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Baked Corn
Cut the grains of one dozen ears of corn down the middle, and scrape. Add one cup boiling milk, one-half cup butter, salt and pepper. Put in a buttered baking dish, dot over small bits of butter and bake in a moderate oven three-quarters of an hour.
— Mrs. Kate Brooks
A plain corn pudding with no eggs and no thickener — the body comes entirely from the starchy pulp scraped off the cobs, which is why the cutting method is the whole recipe.
- Score and scrape, don't cut offRunning the knife down the middle of each row of kernels splits the hulls so the milky interior can be scraped out with the back of the blade, leaving the tough skins on the cob. Kernels cut off whole will give a looser, more watery dish, since the scraped pulp is the only binder here.
- Use field-ripe cornUse riper corn -- The body here depends on starch, which increases as the ear matures. Very sweet modern hybrids bred for eating raw hold their sugar and give less starchy pulp, so the pudding tends to stay loose; older, chewier corn generally works better.
- A dozen earsThat yields roughly 3 to 4 cups of scraped pulp, enough for a 2-quart dish serving six to eight as a side.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350 to 375F. Three-quarters of an hour is about right for a dish 1 1/2 to 2 inches deep; a deeper dish will need longer and should be checked for a set center.
- The butterHalf a cup for a dozen ears is generous by modern habit. A third of a cup will not spoil the dish.
- Boiling milkAdding it hot warms the pulp rather than chilling it, so the dish goes into the oven closer to temperature. Using cold milk may lengthen the bake.
- SeasoningNo amounts are given. Start with a teaspoon of salt for the full batch and taste again after baking.
- SurfaceThe recipe does not say whether to cover it, but the butter dotted over the top implies an exposed surface and a browned skin, which is what distinguishes this from a stovetop creamed corn.
Scraped-corn puddings appear all through nineteenth-century American cookery under names like corn pudding and simply baked corn, and they exist because sweet corn spoils fast: an ear begins converting sugar to starch within hours of picking, so households with a garden row cooked what they could not eat fresh that day. The technique of splitting the kernels and scraping the cob rather than cutting is older than the recipe and is often said to have been the usual instruction in period cookbooks — it captures the starch that acts as the binder, which is why this version needs neither eggs nor flour. Community collections like the Catskill book gathered such receipts under a contributor's name, a practice generally explained by the value lying in local reputation rather than novelty; Mrs. Brooks's corn was presumably known to be good, though that is only a guess, and the recipe assumes a reader who already knew what a corn pudding should look like coming out of the oven.