Home › Dessert › Pop Corn Pudding
Pop Corn Pudding
Soak two quarts of freshly popped corn in three pints sweet milk over night. When ready to bake add three well beaten eggs, a little salt, and sugar to taste. Bake like a custard.
A soaked-corn custard of the sort that turned a bowl of leftover popcorn into a baked dessert. The soaking is the whole point: the corn swells and softens into something closer to a bread pudding than to popcorn.
- The hinge: an overnight soakTwo quarts of popped corn to three pints of milk looks absurd until the corn collapses. Leave it covered in the refrigerator overnight, not on the counter, and stir once so the top layer is wetted through.
- Use plain popcornAir-popped or dry-skillet corn with no salt, butter, or oil. Microwave bags carry butter flavouring and heavy salt that will fight the custard, and coated or caramel corn is useless here.
- Sweet milkNineteenth-century shorthand for fresh unsoured whole milk, as opposed to buttermilk or clabber. Whole milk is the right substitute; three pints is six cups.
- The egg ratio is thinThree eggs to six cups of milk is far below the usual custard proportion of about one egg per cup. The soaked corn absorbs a great deal of the liquid and provides body, but the result will be soft and spoonable rather than sliceable. Two or three extra eggs give a firmer set if that is what you want.
- "Bake like a custard"In modern terms that is usually taken as 325-350F in a buttered dish, ideally set in a pan of hot water, until the centre is just barely wobbly; expect roughly 50 to 70 minutes for this volume. A knife an inch from the centre should come out clean; carryover heat finishes the middle.
- Sugar to tasteAround 1/2 to 2/3 cup for this quantity of milk reads as a dessert without being cloying. A teaspoon of vanilla and a grating of nutmeg are period-appropriate and improve it considerably.
- YieldFills a 2 1/2 to 3 quart dish and serves eight. Good warm, better cold the next day, when the corn has settled further.
Popcorn was a cheap and widely available American commodity in the nineteenth century, popped at home over the fire and, by the later part of the century, sold by street vendors long before it belonged to the cinema. Cookbooks of the period do put it to domestic use rather than treating it purely as a curiosity: it appears in balls, in candy, occasionally as a garnish for soup in place of croutons, and here in a custard. The technique is the same one behind bread pudding and its many cousins - a stale or dry starch swelled overnight in milk, then bound with egg and baked - a family of dishes that made use of what would otherwise be thrown away.