Butter are a staple of the Anchorage street fair and sporting event culinary scene. No Aces game is complete without a third period order of Korn Fritters, but they are not quite the same as my at-home rendition. Furthermore Fritz, the chef of Nero Wolfe (the fictional detective and gourmand extraordinaire) was known to make corn fritters, although his were usually drizzled with wild thyme honey from Greece.
But of course, the corn fritters I make from the recipe copied from my mother’s Betty Crocker have a flavor all their own. It's made up of the salty richness of deep fried batter, the of the velvety finish of that wooden table with its varnish worn off, my brothers' jokes and sweet sticky pancake syrup. Which is appropriate given how sappy I'm feeling about corn fritters. Maybe tomorrow should be salad night?
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