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Green Corn Pudding
To two cups of cooked green corn, cut from the cob (or one can of corn) chopped fine, add two eggs slightly beaten, one teaspoon Fifth Sunday salt, one-eighth teaspoon pepper, one teaspoon sugar, two tablespoons melted butter, and two cups scalded milk. Mix well and turn into a buttered pudding dish; bake until firm in moderate oven.
A plain corn custard, and it behaves like one: the eggs and scalded milk do the setting, the corn only rides along. Treat it as a savory custard rather than a casserole and it will come out tender instead of curdled.
- "Green corn"This means fresh sweet corn at the milk stage, not any green-colored variety. Two cups cut from the cob is roughly three to four medium ears; the canned substitute the recipe allows should be drained first, since the packing liquid will thin the custard.
- "Fifth Sunday salt"The phrase is unexplained in the recipe itself and may be a cross-reference or a printing artifact; treat it as plain salt. Use one teaspoon of ordinary table salt, or a scant three-quarters teaspoon if your salt is coarse-flaked.
- Moderate oven350F. Anything hotter will set the outer edge before the center thickens and leave you with weeping, grainy custard.
- Scalded milkHeating the milk to just below a simmer speeds the set and dissolves the sugar and salt evenly. Add it to the beaten eggs in a slow stream while whisking, or you will scramble them.
- Water bathThe original omits it, but a pudding dish set in a pan of hot water reaching halfway up the sides is the difference between silky and curdled.
- How long, and how to knowExpect 45 to 60 minutes in a 1 1/2-quart dish. It is done when the edges are set and the center still trembles as a single mass; an instant-read thermometer in the middle should show about 175F. It firms further as it cools.
- Chopping the cornChopping fine, or a few pulses in a processor, releases the starchy milk from the kernels and gives the pudding body. Whole kernels left intact will sink and the custard around them will be looser.
- YieldFour to six as a side dish. It is a vegetable course, not a dessert, despite the sugar.
Corn puddings of this kind are among the oldest American adaptations of the English baked custard: the technique is entirely European, the ingredient entirely native, and the pairing shows up in printed cookbooks from the early nineteenth century onward. "Green corn" was the standard market term for sweet corn picked young, when the kernels are still soft and milky, and it was a fleeting summer commodity. The parenthetical permission to use "one can of corn" is the interesting part: canned corn had become cheap, reliable, and respectable enough for a Sunday table, and books like this one routinely paired the seasonal ideal with the pantry shortcut. The odd "Fifth Sunday salt" is harder to account for.