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Corn Pudding
Grate twelve ears of corn, add a teacup of milk, a teaspoon of sugar, a little salt and butter half the size of an egg. Bake in a moderate oven.
— Miss Anna M. Rossell
A bare-bones green corn pudding of the kind that only worked when the corn was picked that morning. The whole dish depends on the starch and milk in the kernels, so almost everything hinges on how you get the corn off the cob.
- Grate, do not cutGrating means splitting the kernels against a coarse grater or the back of a knife so the milky interior runs out and the tough hulls stay on the cob. Cut whole kernels give a loose, watery pudding that will not set; the starchy pulp is the binder here, since there are no eggs.
- Twelve earsTwelve ears of grated corn will give you something in the region of 3 to 5 cups of pulp, depending on the ears. Modern ears tend to be larger, so eight to ten may be enough.
- A teacup of milkA teacup in this era is not a modern measuring cup; equivalents given at the time range from about half a cup to three-quarters. Add it gradually — the pulp should be thick and pourable, not soupy.
- Butter half the size of an eggAbout 2 tablespoons. Melt it and stir it in, and butter the baking dish as well.
- Moderate ovenUsually taken today as around 350F. In a buttered 1 1/2-quart dish this takes 45 to 60 minutes, until the top is set and lightly browned and a knife near the centre comes out clean. Without eggs it firms rather than puffs.
- The sugarA single teaspoon, barely a seasoning; sweeter modern varieties may need none. Taste the pulp first.
- YieldServes six as a side dish. Best straight from the oven — it stiffens and dulls as it cools.
Grated green corn puddings appear all through nineteenth-century American household cookery, and they are the plainest evidence of how tied such cooking was to the season: sweet corn in the Northeast was picked and used within hours, before its sugars turned to starch, and a pudding like this was a way of eating a glut of it in August and September. The recipe's brevity is typical of a community cookbook contribution: her reader knew what a grated ear looked like, how thick the batter should be, and roughly how long a pudding sits in the oven. Collections of this sort were compiled by church and village committees, and the value was less in instruction than in the credited names: a neighbour's pudding, vouched for by the neighbour.