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Corn Pudding
1 1/2 pints (3 cups) milk I 4 eggs 4 ozs. (4 heaping tablespoonfuls) sugar Salt and pepper to taste Cut the corn from the cob, rejecting the hull. Put the corn into a deep buttered earthenware dish, add the milk, sugar, salt and pepper, and the eggs well beaten.
Bake in a moderate oven for two hours.
The ingredient list has come through the typesetting badly: the corn itself is missing from it, and the milk line should read 1 1/2 pints. The method is a plain baked custard with corn suspended in it, so treat it as a custard first and a vegetable dish second.
- The missing quantityNo amount of corn is given in the surviving list. For 3 cups of milk and 4 eggs, about 3 cups of kernels — roughly four to six ears — gives a workable proportion; much more than that and the custard will struggle to set around it.
- Reading the milk line"1/2 pints (3 cups)" is a broken "1 1/2 pints," which is indeed 3 cups. Whole milk is what the book assumes; a cup of the milk replaced with cream makes a richer set.
- Moderate ovenUsually reckoned at around 350F, though period usage runs from roughly 325F to 375F. A custard this deep is liable to curdle and weep at the higher end over two hours; 325F is the safer reading, and the dish is best set in a pan of hot water reaching halfway up its sides.
- When it is doneTwo hours is a guide, not a rule. The pudding is set when a knife slid in an inch from the edge comes out clean and the centre still trembles — around 170-175F. Carryover heat finishes it.
- Rejecting the hullScore down each row of kernels with a knife tip, then scrape the cob with the back of the blade. This releases the milky interior and leaves the tough outer skins behind, which is exactly what the instruction intends.
- The sugarThe list gives "4 ozs. (4 heaping tablespoonfuls)," and the two do not agree: 4 ounces by weight is over half a cup, while 4 heaping tablespoons is nearer a quarter. Either reading is sweet by modern standards, and modern sweetcorn varieties are generally bred for higher sugar than the corn of the period. Two tablespoons suits present-day taste.
- VesselThe "deep buttered earthenware dish" is any baking dish of 2 quarts or a little more. Butter it well, as corn custard grips.
- YieldSix to eight as a side dish. It is best warm rather than hot, and it will not reheat well twice.
Corn pudding belongs to the long line of American maize dishes that pass through colonial kitchens from Native cooking, where fresh green corn scraped from the cob was a summer staple rather than a preserved grain. The custard treatment here — milk, eggs, sugar, a long slow bake — is English pudding technique laid over an American ingredient, and it is one of the forms that recur in nineteenth-century household books. Its appearance here reflects the vogue, strong in the first decades of the twentieth century, for earthenware dishes that went from oven to table: fuel-thrifty, presentable without a separate serving bowl, and suited to the shrinking domestic staff of the period. The two-hour bake is a reminder that these ovens held heat unevenly and that cooks judged by the eye rather than by a thermometer.