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Corn Creole
Put 2 cans corn into saucepan with 2 tablespoons chopped green peppers and 1 cup milk, and cook slowly 10 minutes; season with salt and pepper, add 2 tablespoons Crisco and serve. This may be put in baking dish, covered with breadcrumbs, and baked 15 minutes.
A plain creamed-corn supper dish from a Crisco-sponsored menu book, workable as written once the can sizes and the missing oven temperature are pinned down.
- Can sizesThe recipe does not specify a size. Period cans of corn ran around two to two and a half cups, so two cans is somewhere near a quart of kernels and liquid. Three modern 15-ounce cans, or about 4 cups of frozen kernels, are in the same range.
- CriscoThe book was published to promote Crisco, then a novelty. Any neutral shortening works, but 2 tablespoons of butter gives a better result, stirred in at the end as the recipe directs.
- Cook slowly means slowlyMilk and corn starch scorch on the bottom of the pan within a couple of minutes over high heat. Keep it at a bare simmer and stir, or use a heavy pan.
- The peppersTwo tablespoons of raw chopped green pepper may still have some bite after 10 minutes in liquid. Soften them in a little of the fat first if you want them mellow rather than sharp.
- Oven temperature for the baked versionNone is given. 350-375F for 15 minutes will set the crumbs and brown the top; the mixture is already cooked, so this step is only for the crust.
- CrumbsDry crumbs scattered on a wet mixture go pasty. Toss them with a spoonful of melted fat before covering the dish.
- SeasoningCanned corn is bland and often already salted; taste before adding more. A little paprika or cayenne is in keeping with the Creole label.
- YieldAbout six servings as a side dish, or four as the meatless centre of a light supper.
"Creole" in American cookbooks of this period often meant something less specific than New Orleans cooking; it frequently functioned as shorthand for the presence of green pepper, and sometimes tomato and onion, in an otherwise plain dish. This corn appears in one of the volumes issued to demonstrate the new hydrogenated vegetable shortening at a time when cooks had to be persuaded it could stand in for butter and lard, which is why a two-tablespoon dab of it is written into a recipe that hardly needs fat at all.