Corn Pudding
1 pint milk. 3 eggs, whites and yolks beaten separately. 3 tablespoonfuls melted butter. 1 dessertspoonful white sugar. 1 heaping teaspoonful cornstarch or flour. 1 teaspoonful salt. 6 ears of corn.
With a sharp knife, slit each row of corn in the centre. Then shave in thinnest slices. Add the corn to the yolks of the eggs, next the butter, cornstarch, sugar, and salt, then the milk, gradually, and last of all the whites. Bake in a hot oven. As soon as a light brown on top, cover with a buttered paper. Grate cracker or bread crumbs over it and serve.--Mrs. S. T. Corn Pudding.
One dozen large ears corn. Cut off the top of the grain, scrape with a knife, so as to get the heart of the grain without the husk. Season with a teacup of cream, a large tablespoonful butter, salt and pepper to the taste. Bake in a dish.--Mrs. Dr. E.
Two versions from two contributors: a custard-bound pudding and a plain scraped-corn dish with cream. Both depend entirely on the corn being scraped rather than cut, which is the point of the knife work described.
- Slit and scrape, don't cutSlit and shave, don't cut -- Running the knife down the centre of each row before shaving the tops off breaks the hulls and releases the starchy "milk"; Mrs. Dr. E.'s version goes further and scrapes the cob outright. That milk is what thickens the pudding; kernels cut off whole give a wetter result with chewy skins.
- Corn quantitySix medium ears yield roughly 3 cups of scraped corn and milk; a dozen large ears in the second version give about 6 to 7 cups. Modern sweet corn varieties are generally sweeter than those available in the 1870s, so the dessertspoonful of sugar (2 teaspoons) can be dropped if you like.
- Dessertspoonful and teacupA dessertspoonful is 2 teaspoons. The teacup of cream in Mrs. Dr. E.'s version is about 6 fl oz, not a modern 8-oz measuring cup.
- "A hot oven"The book gives no temperatures; "hot" was conventionally understood as something in the region of 400-450F. A custard of milk and eggs will curdle and weep at that heat unless watched closely; 350F, or 325F in a water bath, gives a smooth set. The buttered paper the recipe calls for is the period's answer to foil, laid on once the top has browned.
- Testing for donenessThe first pudding is set when a knife inserted an inch from the centre comes out clean and the middle still trembles slightly, roughly 45 to 55 minutes in a 2-quart dish. It will finish setting as it stands.
- Cornstarch or flourOne heaping teaspoon in a pint of milk is a token thickener only, there to insure the custard against separating rather than to bind it. Do not increase it or the texture turns pasty.
- The crumb toppingGrated cracker or bread crumbs go over the pudding after baking, at the table. They are not a browned crust, and adding them before baking changes the dish.
- YieldThe first recipe serves six as a side; the second, with twelve ears, serves eight to ten.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from the contributions of some 250 Virginia housekeepers, characteristically prints two or three versions of a dish side by side under one heading, initialled rather than named -- Mrs. S. T., Mrs. Dr. E. -- which is why the same page can hold both an eggy baked custard and a nearly bare dish of scraped corn and cream. Corn pudding belongs to the family of green-corn dishes that Southern and mid-Atlantic cooks made in the few weeks when sweet corn was at the milk stage, before it went starchy; the technique of slitting the rows and scraping the cob is often traced to Native American practice and was in any case standard in American kitchens long before this book. Its appearance among the book's other corn preparations here -- batter bread, corn oysters -- is a reminder that in a Virginia household maize was not a vegetable so much as the foundation of the table.