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Green-Corn Pudding
Grate the corn from the cob, and add to it enough milk to make it rather thin; add butter, salt, pepper and a very little sugar. Bake in a moderately hot oven.
A characteristically terse turn-of-the-century vegetable side: no quantities, no pan size, no time. The proportions are the whole recipe, so start there.
- Working proportionsSix to eight ears of corn yield roughly 3 cups of grated pulp. Add about 1 cup milk, 2 tablespoons butter, 1 teaspoon salt, a few grinds of pepper and no more than a teaspoon of sugar. "Rather thin" means pourable but not watery — it should coat a spoon.
- Grating the corn is the pointSplit the kernels down each row with a knife tip, then scrape the cob with the back of the blade. What you want is the milky pulp and the hulls left behind, which is why grating rather than cutting matters: the starch in the pulp is the only thickener in this version.
- Sweet corn has changedModern supersweet varieties carry far more sugar than the field and sweet corn of 1900. Skip the sugar entirely unless the corn is out of season or tastes flat.
- "Moderately hot oven"Read it as roughly 375-400F. Period books are not consistent about these terms and this one gives no temperatures; the pudding wants enough heat to set the starch without curdling the milk.
- No eggs hereMany green-corn puddings of the period are bound with two or three beaten eggs, which gives a sliceable custard. This one relies on the corn's own starch, so expect a loose, spoonable pudding closer to creamed corn. Adding two eggs will firm it if that is what you want.
- Dish and timeA buttered 8-inch square or 1 1/2-quart dish, 45 to 60 minutes, until the top is lightly browned and the center barely trembles. Stir once at the 20-minute mark to redistribute the pulp, which settles.
- YieldServes six as a side dish. It is best warm; the starch stiffens and dulls on cooling.
"Green corn" is the old American term for corn picked at the milk stage and eaten as a vegetable, as against the dried field corn ground for meal. Puddings of grated green corn appear in American cookbooks through the nineteenth century and are often said to derive from Native practice, the technique of scraping the milky pulp from the cob being traditionally traced to Native cooks. "Pudding" in this period still meant any soft baked or boiled dish, sweet or savory, and the very little sugar is seasoning rather than sweetening. The recipe's brevity reflects its season: it was made in the few weeks of high summer when corn was in the milk, and any cook reading the book would have known what that corn looked like.