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Chicken Pudding
Dress and cut one chicken into small pieces, put it into a saucepan or kettle with a little water, season with salt and pepper, let boil until it begins to grow tender, then take out and put into a three-quart pudding dish; have ready one quart green corn grated or cut fine, to which add three eggs beaten light and one pint sweet milk; season with salt and pepper, and pour this mixture over the chicken, dredge thickly with flour, lay on bits of butter and bake until done.-Mrs. A. Wilson, Rye, N. Y.
A corn custard baked over parboiled chicken — essentially a savory pudding that stands or falls on the egg mixture setting without curdling. Keep the oven moderate and pull it while the center still trembles slightly.
- Green cornThis means fresh sweet corn cut or grated from the cob, not dried or canned. A quart takes roughly 6 to 8 large ears; grating gives a milkier, thicker custard than cutting, and the scraped cob milk is worth including.
- Sweet milkPlain whole milk. The word distinguished it from the sour milk or buttermilk that period kitchens also kept on hand, and which would curdle here.
- The chickenRead as a dressed bird of roughly 3 to 4 lb cut into small serving pieces. "Begins to grow tender" may be only 20 to 25 minutes at a low simmer for a young chicken, longer for an older fowl — the baking finishes the job, so stopping short is correct.
- Save the brothThe recipe discards the parboiling liquid by implication. Reduce it and serve it as gravy, or add a few spoonfuls to the corn mixture for depth.
- OvenNo temperature is given; a moderate oven, around 350F, suits it. "Until done" means until the custard is set and lightly browned, roughly 45 to 60 minutes in a 3-quart dish; the center should be set rather than liquid when the dish is tilted (about 165 to 170F).
- Dredge thickly with flourA heavy flour dusting over the wet surface would have formed a crust as the butter melted through it. A thick layer tends to go pasty in a modern oven — a light, even dusting under the butter bits does the same work.
- VesselA three-quart pudding dish is a deep 3-quart baking dish or casserole. The chicken should sit in a single layer with the custard covering it.
- YieldServes six as a main course. It cuts best after resting 10 to 15 minutes, like any custard.
Corn puddings of this kind were a fixture of late-summer American cooking, when "green corn" was briefly abundant and had to be used within a day or two of picking — sweet corn of the period lost its sugar to starch far faster than modern supersweet varieties. Combining it with a parboiled fowl turned two modest ingredients into a single dish that fed a table, a logic at work elsewhere in Buckeye Cookery (1877), a book assembled from contributed recipes by Ohio housekeepers and their correspondents. The attribution to a contributor in Rye, New York, is typical: the compilers gathered submissions well beyond Ohio, and recipes were published over the names of those who sent them in.