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Succotash
Boil 1 dozen ears of corn for 3 minutes. Cut corn from cob, taking very small piece from top of each grain, then press out pulp. Mix this with an equal quantity of nicely cooked lima beans; add Crisco, salt and white pepper to taste; reheat and serve.
St. Leonard's Pudding Line edge of a pudding dish with pastry, and spread 2 tablespoons of jam in the bottom. Blend 4 tablespoons Crisco with 1/2 cup flour, when smooth stir in 1 cup milk, 4 tablespoons sugar, 1 teaspoon vanilla extract, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and 2 yolks of eggs, stir well together and pour over jam, bake 30 minutes. Beat up whites of eggs to a stiff froth, add 1 tablespoon sugar, and arrange roughly on the top. Place in oven until lightly browned.
Two recipes run together here: a scraped-corn succotash and a jam-bottomed baked pudding under meringue. Both come from a Crisco promotional cookbook, which explains the shortening in a vegetable dish.
- The hinge: scrape, do not cutSlicing the tops off each row of kernels and then pressing the cobs with the back of a knife gives you starchy corn milk rather than whole kernels. That milk is what thickens this succotash — skip it and you have buttered corn and beans in a pan.
- Three minutes is enoughThe corn is barely blanched because it finishes cooking during the reheat. Three minutes in boiling water is ample; longer turns the pulp pasty.
- CriscoStill sold, still works, but butter is better here for flavour. The book calls for shortening throughout because it was published to sell it. Two to three tablespoons is enough for a dozen ears' worth of pulp.
- Lima beans"An equal quantity of nicely cooked lima beans" means about equal in volume to the corn pulp — roughly a pound of frozen baby limas, boiled until tender, for a dozen ears. Fresh shelling limas are the original intent if you can find them.
- Oven temperature for the puddingNo temperature is given, as was normal when ranges had no dials. Bake the pudding at 350F for the 30 minutes stated, then return it with the meringue on top at the same heat for 10 to 12 minutes until lightly coloured.
- The pudding batterBlending shortening with flour and then stirring in cold milk is an old shortcut for a thin custard base; it will look loose in the dish and sets as it bakes. Add the milk gradually to avoid lumps, and use only two yolks as written — the whites go on top.
- Pastry"Line edge of a pudding dish with pastry" means a collar of shortcrust around the rim only, not a full lining.
- YieldThe recipe states no yield. The succotash serves six to eight as a side; the pudding, built on 1 cup of milk, is nearer four.
Succotash is one of the oldest continuously cooked dishes in North America, taking its name from a Narragansett word usually given as msickquatash, meaning boiled corn kernels; the pairing of corn with beans came to English colonists from Indigenous cooks and stayed on New England tables for three centuries. The version here is a refined city variant — the kernels are gutted for their milk and the hulls discarded, producing something closer to a creamed corn than the sturdy stewed dish of a farm kitchen. Its appearance in A Calendar of Dinners, a menu book issued by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco after the shortening's 1911 introduction, is the giveaway: recipe after recipe in the volume finds a place for the product, even a vegetable dish that would traditionally have taken butter or salt pork. St. Leonard's Pudding, the second recipe crowded onto the page, belongs to the large family of Victorian and Edwardian jam-and-custard puddings finished with a rough meringue.