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Scalloped Corn
One can corn, ten soda crackers (rolled), one and one-half cups of milk, salt, pepper and piece of butter size of an egg. Mix all together and bake in a quick oven. MRS. ELMER P. MILLER.
A four-ingredient corn pudding of the sort that carried a supper table between garden seasons. The original gives no dish size, no time and no oven number, so the notes below fill in what the cook of 1900 took for granted.
- "A quick oven"Roughly 400-425F. At that heat a shallow dish sets in about 25-30 minutes; a deeper one wants 375-400F for 40-45 minutes so the centre firms before the top browns hard.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Old receipts measured butter by eye against a hen's egg, and the figure is generous by modern taste but correct for this dish.
- One can cornPeriod cans varied, but the usual corn can of the era held somewhere between a pint and a pint and a half; call it about two cups. A modern 15-ounce can drained is a little under that; top up with a second part-can or with frozen kernels if you want the full quantity.
- Soda crackersClose kin to modern saltines. Ten rolled fine give roughly a third to a half cup of crumbs, which is what thickens the milk instead of leaving it soupy.
- Salt with careSaltines and canned corn both carry salt already. Season the milk lightly, taste the mixture before it goes in, and add pepper freely.
- Dish and donenessA buttered 1-quart baking dish. It is done when the centre no longer ripples when the dish is nudged and a knife comes out clean; a few extra crumbs and dots of butter on top give the browned crust the name "scalloped" implies.
- YieldFour modest side servings. It doubles without trouble in a 9-inch square dish, with about ten minutes more in the oven.
"Scalloped" in nineteenth-century American cookery meant anything layered or bound with crumbs and baked, from oysters to potatoes, and the word long outlived whatever its origin: it is traditionally traced to the scallop shells such dishes were once cooked in, though that derivation is contested and the term has also been linked to escalope or collop. Canned sweet corn made this particular version possible: commercial corn canning expanded rapidly in the United States after the Civil War, and by the time community cookbooks like this one were being compiled a can of corn was a reliable pantry staple where fresh ears were available only for a few weeks in late summer. Soda crackers did the work that a modern cook might give to breadcrumbs or cornstarch, and their presence in church-and-society receipts of the period says as much about what sat in the kitchen cupboard as about the dish itself. The attribution to Mrs. Elmer P. Miller is characteristic of the form: a contributor's name beside her plainest dish was part of the point.