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Chicken and Corn Pudding
3 lb. chicken 1 qt. green corn cut fine 3 eggs 1 pt. sweet milk 1 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon pepper Few grain cayenne Clean, dress and cut the chicken in small pieces; simmer in a covered kettle until it begins to grow tender, remove to a buttered baking dish, seasoning well with salt and pepper. Combine the corn, scalded milk, seasoning and beaten eggs; pour this mixture over the chicken, cover the top with fine buttered bread crumbs and bake in a moderate oven for twenty-five minutes or until set and a delicate brown. Reduce the stock in which the chicken was cooked to a pint, make a gravy and serve with the pudding.
A stewed chicken bound in a corn custard, closer to a savory spoonbread than to what most people now call pudding. The main thing to watch is the custard: it wants gentle heat and more time than the original allows.
- Green cornFresh sweet corn cut from the cob, not dried or field corn. A quart of cut kernels is roughly six to eight medium ears; scraping the cobs afterward with the back of the knife adds the starchy milk that helps the pudding set.
- Sweet milkPlain fresh whole milk, so named to distinguish it from sour milk or buttermilk. Scalding it, as the recipe directs, was routine in custard recipes of the period, and bringing the milk up to temperature helps the custard set evenly.
- Moderate ovenThe recipe gives no temperature; "moderate" is usually read as about 350-375F. Much hotter and the egg-and-milk mixture is liable to curdle and weep at the edges before the center firms.
- The twenty-five minutes is optimisticA quart of corn and a pint of milk in a deep dish will take 40 to 55 minutes at 350F. Judge by the center: it should be set with only a slight tremble, around 170-175F on a thermometer.
- Simmering the chickenA 3 lb bird cut up needs roughly 30 to 40 minutes at a bare simmer to reach the "begins to grow tender" stage. It finishes cooking in the oven, so stopping short is correct, but the meat must still reach 165F in the finished pudding.
- Bones or no bonesThe original leaves the chicken in pieces, bones included. Pulling the meat off in large pieces after simmering makes the pudding far easier to serve and changes little else.
- The gravyReducing the poaching liquid to a pint concentrates it; thicken with a roux of about 2 tablespoons each butter and flour. Taste before salting, since the reduced stock will already carry the seasoning from the pot.
- YieldServes six generously as a main dish; use a 3 quart baking dish, since the corn, milk, eggs and chicken together come to well over two quarts.
Corn pudding in this custard form is an American dish of the corn belt and the mid-Atlantic, built on the brief midsummer window when sweet corn is milky enough to cut from the cob and cook without further sweetening. Combining it with a stewed fowl was thrifty domestic practice: the bird gave both meat and a pint of good stock for gravy, and the corn stretched the portion. Gold Medal Flour's cookbooks were promotional publications from the Washburn-Crosby milling company of Minneapolis, distributed to sell flour, and their poultry chapters reflect the standard middle-class American table of the early twentieth century. The instruction to "clean, dress" the bird, which in early twentieth-century usage commonly meant singeing, drawing and trussing an already-plucked bird, tells you as much about the period as the recipe itself.