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Corn Pudding
1 doz. ears corn 2 cups scalded milk 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon sugar 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons Gold Medal flour 2 eggs Remove the husks from the corn, pick out all the silk; with a sharp knife, cut a thin slice from the kernels; with a dull knife, scrape down the ears. Melt the butter, add the flour and seasonings, combine with milk and corn. Add the beaten eggs last. Pour in a buttered baking dish and bake in a moderate oven for thirty minutes.
A straightforward custard-bound corn pudding, but the corn handling and the oven note both need translating.
- The scraping method is the pointCutting only a thin slice off the kernel tops and then scraping the cob with the back of a knife releases the milky pulp without the tough kernel hulls. That pulp is what thickens the pudding; simply cutting whole kernels off gives a looser, more watery result.
- A moderate ovenRoughly 350 to 375F. Thirty minutes will do for a shallow dish at that heat; a deeper one will want 40 to 50 minutes, until the centre is just set and no longer wobbles as a liquid.
- A dozen earsEars of the period generally ran smaller than today's supersweet hybrids. Twelve ears scraped this way should give several cups of pulp and kernel; with large modern corn, fewer ears will do.
- Frozen cornIf using frozen kernels, thaw and pulse briefly in a food processor to break some of them down, or the pudding will lack body. You cannot recreate cob milk, so expect a slightly leaner texture.
- Scalded milkHeated to just below boiling, until it steams and shows bubbles at the edge. With raw milk this served keeping and safety; with pasteurised milk the practical benefit is that hot milk blends more smoothly into the flour paste.
- The rouxMelt the butter, stir in the flour and cook a minute before adding the hot milk gradually. Add the beaten eggs only after the mixture has cooled somewhat, or they will scramble.
- YieldRoughly six to eight servings; use a 2 quart dish or larger. A water bath is not called for and is not needed at this ratio of eggs to liquid, but it makes for a smoother set if you have one.
Corn pudding descends from the practice of cooking green corn, milked from the cob at the milk stage, which colonial cooks along the eastern seaboard took up from Native American cookery; green corn puddings appear in American cookbooks through the nineteenth century. Its presence in a flour company's promotional cookbook is worth noting: the two tablespoons of Gold Medal flour do real work here, binding the custard, but the recipe is also an advertisement, part of a wider practice of finding a place for the product in dishes that had long existed without it. The dozen ears also mark this as a seasonal, late-summer dish.