School Maize

School Maize: A project of the Wilmington Education Association 1983 Wilmington, Ohio

The location is a tiny bit of a guess, they do not list the state but the WEA is still an organization in Ohio. June Yewey, with Jill Holl, wrote the introduction and I can find June Yewey in some documents relating to another Ohio-based organization. I cannot imagine June Yewey is that common of a name so I feel pretty confident that this is an Ohio cookbook!

Cover art by Courtney Jones and the proceeds went to to the WEA scholarship fund. The other illustrations in the book seem to have come from children of all ages.

I got this book in a lot on eBay and it inspired me to bid because of the cute hand-drawn corn cover. I had assumed it was just a pun on “School Days” since it was put out by an educational group but no, it is single subject cookbook about corn! I love single subject cookbooks (and have written and contributed to quite a few myself) but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a single subject community cookbook before.

There is a little history of corn in the United States in the front and all of the recipes feature corn.

There is a chapter of children’s corn “creations” from elementary school students which teach us how to cook corn on the cob, make popcorn, soup, and even a bowl of cornflakes.

Nearly all of the recipes are credited and a few reference another source.

The book is fairly short (but longer than you’d think a volunteer-organized corn cookbook would be–just under 100 pages) and stapled together. There are a lot of different corn recipes! I was expecting a lot of corn bread and fritters but it really covered a lot of ground. There is a soup/chowder chapter, desserts and “corn-fections”. There are corn poems! A Finnish dish that calls for liver and raisins!

The recipes were all pretty solid and helpful too! For example the (uncredited) Corn Gumbo gave some garnish suggestions and variations.

I adapted and updated Leslie Holmes’ Pie Plate Corn Bread recipe from this book.