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Corn Pudding To Be Eaten with Meat
Two cups grated corn, one cup milk, one tablespoon sugar, two teaspoons even full of salt, one well beaten egg, a piece of butter the size of an egg, a little pepper. Bake one hour.
A plain corn custard from the era when fresh summer corn was grated rather than cut. The original assumes you know your own oven and your own baking dish, so a few numbers need filling in.
- Grated cornThis means ears of fresh sweet corn split down each row and scraped with the back of a knife, so you get the pulp and milk but leave the tough hulls on the cob. Two cups takes roughly 4 to 6 ears. Whole kernels cut from the cob will work but give a coarser, looser pudding; a brief pulse in a food processor approximates the old texture.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Melt it before it goes in so it disperses rather than sitting on top.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A pudding of this kind belongs in a moderate oven, 350F. Much hotter and the egg curdles at the edges before the centre sets.
- The saltTwo level teaspoons for two cups of corn is heavily salted by current taste, reflecting a dish meant as a savoury side against plain roast or boiled meat. Half that is closer to modern seasoning, and can be adjusted before the egg goes in by tasting the uncooked mixture on a spoon.
- Dish and depthA buttered 1-quart baking dish suits the volume, which comes to roughly three and a half cups. A shallower dish spreads the mixture thin and it may dry at the edges within the hour; a deeper one will likely need longer to set through.
- DonenessAn hour is right for a quart dish, but judge by the centre: it should be just set with a slight wobble, and a knife slid in near the middle should come out clean. Overbaking makes it weep.
- YieldFour to six as a side dish. Warm rather than piping hot shows it best.
Corn pudding belongs to the long American habit of treating green corn, that is, sweet corn caught before the sugars turn to starch, as a vegetable to be extended with eggs and milk. The grating technique is the point of it: scraping the ear releases the starchy liquid inside each kernel, which thickens the custard without any flour. The title's insistence that it be eaten with meat suggests a reader might otherwise have taken a milk-and-egg pudding baked for an hour as a dessert. The single tablespoon of sugar reads as seasoning rather than sweetening.