Home › Vegetables › Corn Pudding
Corn Pudding
dozen large ears of young corn, 1 pint of milk, 4 eggs, 1 teaspoonful of salt, ¼ teaspoonful of black pepper.
Score the corn down the centre of each row of grains, then with the back of the knife press out all the pulp, leaving the hull on the cob. Beat the whites and yolks of the eggs separately, add the yolks to the corn, mix thoroughly; then add the salt, pepper and milk, and stir in carefully the whites of the eggs. Brush a pudding dish lightly with butter and pour in the mixture. Bake slowly one hour. Serve as an accompaniment to roast beef or lamb. .
A custard-style corn pudding that depends entirely on scraping the corn rather than cutting it. Everything else is a plain baked custard.
- Quantity of cornThe opening figure is missing, but since the other amounts are set as "I pint" and "I teaspoonful," the line was most likely "I dozen large ears." A dozen large ears yields far more pulp than a pint of milk and 4 eggs will bind, so a smaller quantity — 6 to 8 ears, roughly 3 cups of scraped pulp — gives a custard that sets, though that is a modern adjustment rather than what the book says.
- Scoring and scrapingThis is the hinge of the dish. Splitting each row of kernels with the knife tip and then pressing out the pulp with the blade's back leaves the tough hulls on the cob and releases the starchy milk, which is what thickens the pudding. Cutting kernels off whole gives a watery custard studded with skins.
- "Bake slowly one hour"No temperature is given. "Slowly" is usually read today as somewhere around 300 to 325F. The mixture is an egg custard and will curdle and weep if pushed hard; a pan of hot water under the dish helps if your oven runs hot.
- DonenessThe centre should be just set and barely jiggling, with a knife inserted an inch from the edge coming out clean. Carryover heat finishes it. No dish size is given; an hour suits a pudding dish of roughly 1½ quarts, and a shallower one will be done sooner.
- MilkA pint is 2 cups. Milk of this period was not homogenised, so the cream sat separately rather than being dispersed through it; whole milk works, and replacing a half cup with cream gives a richer result.
- Corn variety"Young corn" meant corn picked at the milk stage, before the sugars turned to starch. Modern supersweet hybrids are considerably sweeter and lower in starch, so the pudding may taste closer to a dessert and can be slower to set.
- Beating the whitesFold them in with a light hand at the very end. They lift the pudding as it bakes; overmixing collapses it and you get a dense, sliceable custard instead.
- YieldServes six to eight as a side dish at the reduced corn quantity above; the full dozen ears would make a considerably larger pudding. It falls somewhat as it cools, so bring it to the table from the oven.
Corn pudding belongs to the long line of American dishes built on green corn — that is, corn eaten fresh at the milk stage rather than dried and ground. The scraping or "grating" of corn for puddings and fritters, as distinct from cutting the kernels off whole, appears in American cookbooks well before this one, and the distinction was a familiar one.