Mary Carlisle
CORN PUDDING-SOUTHERN STYLE
6 ears corn 2 eggs 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons sugar 1½ cups milk Grate the corn, beat the eggs with a spoon and mix all the ingredients together. Butter a deep earthen dish and pour in the mixture. Bake over a low flame an hour or more. Serve hot.
Truly yours,
A plain custard held together by fresh corn starch and two eggs, and it lives or dies by the corn. The instruction to "bake over a low flame" is the one line that needs translating.
- "Bake over a low flame"Likely oven or stove language from a period when ranges were not thermostatically controlled and heat was judged by flame or by feel; the recipe itself names no temperature. Treat it as a slow oven -- a modern cook might work around 325F -- for an hour or a little more; the pudding is done when the centre is just set and a knife comes out clean rather than milky.
- Grating the cornGrating rather than cutting is the point of the dish. Split the kernels down the row with a knife tip and scrape the cob with the back of the blade so you get the milky pulp and none of the tough hulls. Six average ears give roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups of pulp; a box grater over a bowl works, but a cut-and-scrape is cleaner.
- Why it "jellies"There is no gelatin here. The set comes from the eggs, with some thickening from the starchy milk in the grated pulp, which is why grating to capture that pulp matters. Cut whole kernels or frozen corn will give you a looser custard with corn in it rather than something sliceable.
- The earthen dishA deep earthenware or stoneware baking dish of around 1 1/2 quarts will hold the mixture; earthenware does heat slowly and evenly, though the recipe does not say why it was chosen. Glass or ceramic is the modern equivalent; avoid thin metal, which will set the edges before the middle moves.
- A water bath helpsThe original does not call for one, but standing the dish in a pan of hot water is insurance against a curdled, weeping edge at this ratio of egg to milk.
- SugarTwo tablespoons is modest by the standards of many later corn puddings; the recipe does not say why. Taste the raw pulp before you commit to it.
- YieldServes four to six as a side dish. It is a supper vegetable, not a dessert, despite the sugar.
Corn pudding belongs to the long line of American dishes built on green corn, the immature ear eaten fresh rather than dried for meal; grating the cob to capture the milk is a technique generally traced to Native practice and long kept in American kitchens. Recipes labelled "Southern style" turn up widely in American household cookery, usually distinguished by their restraint: milk, eggs, a little sugar and salt, and nothing to distract from the corn. The signed sign-off preserved here, "Truly yours," suggests the entry came to the compilers over a signature, in the manner of the celebrity-contribution collections that were a popular fundraising and publicity format; Mary Carlisle was a screen actress of the 1930s.