Peach Custard
Equal parts rich sliced peaches, green corn pulp and water. Sweeter to the taste, and bake twenty minutes.
A three-line recipe that assumes a great deal. The custard here is thickened by the starch and milky liquid of scraped fresh corn, not by egg, so the corn has to be handled correctly or there is nothing to set.
- "Green corn pulp"Green corn means fresh sweet corn at the milk stage, not a green variety. Split the kernels down the row with a knife tip and scrape the cob with the back of the blade so you get the starchy liquid rather than whole kernels; that liquid is what thickens the dish.
- "Sweeter to the taste"Most likely a compositor's slip for "sweeten to the taste," though the text as printed is all we have. The recipe gives no quantity; 2 to 4 tablespoons of sugar per pint of mixture is a workable modern starting point, depending on the peaches.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as a wood-fired range offered no way to state one. Around 350F works in a modern oven. Twenty minutes is enough only in a shallow dish; a deeper one will take considerably longer, and it should be baked until it barely wobbles.
- Equal parts by volumeEqual parts -- the recipe does not say whether by volume or by weight; volume is the simpler reading, so measure peaches, corn pulp and water in the same cup. Three cups of each will give roughly six servings; two cups of each will about fill a pie plate.
- The water is doing less than you thinkIt is there to loosen the corn pulp into something pourable. If your corn is very milky, cut the water back or the custard will weep. Substituting milk or cream is a departure from the recipe but produces a firmer set.
- Peaches"Rich" means ripe and full-flavoured. Freestone peaches, peeled, are easiest. Canned peaches in syrup will work but drop the added sugar accordingly.
Corn and peaches ripen together in the Ohio Valley, and this recipe belongs to the few weeks in late summer when both are cheap and abundant at once. Scraped green corn was a standard thickener in nineteenth-century American cooking, turning up in corn oysters, corn puddings and soups; the milky starch released from the cob thickens a mixture. Buckeye Cookery, compiled in Marysville, Ohio, and printed in 1877 -- its origin often traced to a fundraising project for a Methodist parsonage -- is full of recipes written at this length: the contributors were housewives noting down what they already knew for other women who already knew it, which is why the oven heat, the dish size and the yield all go unmentioned. The pairing of a sweetened fruit with a vegetable starch also reflects a period habit of blurring the line between vegetable dish and dessert.