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Sweet Corn New England Style
Chop one can of corn or two cups of green corn fine. Add three eggs slightly beaten, one-half tablespoon sugar, one teaspoon salt, one-eighth teaspoon pepper, one tablespoon melted butter and two cups scalded milk. Turn into a buttered baking dish or into individual ramekins, and bake in a slow oven until solid or custardlike. Serve in baking dish.
This is a corn custard, and it behaves like one: gentle heat, no boiling, and a knife test rather than a clock. The custard ratio here is three eggs to two cups of milk, which sets soft.
- Oven temperatureA slow oven is 300-325F. Anything hotter curdles the egg and weeps liquid into the dish. Expect 45 to 60 minutes in a shallow baking dish, 25 to 35 in individual ramekins.
- Use a water bathThe recipe does not call for one, but in a modern oven, set the dish in a roasting pan and pour in boiling water halfway up the sides. It gives a gentler, more even set.
- Scalded milkHeat the milk to about 180F, until it steams and shivers at the edge. Then add it to the beaten eggs in a slow stream while whisking, or you will have sweet corn scrambled eggs. Scalding is generally explained as a precaution with raw milk; in a custard it also shortens the bake.
- "Green corn"Period usage for fresh sweet corn at the milk stage, cut from the cob, not for any green-coloured variety. Two cups is roughly three to four ears. Frozen kernels, thawed and drained, work in its place.
- Canned cornA can of the period was larger than a modern one. Modern cans are 15 oz, about a cup and a half drained; use two if you want the fuller texture, and drain them or the custard will be thin.
- Chopping the cornThe point is to break the kernel skins so the starch and milk disperse through the custard. A few pulses in a food processor does it. Do not purée, or you lose all texture.
- DonenessSet at the edges, still with a slight wobble at the centre, and a knife inserted an inch from the edge comes out clean. It firms as it cools. Baked until "solid" all the way through, it will be rubbery by the time it reaches the table.
- YieldFour to six as a side dish, or six ramekins.
Corn puddings of this kind run right through nineteenth-century American cookery, from Indian pudding at the sweet end to plain baked corn custards served with roast meat. The name "New England style" may have served to set it apart from the Southern spoonbread tradition, which leans on cornmeal and a hotter oven, and from the fried corn cakes and succotash that used the same vegetable. What places this version in a broad period after the rise of canning is the opening line: "one can of corn or two cups of green corn." Commercially canned sweet corn was among the most successful early canned vegetables in the United States, and by the 1910s a cookbook aimed at ordinary households could treat the can as the default and the fresh ear as the alternative.