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Cheese and Corn
1 cupful (1/4 lb.) grated cheese I can corn 4 soda crackers 1 egg 1 gill (1/2 cup) milk Salt and paprika to taste I heaping teaspoonful butter Roll the crackers, add the egg well beaten, butter, cheese, seasonings, milk, and corn. Mix well and turn into a buttered fireproof dish.
Bake for thirty minutes in a hot oven.
A plain cheese-and-corn pudding of the sort that carried a meatless supper in the early days of fireproof ware. It needs only a few translations to work as written.
- A gillHalf a cup, as the original helpfully glosses. It is the only liquid besides the egg, so measure it rather than eyeballing.
- "1 can corn"Period can sizes varied; a modern 15-oz can, drained, or a No. 2 can (20 oz) is in the right range. Cream-style will make a looser, sweeter pudding; whole kernel keeps the texture the recipe expects.
- Soda crackersRoughly what we now call saltines, though period crackers ran larger. Four rolled fine give only a small quantity of crumbs, a few tablespoons, and that is all the binder there is; more will make the dish stodgy.
- A hot oven400-425F. Thirty minutes at that heat sets the egg and browns the top; the centre should be just firm, not weeping.
- The cheeseA quarter pound grated is about a cup loosely packed, as the recipe's own gloss says. Plain factory American cheese is what books of this date generally meant by "cheese"; a medium cheddar is the closest supermarket equivalent. Avoid pre-shredded, which is dusted with starch and can turn grainy in a thin custard.
- Fireproof dishA shallow glass or ceramic baker; the mixture comes to nearly a quart, so allow rather more than that. Depth matters more than volume: a deep dish will still be liquid in the middle at thirty minutes.
- SaltCanned corn and saltines are both salted and the cheese more so. Taste the mixture before it goes in the dish.
- YieldThree as a light main course with bread and a salad, four as a side.
Books of this kind appeared in quantity in the first years of the twentieth century, when heatproof earthenware and, a little later, borosilicate glass made it practical to cook and serve in the same vessel — hence the whole genre of "casserole dishes," the name still attached to the pot rather than to any particular food. The recipe is a period type rather than a named dish: canned sweet corn was cheap and reliable year-round, grated cheese could stand in for meat on a meatless day or a thin week, and rolled crackers did the binding work that flour or breadcrumbs would do in an older kitchen. Corn puddings thickened with egg and milk are much older in American cooking, though their descent from English custard puddings is more often asserted than documented; what marks this version as modern for its date is that every component but the egg came out of a package.