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Corn Pudding (Take canned corn in the season)
Take canned corn (in the season, green corn scraped from the cob) and add to one can of corn a quart of cold milk, three eggs well beaten, two tablespoonfuls of sugar and one teaspoonful of salt. If not sweet enough, add sugar; if too thick, more milk. Pour this into buttered dishes and bake. It is delicious for tea.
This is a plain baked custard carrying corn, and everything hinges on the egg-to-milk ratio, which the original sets very thin. Read the proportions before you commit.
- The custard is loose as writtenThree eggs to a quart of milk is about half the egg a modern baked custard uses; expect something closer to a soft spoon pudding than a sliceable one. Cutting the milk to a pint, or going up to five or six eggs for the full quart, gives a set that holds a spoon mark.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given, as was usual in recipes of this kind. Bake at 325-350F; anything hotter curdles the egg and weeps liquid into the dish.
- Water bathThe recipe gives no guidance on oven heat. Setting the dishes in a pan of hot water reaching halfway up their sides guards against curdling in a modern oven.
- TimingA single 2-quart dish needs 50-70 minutes; the "buttered dishes" of the original, if small and individual, are done in 25-35. It is set when a knife an inch from the center comes out clean and the very middle still trembles.
- "Green corn"Fresh sweet corn, scraped rather than cut so the milky pulp comes away with the kernels. Four to five ears give the roughly two cups that stand in for one can.
- Canned corn nowModern cans are 15-15.25 oz and often packed with added sugar and salt in the liquid. Drain it, and taste before adding the two tablespoons of sugar and full teaspoon of salt.
- Sweetness and place at the tableTwo tablespoons of sugar to a quart of milk is barely sweet, which suits it to a place beside ham or cold meat rather than as dessert.
- Yield and "for tea"The full quantity serves six to eight. Tea here means the light evening meal, not the beverage course.
Corn pudding belongs to a family of American baked custards that treat sweet corn as a starch rather than a vegetable, and it long predates canning: earlier versions are generally said to rely entirely on green corn scraped from the cob in late summer, which is why this text carries the fresh-corn instruction as a parenthesis. The offhand "take canned corn" is the interesting part. Canned corn was cheap and widely available, corn having been among the earliest American vegetables commercially canned in quantity, and a cook could set a corn pudding on the table in February without apology.