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Green Corn Pudding
Draw a sharp knife through each row of corn lengthwise, then scrape out the pulp; to one pint of the corn add one quart of milk, three eggs, a little suet, sugar to taste, and a few lumps of butter; stir it occasionally until thick, and bake about two hours.
A baked corn custard, thin by modern standards and long in the oven. The technique on the cob is what makes or breaks it.
- Scrape, do not cutSplitting each row of kernels lengthwise and then scraping releases the milky pulp while leaving the tough hulls on the cob. Cutting kernels off whole gives a grainy pudding with none of the starch that thickens it.
- "Green corn"Nineteenth-century shorthand for fresh sweet corn at the milk stage, as opposed to dried field corn. One pint of scraped pulp takes roughly 6 to 8 ears, depending on size.
- SuetBeef suet was a common household fat of the period. "A little suet" is unquantified; a tablespoon or so of finely chopped suet is a reasonable reading, and butter alone works, since the recipe already calls for "a few lumps" of it.
- Sugar to tasteCorn varieties then were less sweet than modern supersweet hybrids, which may be why the amount is left open. Start at 2 tablespoons for the quart of milk.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A custard of this proportion wants a moderate oven, 325 to 350F; hotter and the eggs curdle and weep before the two hours are up.
- The stirring"Stir it occasionally until thick" is ambiguous: it may describe thickening the mixture over heat before it goes into the oven, or stirring during the early part of baking. Either way, stirring keeps the pulp suspended instead of letting it sink into a layer at the bottom.
- Ratio and donenessA quart of milk to three eggs is a very loose custard by current practice. It sets mostly on corn starch, so judge it done when the centre is just barely trembling rather than firm; check at 75 minutes.
- YieldServes about 8 as a side dish; the mixture comes to roughly 1 3/4 quarts, so use a dish of at least 2 quarts. The sugar notwithstanding, it reads as a vegetable dish rather than a dessert.
Green corn pudding belongs to the brief high-summer weeks when sweet corn was picked, scraped and eaten the same day, before refrigeration and long-distance shipping made corn a year-round item. Scraped-corn puddings appear in American cookery from the eighteenth century onward, and the use of corn at the milk stage is usually credited to Native American practice later taken up in settler kitchens. Beef suet was a common household fat in the period, kept on hand and used where a modern cook would reach for butter.