ISSUE 62, RELISH, Part 2: Corn Relish
Corn Relish
The meaning of the term relish has changed over the past two centuries. 200 years ago it mean a dish accompanying another dish that particularly enhanced the flavor of the main course: sautéed mushrooms for a steak, mint sauce for lamb, sauerkraut for roast pork, greens for fried fish. The relish was served with the main dish, but prepared separately. So it was not like the sweet potatoes in possum ‘n taters, which were cooked along with meat. A hundred years ago one could see a shift in the meaning of relish, as it was coming to designate a particular range of accompaniment dishes—ones that incorporated vinegar, sugar, and salt to form a sweet-sour pickle. Relishes differed from other kinds of pickles (Chow-Chow for instance) in that they featured one ingredient above all others; so Southern cookery has a range of relishes identified by their key ingredients: cucumber relish, artichoke relish, pepper relish, tomato relish, pear relish, ginger relish, and corn relish.
Corn relish originally was made with green corn, not sweet corn. Green corn was dent field corn whose kernels were cut off the cob when they reached the milk stage. In the first decades of the twentieth century when the USDA sponsored local women’s canning clubs across the South, corn relish became one of the star creations of home food processors in Georgia. The Atlanta Journal’s test kitchen in summer of 1919 made a particular point of instructing home cooks in the preparation of Corn Relish. Ola Powell’s booklet, Successful Canning and Preserving supplied the recipe for the version of Corn Relish that would become canonical in Georgia Cookery, the one promoted by Mrs. Henrietta Dull in her influential cooking column:
Several things should be said about the recipe: its ingredients read like a composite pickle—with the peppers and cabbage contending with corn kernels for dominance. Yet it is qute unlike composite pickles in the lack of spices in the seasoning. There is no mustard, mace, curry powder, allspire, cayenne, or clove. Celery salt is is the sole flavoring additive beyond salt and sugar. The 1920s was the heyday of celery salt in recipes. It made its way into salads, breads, eggs, and into pickles. It does the heavy lifting in terms of flavor in this recipe. The amount of sugar is a bit much. But we must remember sweet corn was not being used.
What did corn relish accompany? Ham, turkey, and cornbread for the most part. One of the first uses of split avocadoes in the South was to supply an edible basin for corn relish which was spooned into the seed hole.
Over the course of the past century cabbage disappeared for the most part from corn relish. The peppers remained. Sweet corn supplanted green corn. The vinegar was for the most part apple cider or white vinegar in most formulations.